Best Format To Render Into

[Dave Haynie]

[Gregory Bauhof] “I need a some suggestions as to what is the best format to render into in order to make a DVD.”

If you want a real DVD-Video format DVD, you have one choice: MPEG-2. Aside from that, you want the rate to match your source video.

[Gregory Bauhof] “I shot a film with my Sony HVR-V1U on the 24p setting. After editing in Vegas Pro 11, I’ve tried to render it into a format that would be good for DVDs in order to send out to film festivals. But if I render using the 24p setting, I get blurs whenever people move quickly. It’s a short sci-fi film so there are moments of a lot of motion.
“

Check what Vegas thinks of your V1U video… there’s a pretty good chance it think you have 60i video there, not 24p. One of the issues with tape formats is that tapes always run the same speed, and thus, the video CODECs (like DV or HDV) always run the same speed. Because of this, back in the DV days, when someone got the great idea of adding 24p, they didn’t change the tape format, they simply recorded 24p as 60i, with 3:2 pulldown added (telecine). In order to correctly edit this, you have to detect the telecine and invert it (eg, simply telling Vegas to render to 24p isn’t sufficient).

But check you clips in Vegas… see if Vegas thinks they’re 24p or 60i. Is the output video showing actual blur, or something worse? See, the problem gets down to a number of things related to Vegas’ handing of interlaced vs. progressive video during scaling. When you convert 1080/24p to 480/24p for DVD, it should be pretty smooth. However, if Vegas thinks you’re 60i, it’s going to want to de-interlace (which, of course, is in the 2:3:3:2 or whatever telecined cadance of frames to fields), then downconvert… much worse looking than just the downconversion you’re get 24p -> 24p. For downsizing, you probably want the project set to “best”, which will use BiCubic rather than BiLinear interpolation.

As far as blurring goes… 24p and MPEG-2 are both limited in their ability to deal with motion. Whether you get motion blur in your video is in part based on your shutter speed, of course. But heavy motion will also result in more MPEG-2 artifacts in the original video.

-Dave

[Gregory Bauhof]

Thanks for the info Dave! Yes, Vegas thinks it’s 60i alright. And I even rendered the final version in that once and it still had some of the same problems. But now that I know about the blur issue as you’ve described I’ll fiddle with the render settings some more and do what I can about it.

Thanks again!

Thanks!
Later,
G