vegas lowering the quality

[Rick Mac]

Alejandro,

[capsat] “The output comes with a really low quality, and with an annoying semi transparent green line at the bottom.”

Does this mean you brought the rendered mpg file back into vegas to look at or are you talking about a burned DVD? If you are talking about bringing the rendered mpg file back onto the vegas timeline and it looks bad I would suspect that your preview window quality setting is set to low. Try looking at it in best full and see how it looks.
If your rendered mpg file looks good and you are talking about poor quality on your DVD I would suspect that while in DVD Architect you recompressed your mpg file which degraded the quality.

[Alejandro Torres]

No, I am seeing it in windows media player, just before burning. The quality is awful, I don’t know what should I do at this point, all the settings were maxed.

Regards

Alejandro

[Rick Mac]

Alejandro,

What does the rendered mpg look like played back on the Vegas Timeline?
Perhaps this is a Windows Media Player Issue.

Did your preview look good in your Vegas project before render?

[capsat] “Note: Most of the footage (specially the .mov’s) come from after effects and I have the original aep’s, I wonder if rendering them out to avi from after effects would help, but they are heavy renders so I don’t want to do it till I know it will work.”

What are original aep’s? Since some of your project was created in After Effects we may have an issue there. Please give us more information about what you created in AE and your settings and workflow exporting from AE and importing into Vegas. Does any of your footage have alpha keys layers?

[Alejandro Torres]

Hi Rick, and thanks for your answers.

The vegas preview looks pretty good (set to best quality and large video quality) mainly because vegas shows the original quality (just as if played in wmp I suppose) The problem comes with the render. I really don’t think it’s a wmp issue as I’ve tried it in winamp and other players and the reult is the same, I’ve also imported it to after effects and saw no difference. I really think it is an issue of the rendering, I don’t know if I screwed up some settings but I think they are all maxed.

Thanks, and I’ll appreciate any help.

Regards

Alejandro

[Rick Mac]

OK,

If your project preview looks good than let’s take a closer look at your
render settings. Please post a detailed description of your render settings.

Just a thought, how about rendering out a short portion of your timeline
to a DV AVI and see what we get. If that renders good than perhaps we should take a closer look at your mpeg render settings.

Pull up your project, highlight about 20 seconds and render to DV AVI with a check in the render loop region box. After render play the file and see what you have.

[Alejandro Torres]

Hi again Rick:

Ok, so I made some tests with other formats, avi is just slightly better, mpeg-1 and wmv are the ones that kept more or less the same quality, but wmv is of no use because dvd architect will have to convert it to mpg anyways.

I don’t know if using mpeg 1 instead of mpeg 2 will do for the DVD.

So here are my main settings for mpeg-2, classified by tabs.

Project: Video rendering quality: Best

Video: output type: DVD

720×480
29.97 fps
aspect ratio 4:3
I-frames: 15—> what are these?
B-frames: 2 —-> I don’t know either.
Profile: Main profile
Level: Main level
Field order: Interlaced, bottom first
Video quality: 31 (highest)
VBR: M: 8,000,000
A: 6,000,000
Min: 192,000

All other tabs… default.

I wonder if the output type is changed to mpeg-2 instead of dvd it will look better on the computer and the dvd quality is set to dvd’s only and it works only when burnt.

Regards and thanks for your help.

Alejandro

[Rick Mac]

Hello Alejandro,

Beleive it or not we are making progress here by deductive reasoning.
I am assumeing that we still have the annoying semi transparent green line at the bottom, even with the avi render. If that is the case than most likely the mpg encoder (render) is not the problem. This points to either something wrong in your project or your media clips from AE in the project.

Your mpg render settings look good. No problem there.

I really think you have a problem in your project itself or the clips themsleves have a problem. Hard to say from here without being able to see your project, but I’m betting that your AE clips are the problem.

I have one more test to try. Let’s start a new project, pull in just a single clip from your other project and render that out. No effects. The idea is to see if there is something in your project or clip that has gone bad.
After you do that start another new project pulling a digital picture onto the timeline and render that out. Then post me back the results.

[capsat] “Note: Most of the footage (specially the .mov’s) come from after effects and I have the original aep’s, I wonder if rendering them out to avi from after effects would help”

There may be a problem with your AE mov’s. How about rendering one of the clips in the project out to a DV AVI and replacing the MOV with it, render that section to see if you still have the green line at the bottom.

Also what version of Vegas or you running?

Anyone else care to chime in here?
Please refer to his first post for the problem. Perhaps someone else that pulls AE files into Vegas could share a good workflow.

Later..Rick.

[Edward Troxel]

When going back and forth between Vegas and AE, try using UNCOMPRESSED AVI and see if that makes a difference.

Edward Troxel

[Alejandro Torres]

Ok, so I chose some random clips (one after effects .mov and one cinema 4d rendered avi. I rendered them out separately and the semi transparent green line just one millimeter above the very bottom of the footage appears. The quality is somewhat lowered. Now I can say that by rendering each of them separately the quality is better, but that doesn’t help me though, I need all of them in a single clip. Ok so right know I made a test and it came out that the problem was solved by setting the field order to progressive only. I really don’t know if this will affect something (size for example) but for now it seems quite good. The only thing that remains is the green line…

Thanks to both of you who helped and specially Rick. I hope to see you around here more often.

Regards

Alejandro

[Rick Mac]

Alejandro,

Thanks for the kind words.
I’m at a loss to explain your green line.
I think the key is to examine your AE Render settings closely
to make sure they match your Vegas settings.
Since progressive looks better than interlaced I would bet
that your AE files were rendered progressive instead of interlaced.
If your end product is to be viewed on an interlaced TV you need to
get your final render out to interlaced, if to be viewed on progressive
Tv then final render needs to be progressive.

Best of luck.

Rick.