Multiple angle video tracks not rendering equally on DVD Architect

[Daniel Ludwig]

Hey mate,
first of all: there is no 23.98 interlaced anywhere. NTSC interlaced is 29.98i and PAL is 25i.

I´m missing in your description the resolution + codec of the original footage. is it DV, or maybe AVCHD?!

another point: if you would like to do mixed/multi-angle-DVDs all assets needs to have the same (closed) GOP-structure and the same bitrate, no VBR is allowed, only CBR.

here are the max. bitrates for different numbers of angles:

5 angles or fewer: 8 Mbps maximum for the track’s combined bit rate
6–8 angles: 7.5 Mbps maximum for the track’s combined bit rate
9 angles: 7 Mbps maximum for the track’s combined bit rate

cheers

danny

[Miguel Almanza]

Thank you for you response, Daniel. I think I understand your response clearly. I must clarify, then, what I wrote initially:

[Daniel Ludwig] “first of all: there is no 23.98 interlaced anywhere. NTSC interlaced is 29.98i and PAL is 25i.”
You are right. I wrote interlaced but it’s really 23.976 originally AND when rendered through Vegas.

[Daniel Ludwig] “I´m missing in your description the resolution + codec of the original footage. is it DV, or maybe AVCHD?!”
It was recorded with a Canon XF105, in MXF: 23.976 fps progressive, 1920x1080x32, MPEG_HD.

If you are saying that the total BR should be equal to 8 mbps, does that mean that in Vegas I should render each to a constant 2 or lower?

I now notice that in choosing the tracks in Architect, under “File”…”Optimize Disc”, and looking at the MBPS for the multi-angle track, it tells me the following: “To avoid recompression, use an MPEG-2 compliant file”, but I am using an MPEG-2 rendering from the Vegas templates, and the only thing I’ve changed is the frame rate so it’s the original video frame rate (23.976p).

Should I re-render the video for the four combined tracks and make each 2mbps (to equal 8 in the multi-angle title), or can they stay at constant 8mbps? Or should I just choose the “DVD Architect Widescreen NTSC” template?

[Daniel Ludwig]

Miguel,
you need to export your single streams as MPEG2-files. each one could have 8Mbit, you don´t need to divide the target-bitrate 8MBit by the numbers of your streams.

I do not know DVD Architect, but the best thing for authoring in general is to provide allready encoded assets to the authoring-application.

the most important thing for your multi-angle-feature besides bitrate is to use closed GOP and the same structure for all streams, otherwise you wont be able to create a multi-angle. if you could set sceen-detection within your encoding-programm – turn it OFF.

I don´t know if vegas could create/export valid streams for multi-angle DVDs, because of the special GOP-option which is needed.

otherwise you should export to AVI or MOV and use a 3rd party transcoding-application like Episode or Squeeze.

if your source is 23.98fps it will be transcoded to 29.98NDF NTSC with 3:2 pulldown, so to use 23.98fps is OK.

cheers

danny

[Miguel Almanza]

[Daniel Ludwig] “you need to export your single streams as MPEG2-files. each one could have 8Mbit, you don´t need to divide the target-bitrate 8MBit by the numbers of your streams.”
They ARE MPEG-2 files, all in 8Mbps constant bit rate.

I don’t know what GOPs are and where I could find that in the templates I use in VEGAS. Which template do you think I could use, if you’re aware?

What software do YOU use for DVD authoring, if not Architect, if you don’t mind recommending it or want to?

[Daniel Ludwig]

Miguel,
I don´t know which template you can use for the export out of vegas, as I don´t use it. I´m a mac-user and the most easy way is to export your viedeo as self contained AVI or MOV. and then afterwards use a 3rd party encoder that could encode closed GOP and constant bitrates.

TMPEnc would be a good choice I guess.

cheers

danny

[Miguel Almanza]

It is not working.

Still, I should not have to render differently. These tracks aren’t supposed to be different. I should be able to see the same quality on the same tracks without having to render with all those settings. I think… isn’t that fair?

ps. You didn’t answer what DVD authoring software you used. 🙂

[Daniel Ludwig]

oh sorry,
forgot to tell – I´m using DVD Studio Pro from Apple on MAC-computers. best choice besides Sonic/Rovi scenarist SD.

I´ve got a demo-version from vegas over here, I could have a look in the next days, so I might be able to answer your question according to vegas-output/export.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Prantl]

Hello,

I don’t know wether this issue has already been resolved, but since I am working a lot with the multi-angle feature of DVD Architect pro in an education project, I thought I could be helpful here:

DVD Architect pro’s multi-angle-workflow is alittle bit different than with other dvd authoring software like DVDSP or similar. In some ways, much easier, but with this also prone to more problems on the image-quality side. Footage you import into a multi-angle DVDAP-Project is _always_ re-rendered, thus making sure that all the settings pointed out above (closed and equal-length-gops, footage of the exactly same length) are right. (Maybe this is because DVDAP also supports the mixed-angle and not only the multi-angle DVD specification which allows you to make only parts of a DVD title in multi-angle, thus saving space on a DVD).
In compliance with the manual and sony support, this re-rendering of footage cannot be disabled. The negative side-effects of this re-rendering is, as you have noted, first, a much longer DVD preparation time and second a sincere loss in quality, especially if the footage is already compressed when it is imported in DVDAP. Because of this, sony recommends rendering the corresponding footage as AVI with the PAL/NTSC-DV profile from Vegas. As I found out that this still leads to quite high quality loss, I came to the following solution: Rendering the footage to PAL-/NTSC-DV in PROGRESSIVE and NOT INTERLACED resulted in a much better quality of the resulting DVDs. (Even better quality can be achieved by rendering to uncompresed AVI in progressive (29p or 25p), but the resulting files are very big (~120 GB/hour)).

So I would like to recommend you rendering your angles as DV-AVI in 29p or 25p and then importing them to DVDAP. Besides, for improving quality, you can also set the bitrate in which the DVD angles should be recorded in the “optimize disk”-dialogue – they can be set much higher than pointed out in an above posting. (I am working with 4-5 Mbps producing very compatible DVDs). I found out that using dual layer-DVDs for multi-angle also helps here.

The bad thing, of course, is that DVDAP always re-renders the files. But as far as I researched, it is still the only windows DVD authoring software (that is somehow affordable) that can produce multi-angle DVDs that work without any problems. Or am I wrong?

Regards,

Daniel