No “Render Using CPU” option in Vegas Pro 11

[Graham Bernard]

[Cathy Hamilton] ” I choose MainConcept MPEG-2 DVDA NTSC Widescreen vid stream”

I have VP11 open, but I don’t see your MC Template? Is this one you made?

Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 and two elderly XM2s

[Cathy Hamilton]

Yes. It coincides with my project settings.

The “render using cpu” option is not available on any template.

[John Rofrano]

[Cathy Hamilton] “I choose MainConcept MPEG-2 DVDA NTSC Widescreen vid stream… The “render using cpu” option is not available on any template.”

That’s because the MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder is not, and never has been, GPU accelerated in any version of Vegas Pro. You might be getting it confused with the MainConcept AVC encoder which is GPU enabled.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Cathy Hamilton]

All I know is the option was available the last time I rendered. I was unable to render last time without selecting that option. If that option is no longer viable, then please tell me what to do to render my project.

Thank you.

[John Rofrano]

[Cathy Hamilton] “If that option is no longer viable, then please tell me what to do to render my project.”

Are you changing the MPEG-2 template try and render to 1024×600? If so that’s your problem. MPEG-2 only supports industry standard resolutions.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] ” MPEG-2 only supports industry standard resolutions.”

That’s not the case. Generic MPEG-2 can be rendered at any resolution, with the constraint that it has to be done in integer multiples of 16 pixels in each direction. However, modern MPEG-2 rendering engines, like Main Concept, kind of hide this from you. In this case, if I render a 1024×600 video (just tried it, at 16Mb/s, just to be smart, works just dandy), I should be getting a 1024×608 MPEG-2 file with metadata indicating that 8 pixels are to be blanked. That’s actually just what happens for HDV and ATSC, too… you’re actually getting 1440×1088 or 1920×1088, but those last 8 lines are blanked.

For a render from Vegas, you want to select a generic MPEG-2 output (“Output type:” on the Video tab in the Custom Settings dialog). There are a bunch of other types, like HDV, DVD, ATSC, etc. which are specific constraints for industry standard formats and may well reject any non-standard settings (in fact, best practices suggests they ought to.. not sure what really happens).

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Haynie] “That’s not the case. Generic MPEG-2 can be rendered at any resolution, with the constraint that it has to be done in integer multiples of 16 pixels in each direction.”

Good point. We were discussing the MainConcept DVD Architect MPEG-2 templates which are confined by DVD resolutions. If all you do is take that template and change the resolution it won’t work but I didn’t mean that generically MPEG-2 had that constraint except for the multiple of 16 as you pointed out.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Cathy Hamilton]

Interesting. I ended up doing it using hdv at 1280×720. Does too much resolution on a dvd degrade the viewing quality? I have found during creatikn of my animations that if the resolution is too high and i scale the object down, it looks rough. I want to know my latitude in future projects. The responses have helped immensely.

[Cathy Hamilton]

Let me further explain my previous post as I was trying to respond with a smart phone with a not-so-smart touchy keyboard.

Yes, I ended up choosing the hdv 720-30p under MainConcept MPEG-2 and chose mpeg-2 as output type. It worked perfectly. The quality of the cartoon animation increased dramatically using the 1280×720 instead of the typical DVD resolution of 720×480. I realize the different resolutions are not exact but close enough not to notice.

Pertaining to my original question as to where is the danged option to ‘render using cpu’ only, I found it when I tried to render the .mp4 version and it returned with an error. That option must not be available for all output types.

Guys, thank you for helping me out. And John, I have been learning from you for quite some time. I am always pleased when you respond to an issue because you usually have the answer. You are the king, John. Thanks for being there.

[John Rofrano]

[Cathy Hamilton] “I ended up doing it using hdv at 1280×720. Does too much resolution on a dvd degrade the viewing quality? I have found during creatikn of my animations that if the resolution is too high and i scale the object down, it looks rough. I want to know my latitude in future projects.”

Resizing is going to degrade the quality because in order to make a picture with less pixels you need to blend adjacent pixels somehow and when you blend you loose information. The algorithms used to do this are different depending on whether you have your render quality set to Good or Best. To do this, go to the Project tab for your render type and set the Video rendering quality to Best. This will use Bicbic resizing (which takes a bit longer to render) instead of Bilinear resizing (which is quicker).

The other issue is that the resizing algorithm is designed for video where there are millions of colors and even areas that appear to be a solid color have multiple shades of that color. Animation is different. It really does use solid colors and crisp lines so you might want to resize with graphics application for maximum quality. For example, render 720p to a PNG Image Sequence and then resize that sequence in Photoshop with a plug-in like Perfect Resize Pro that have much more sophisticated algorithms for resizing and sharpening details that are designed for computer graphics.

Finally, the MPEG-2 codec is optimized for displaying movies not animation. As David and I were discussing, the 16 pixel limitation is because MPEG-2 compression uses blocks of adjacent pixels when it compresses. This is why sometimes you actually see blockiness in the video. Usually this works well when blending natural scenes with lots of colors. This doesn’t work well with animation where colors may need to be solid. So after all of your careful resizing, the MPEG-2 codec may shows it’s limitations in displaying computer animation.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com