Newbie – HD Video Question

[Robert Payes]

1) I’m pretty sure you have to upgrade to Vegas Pro 8 to edit AVCHD footage. Vegas 7 supports regular HDV (i.e. captured from tape).
2) No. Since I assume you also have DVD Architect, you can shoot and edit HD footage, then render for disk authoring using the NTSC Widescreen video setting in Vegas; your video will play fullscreen on a 16:9 monitor and letterboxed on a 4:3 TV. (Check docs for both Vegas and DVDA for details.) You’ll have to render separate video and audio streams, but once you add the video to your DVD project, the audio will be automatically loaded (assuming it has the same file name as the video stream). The big plus here is that DVDA doesn’t have to re-render the footage when it preps your DVD project, saving both time and video quality.
3) See 2.

Robert Payes
Photographer/HD Videographer
“High-Rez Images of Low-life Subjects”

[David Shirey]

[Robert Payes] “2) No. Since I assume you also have DVD Architect, you can shoot and edit HD footage, then render for disk authoring using the NTSC Widescreen video setting in Vegas; your video will play fullscreen on a 16:9 monitor and letterboxed on a 4:3 TV.
This is true, also having captured HD footage allows you some freedom if you ever want to just use a portion of the screen you can zoom in without losing quality for DVD.

However, if you were positive that you’ll never want to burn a bluray of the footage, there are advantages to shooting in standard definition widescreen. One is that it’ll take up less space on your hard drive, if that’s a concern at all. Another would be the time it takes to render the final project to mpeg2. But if you’ve got enough hard drive space and aren’t in a hurry to render, I’d agree you should just keep shooting in HD.

[Brett Olbrys]

David & Robert,

Thank you for your replies. The video in question will be about 4 minutes in length and will contain video and pics. I do not plan to add effects, other then transitions, and hard drive space is not a concern.

1) My only “real” concern with respect to my hardware is the length of time needed to encode. I am running Windows XP Pro SP2 with original Pentium 4 @ 2.26ghz and 768 megs RAM. How long would you expect it to take to encode HD vs SD with what I have described?

2) If I record in HD, what is the process I need to follow to burn the DVD once I finish my timeline within Vegas because I have never used DVD Architect before? Maybe this is why I am a beginner, but in the past, I have created my MPEG2 file in Vegas and then used Ulead DVD Movie Factory to make my DVD’s. Which of the two ways (DVD Architect vs Ulead DVD Movie Factory) would you recommend and why?

Thanks again!!!

Brett

[Allen Zagel]

Hi
Also IMHO from what I’ve been told even if you shoot HD and render to an SD DVD, you’ll get a better picture.

Point of note! You don’t have enough RAM @ 768mb. You ahould have at least 2GB Ram.

I don’t do HD and my editing computer’s got 2gb RAM. Also I’ve been told to do any HD work you’d need at least a dual core or core 2 dual computer.

Allen

ASX Media Group, Inc.
https://www.asxvideo.com

[Robert Payes]

Since Vegas and DVDA work hand-in-hand, outputting video for the latter is pretty simple. Page 23 of the DVDA 4.0 manual gives you the breakdown.

Basically, you’re gonna do separate renders of the video and audio streams, as follows:
Audio: PCM (.wav format), stereo, 48 kHz sample rate, 16/20/24 bit sample size.
Video: MPEG (using the MainConcept encoder, and the “DVD Architect NTSC Video Stream” with a 16:9 aspect ratio, 720×480 frame size, 29.97 fps frame rate, and bit rate of 8 Mbps.

As long as the video and audio streams have the same file name, when you add the video to your DVDA project, the audio will be imported automatically, and in sync with the video.

Render time? Can’t be too long for a 4 minute project. Depending on my computer, I’ve seen render-time-to-footage-time ratios ranging from 4:1 to 8:1. Then again, I was rendering feature-length videos, so I’d start the rendering process just before I went to bed and let it cook overnight. :->

Robert Payes
Photographer/HD Videographer
“High-Rez Images of Low-life Subjects”

[David Shirey]

[Robert Payes] “Render time? Can’t be too long for a 4 minute project. Depending on my computer, I’ve seen render-time-to-footage-time ratios ranging from 4:1 to 8:1. Then again, I was rendering feature-length videos, so I’d start the rendering process just before I went to bed and let it cook overnight. :->”

Yeah I don’t have any specific hard data on render times, but my e8400 cpu normally renders an hour of SD footage to SD mpeg2 in about 45 minutes, whereas an hour of HD to SD mpeg2 can take 4 hours. So if rendering time is a huge concern then shooting in SD will save you time with that older system. Although with only 4 minutes of footage I don’t know what kind of rush you’re going to be in?

[Larry Cole]

What is the difference between SD and HD?