HD Rendering Question Vegas 9

[Dave Haynie]

YouTube takes most major formats… AVC/MP4, MPEG-2, WMV9, etc. I have uploaded full 1080/24p and 1080/60p video files to YouTube, at bitrates up to about 20Mb/s, and it ate ’em up just fine.

HD rendered to HD will look better than SD rendered to SD, regardless the output format, unless you’re trying to match bitrate (eg, SD at very low bitrates will probably look better than HD rendered to the same very low bitrate). For YouTube, there’s no need to go to a crazy low bitrate for upload, unless you have internet connection issues (and I’m more limited, on satellite, than most folks).

My usual YouTube upload is 1280x720p rendered in AVC at 6Mb/s, which looks great… I have only done a few YouTube projects since they started actually supporting 1080p playback (that’s where the 20Mb/s videos went). Do keep in mind that, no matter what format you provide, they will recompress to their various standard resolutions. So you want to optimize the quality of the upload, knowing that recompression will lower it somewhat.

-Dave

[Stephen Mann]

Also..
You can’t predict what resolutions You Tube provides from your uploaded video. I also upload Sony AVC at 1920 resolution. Most of the time the “processed” video will max out at 720, sometimes it is available at 1080. I haven’t found any magic bullet that determines what resolution that YouTube presents.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Escojido Machado]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Let me explain my last question more clearly. Does HD rendered to SD format, let’s say mpeg2 look better than the same footage shot in SD rendered to mpeg2?

[Jim Greene]

Yes, absolutely! I noticed a difference years ago even when going from the Sony PD-170 to the Sony Z1U, and now even remarkably more with the Canon 5D. When shooting & editing in HD then creating the mpeg2 required for DVD, more pixels and clarity will produce better looking SD, for sure. It’s the old saying, garbage-in = garbage-out. Not that the PD-170 or Z1 is garbage, but times change and so does quality.

-Jim.

[Stephen Mann]

Absolutely!
I made that discovery when (years ago) I hired a camera op to help with a complex theater shoot. He had a new Canon HDV camera, and I was using my Sony PD-150’s. I had him shoot in DV because I had no experience with HDV yet. When editing the project, I wound up using his footage whenever he had the shot because the DV from the HDV camera was noticeably sharper.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Escojido Machado]

Do I have to render hd footage to avi or something first, then edit both as avi files as a new project? I am thinking that because of the project settings, I can’t set it to HD settings for the HD video, then bring in the SD video and edit them together.

BTW, will the quality of the HD footage rendered to SD be that much noticeable?

[Jim Greene]

OK, I think maybe you’ve been asking a different question all along, no? It sounds like your question is that you need to know the best way to put both SD & HD footage in the same project? Then you want to edit them together, and you are concerned about the project settings & quality and visual difference when rendered?

The best way to edit SD & HD together is to always set the project to match the highest quality footage in that project. So you would set the project to match the HD footage. In some cases you may need to set the clips of the other footage to match the aspect of the project (do this in the event pan/crop, then right-click and select “Match Output Aspect”). Then edit and render to your SD output.

The result is that you will notice the SD footage as compared to the HD footage, but this occurs all the time on TV when you watch the news, for example. The HD footage will look sharper, compared to the SD footage, even when rendered to SD.

-Jim.

[Escojido Machado]

Makes perfect sense, thanks for the detailed explanation Jim and all who helped.

[Dave Haynie]

You probably need to phrase your question more precisely. After all, MPEG-2 is a format used for both HD and SD… there’s no question that a full HD video rendered to full HD MPEG-2 looks better than an SD video rendered to SD.

Rendering HD down to SD, correctly, looks better than SD. It’s even more profound in the real world of NTSC video. When you shoot SD, as typically people do, on DV tape, the video is recorded in DV format. DV is a DCT format, very similar to Motion JPEG. As well as the lossy compression (low-pass filtering of the frequency domain transform), there’s a color decimation… 3/4th of the color is basically just tossed out.

The problem here is that, in DV, we do 4:1:1 color decimation; in DVD/MPEG-2, we need 4:2:0 color decimation (PAL DV does the same 4:2:0 that’s done in MPEG). So, even if you want an SD target, shooting in HD will give you much better color, based on practical gear. Pretty much any MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 camera will use 4:2:0… once you get more high-end in the pro market, there are also 4:2:2 options (only half the color samples are tossed out).

As a general rule, I recommend shooting at your target frame rate, and otherwise in the best possible resolution and bit rate, at all times. You paid for high quality gear, presumably, no need to use it in lower quality modes, unless there’s some absolute need (once I had to buy a couple memory cards in a pinch… my camera refused to allow full quality modes with one of them… despite at fact they were the same SanDisk model).

-Dave