which bit rate do you use for 720p HD?

[Mike Kujbida]

[John Rofrano] “No problem… didn’t you see my big wink!?”

John, I did see your wink but still felt that I had to apologize as I had no idea things had changed in Pro 11.
Live and learn – and learn and learn and… 🙂

[Tyson Onaga]

Ok, thanks.
Re: the other Templates which I’ve created in Vegas 10 … can they be simply copied to:

C:\Users\[userName]\AppData\Roaming\Sony\Render Templates
and used in Vegas 11?

[John Rofrano]

[Tyson Onaga] “… can they be simply copied”

Yes, they can. Vegas Pro 10.0 and 11.0 use the same render template format.

~jr

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

[Gilles Gagnon]

one more thing John,

Back to my original question, which bitrate do you recommend when using MC as a template to provide a video for a client?

(to be viewed at a conference)

Gilles

[John Rofrano]

[Gilles Gagnon] “Back to my original question, which bitrate do you recommend when using MC as a template to provide a video for a client?”

I believe the MC Internet templates are 8Mbps average with 16Mbps peak. That should be more than enough for both high quality and smooth playback.

~jr

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

[Gilles Gagnon]

That’s the one I’m using John. I was wondering if I can lower the bitrate while maintaining quality but reducing file size. wondering if there was another magic combination 🙂

Gilles

[Dave Haynie]

I second that.. I’ve been playing around with the improved Main Concept AVC, and it’s very good. Plus, it does VBR, which is sometimes what you want.

I have typically used the ~8Mb/s AVC for uploading of 720p material to YouTube and other online sites. They’ll naturally transcode it to something lesser, but I haven’t found I get better results on most material going higher.

It’s also kind of interesting to see the kind of bitrates consumers are not typically viewing on the various services. Netflix HD, for example, is VC-1 720p24 or 720p30 at up to 3.6Mb/s. Apple’s newly launched 1080p24 option (which is chewing though the $50/month LTE accounts on the iPad “3” in 3 hours) is somewhere in the 3.8-4.0 Mb/s range, AVC of course… and I’ve read a few accounts (by Apple fans, no doubt) comparing this encoding of films to the same BD favorably enough (eg, they’ll give the nod to the BD, but clearly, the HD edition is far superior to DVD or 720p versions).

So, in short, for most consumer viewing purposes, doubling that for half the resolution (eg, 720p at 8Mb/s) is probably just dandy for online stuff. 720p24 or 720p30 may also be a “safer” format to just hand to a consumer, since this ought to play well on most modern PCs. 1080p is going to stress a 2-core laptop if you don’t have GPU acceleration (which Windows 7’s built-in AVC CODEC will use… though most laptops don’t have a capable enough GPU to offer such help). And forget it on most tablets… if you know it’s destined for one, choosing an iPod/iPhone/iPad is a pretty safe bet (iOS is a popular platform, sure, but most Android devices have similar or better video playback chops, at least those not running Cyangen(mod) or other “community” builds of Android).

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Gilles Gagnon] “I was wondering if I can lower the bitrate while maintaining quality but reducing file size.”

You sure can. When I deliver my Boris TV episodes to BorisFX, I use 3Mbps average with a 6Mbps peak and the files are small with high quality. It really depends on the content of the video. A lot of fast changing scenes will require more bits to encode. You really have to go by the content. I would try 3 or 4Mbps average with 6 or 8Mbps peak and see how it looks.

The file size is controlled by the average. The lower you make the average bitrate, the smaller the file. If you want higher quality from the same bitrate use Two Pass encoding. This will allow the encoder to make better use of the bits it has but will take twice as long to encode because it uses two passes through the video; one to determine the optimal bitrate for each frame and another to actually encode at those bitrates.

~jr

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

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks for this John, most useful. The project I’m working on doesn’t have much movement therefore the rates you suggest should work great. I’ll give them a try.

thanks for the clear and useful explanation.

Gilles