Vegas 10.0a (388) vs. PPro CS5…render quality

[Eric Addison]

David,

Sorry to hear your having such trouble with PPro. As someone who uses it almost daily, I haven’t seen the troubles you have. AME works great on both my systems.

As for the audio conforming, I believe that is something that only happens once when you first import the footage, and is to convert the audio to 32-bit floating-point. While it does take some extra disk space, it’s never really been an issue for me.

Have you posted your problems over in the Adobe forums? You may find some help over there. Also, are you running the latest updates for all the programs?

Sorry – I don’t mean to hijack the thread…just trying to help.

—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com

[Mike Kujbida]

[Gilles Gagnon] “How do you know to choose CBR over VBR?”

Gilles, if the program is less than 70 min. I use a CBR of 8,000,000.
Anything more and it’s VBR with the aid of a bitrate calculator.
BTW, no matter what it says, I never go over 8,000,000 for a maximum setting as some players as well as some cheap media can have difficulty with a bitrate over this value.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Excellent! Thanks so much for this helpful tip. I’ll give it a whirl in my next project.

By the way, I burned the same project 50 min or so project in 2 different ways. One with a standard template, the other using the “Tools-BurnDisc-DVDdisk” menu option. When I look at the burned/reflective side of the DVDs, I notice that the DVD burned from the template shows “burned” section up to about half the DVD whereas the DVD burned from the menu has an “underneath” that looks more like a commercial DVD. That is, it looks like a lot more of the disc’s surface was used to burn the DVD.

Is what I’m seeing a result of the bitrate used?

Gilles

[Mike Kujbida]

[Gilles Gagnon] “Is what I’m seeing a result of the bitrate used?”

That’s correct Gilles.
A higher bitrate means a larger file which means more of the disk will be used.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks again Mike!

Have a great day/weekend,

Gilles

[David Shirey]

Thanks for the concerns and yeah I have posted on the Premiere forum of this site and people are trying to help out. I know the audio conform changes audio to 32 bit floating-point, I just don’t see what benefit it is to me as the end user. Vegas doesn’t do it and Vegas works great, so what do I gain from going through this process?

Even with the conversion, you’re right in that it only happens one time and so what if it eats up disk space which is plentiful. Our main problem is that every time you open a project that may have 400 video clips, it takes about 10 minutes to open because it’s trying to load 2,000 files. You see the EX-1 MXF XDCAM files we use have one video and 4 audio tracks, even though 2 of those audio tracks aren’t used. In Vegas it would just never show those unused tracks, but Premiere shows then and makes conform audio files for each track, so one MXF file suddenly becomes 5 files the program needs to load. Coming from the infinite customization of Vegas, I just don’t like being told “That’s what the program does and you can’t change it to suit your needs” We are so spoiled!

As for AME, I’m sure there’s just something wrong with our installations and I hope we’re able to work it out. Sorry for continuing to hijack the thread, but on a related note I did finally get the Vegas 10 upgrade last night and boy those 1080p h264 files are a whole lot easier to deal with.

[Dave Haynie]

Not to suggest Adobe’s doing anything right or take away from Sony.. but what are the settings for the Premiere render? Are you also rendering CBR, or is it a flavor of VBR?

CBR is fine, and at 8Mb/s, you’re doing about as well as you can, as long as your project will fit. However, for a longer video, you generally want variable bitrate. For commercially produced DVDs, you have an encoding engineer who’s looking at the video, varying things like bitrate, global low pass filters, and other tweaks to deliver the best possible video. Without that, a 2-pass VBR will offer some of the same adaptations, at the expense of rendering time.

Not that I have any problem with Sony’s MPEG-2 output. I started making digital videos on my own in the early 1990s. The first target was Video CD, and there were exactly two encoders that did this well: Panasonic’s MPEG-1 encoder and TMPGenc. The latter could also do a low bitrate MPEG-2 for “SuperVideoCD”… my first generation Pioneer DVD player supported this odd format as well (and DVD-R, and DVD-RW… they didn’t use the Philips reference platform that caused so many early players to contain bugs that rejected DVD-R/RW).

So going into DVD, I was skeptical of other encoders. The early versions of the Main Concept code were not up to the TMPGenc quality, but by the time Vegas got video support, the quality was excellent. I think these days, most of the MPEG-2 encoders offer similar quality.. this is a mature technology. Now, AVC, on the other hand…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

That’s interesting. I used Premiere briefly back it the 90s, and never liked it. Largely, it was the idea of having to use proxy files for video and audio in those days… despite PCs by then being fast enough for SD editing native. And the fact that audio was treated as a second class entity… I was an audio guy getting into video in those days.

I was under the impression they had pretty much fixed both of those issues in Premiere Pro.

Of course, if you’re doing Blu-Ray, Apple’s intentional lack of support there couldn’t be a good thing either… that would get some users looking toward Adobe, even if they stayed on the Mac platform.

Unfortunately, Apple lets their particular view of consumer buying habits infect their professional tools in bad ways. As a Sony Vegas user, I’m glad to know this will NEVER happen to us (for instance, Sony would never spend crazy time on “3D” support but miss the GPU-accelerated UI that pretty much every other major NLE introduced this year… oh, wait…).

-Dave