Why doesn’t SV 11 offer rendering using h264 codec as MOV?

[Ron Whitaker]

OK.

I just downloaded Handbrake, which is an encoder, and you can see (in the screenshot below) that there is a Quality setting. If you set the Quality to 0, it shows as Lossless.

Is this perhaps what I’m looking for when re-encoding an .mp4 to Quicktime?

[Dave Haynie]

[Ron Whitaker] “1) First question: if I render out to MainConcept AVC/AAC (.mp4) or Sony AVC/MVC, those are containers, right? And I think/hope that the video codec each of those use is h264. Is my thinking correct?
“

Absolutely. And sure, if you have the right tool, you can re-mux the video from one container to another. Or even the same container… I used to have a “throw-away” camera, a Sanyo Xacti FH1, which recorded directly in AVC/AAC into MP4 containers. Only, it had bugs, like negative timecodes, which made Vegas lose its mind. Re-muxing to MP4 fixed the problem.

This is kind of a high-level thing… consumers don’t understand enough about the issue to even ask the question. So the 2,878 programs out there to produce .mov files are designed to get your video on an iPhone as simply as possible.

[Ron Whitaker] “The only reason why I’d like to find something other than ffmpeg is that ffmpeg looks like you basically enter commands like on an old DOS prompt. (I left the old DOS prompt behind 20+ years ago and would rather not go back to that! But if that’s all there is out there, then I guess that’s what I’ll have to use.)”

FFMPEG comes from the Linux/FOSS world. While the DOS prompt was left behind ages ago for consumers, professional software developers still use it for their own tools. It’s very efficient for things you do every day.

This is open source… free software. The good part is that you have some great, professional programmers working on this stuff… maybe they’re bored with the bill paying day job, maybe they just want a tool they can use for a hobby. The problem: nothing forcing the developer to put a nice, user-friendly GUI on top of it. Much of what’s done in free software is included in the VLC program, but I don’t find a real Quicktime output mode (on some occasions, you can rename “thing.mp4” to “thing.mov” and everyone’s happy, but this isn’t univeral… the .mp4 container started with Quicktime, but it has diverged as a separate standard).

[Ron Whitaker] “3) OK, one last question: my footage that comes from my camera (Panasonic GH2) is in AVCHD format. Is AVCHD compressed, or an uncompressed format? So, when I open my AVCHD clips in SV, do my editing, then render it out, it’s getting compressed again, no matter WHAT format I render to?”

Yes. AVCHD is a formal specification for AVC video (aka MPEG-4 Part 10, aka H.264) video, SMPTE AC-3 audio (aka “Dolby Digital”), in an MPEG-2 transport stream file wrapper. It puts boundaries on bitrates and GOP sequences and other things, to make it a “smaller” standard to target.

It’s very compressed.. but also state of the art in compression. A well compressed AVC video will look as good as an MPEG-2 video at twice the bitrate. Looking at it another way, the typical peak of 24Mb/s for AVCHD video is substantially higher quality than HDV video at 25Mb/s… much less DV video at 25Mb/s.

The penalty you pay is complexity. MPEG-2 at SD rates was decoded in software with a 133MHz Pentium (before that, you needed hardware acceleration). You need a dual core 2GHz-or-so processor to decode 1080/24p or 1080/60i AVC video at native frame rates (depends a bit on the specific processor). All mobile devices employ hardware acceleration to decode AVC; even PCs benefit greatly by getting the GPU involved (kind of the point of Vegas 11, BTW).

Back in the old days, I would edit DV video, and if I rendered back to DV, it has to recompress. At some point, Vegas learned to do “smart rendering”.. only the changed parts had to be recompressed. That was nice for repeated editing, but at some point, I have to render to the final delivery format, which isn’t DV. The same cycle took place with MPEG-2… if you match the input and output formats, MPEG-2 could get this same “smart rendering” support.

This is technically possible with AVC. But it’s not as if MPEG-2 is twice as complex as DV, and AVC is twice as complex as MPEG-2… these are orders of magnitude of increased complexity. When you make video compression 2x better, you may make it 10x or 100x more complex. So no idea if anyone’s going to get AVC smart rendering going well. You will recompress.

That’s not as bad as it sounds, though. In the audio and video compression industry, there’s been the concept of a “fragile” compression for some time. Early versions of MP3 and others, early versions of MPEG, had very sharp generation to generation degradation. I know that in the early days of MiniDisc, you would hear very noticable recompression artifacts after 4-5 generations of recompression. But by the time MD was over with, you could 25 generations of recompression without much in the way of audible recompression artifacts. Most modern compression engines have learned from these early experiments. Most…

-Dave

[John Bean]

Just try it!

Re-wrapping (re-muxing) should not be a long process.

If Handbrake takes a long while to complete, then my guess is that it is doing some kind of encoding.

I believe there are some GUIs for FFMPEG out there, like WinFF I believe. But I don’t use them.

Because you will have more control and customization using ffmpeg from the commandline.

Plus, it will make feel like a NERD … and hence smart and cool!

[Ken Mitchell]

You can always create a .mp4 in Vegas.. Then just change the file extension from .mp4 to .mov… It will play in the quicktime player and will read as a quicktime .h264 quicktime.

[Dave Affholter]

Thanks everyone for the info on this.

Ken,
If I put out .mp4 is there any specific settings that I need to make sure are used to make sure that it is read as h.264? Or is it included in the .mp4 encoding?

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Affholter] “If I put out .mp4 is there any specific settings that I need to make sure are used to make sure that it is read as h.264? Or is it included in the .mp4 encoding?”

It’s included in the MP4 encoding. Both the Sony and MainCopncept AVC encoders produce AVC/H.264 MP4 files. As Ken said, just rename them to .mov and you’re all set.

~jr

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