[Dave Haynie]

You can make an AVCHD.. though not with DVD Architect. DVDA will make a “Blu-Ray on DVD” file structure, which is ever-so-slightly different than AVCHD. This matters, because most Blu-Ray players will play an AVCHD disc, but they will not play BD-on-DVD.

And unless you have a really short video, you will seriously compromise video quality on an AVCHD. I guess if you’re new to HD, it’s nice to know you can do this without buying new hardware (and little software, if you have the Nero suite.. that’s how I found I already had the ability to burn AVCHD, when I discovered DVDA didn’t so it).

But I started into HD some four+ years ago. It’s a big shift, and that means, every element in your production toolchain has to change. So that’s an HDTV, and an HD camcorder (ok, I have three of those now, but the first one was a pretty expensive one). You need a player that can handle HD… when I started, the format war had not even hit the street, so I began with an IOData AVeL Linkplayer2, a red-laser DVD player that could play HDV over my network, DivX-HD, and WMV/HD. It recognized and player authored WMV/HD discs.. same idea as AVCHD, only using WMV9 and an arcane set of HTML and JavaScript conventions, with virtually no authoring system tools (HD-Net did a few WMV/HD releases without DRM.. my player obeyed all of Microsoft’s DRM conventions, but still was not allowed to play a DRMed WMV/HD… it was pretty clear MS never intended this to be successful).

So basically, I was tired of compromising my HDV video just to have a handy livingroom format (which would, at least, autoplay on pretty much any PC, without extra software.. most PCs can’t play AVCHD, because it uses the UDF 2.5 or whatever file system, same as Blu-Ray, not supported except on very recent Windows editions). Blu-Ray is pretty affordable these days.. BD-R 25GB discs, printable, run under $3.00 each in bulk. I started into DVD when they were twice that, and the burners cost $400.

A big advantage of DVDA 5.0 is that, unless you go crazy complex on your Blu-Ray design, you can simply switch the project to “DVD”, press a button, and get a DVD downconversion without much extra work.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Forget bling… the Flip “Ultra” HD doesn’t even have features. First of all, it shoots HD, but just barely… 1280×720 at 30fps. This is recording at 9Mb/s… real AVCHD models record at 17-24Mb/s, HDV and DV record at 25Mb/s.

Then there’s the lens.. f2.4 and no zoom… barely any lens. If you look at a “camcorder”.. hell, even a web-cam based camcorder, look for the lens. If the area that should be the lens is all full of glass, you have a fighting chance of holding a real camcorder in your hands. If you see rings of plastic leading to a tiny lens that would make a disposable 35mm camera blush and a pin-hole camera cry “brother”, you’re holding a toy for YouTube obsessed tweens.

You pay $170 for a “flip”.. for 2.5x that, you could get a Sanyo VPC-FH1, a tiny flash based camcorder, but one capable of shooting real HD. Very real… it even does 1080/60p. It’s got a real 10x zoom lens, f2.0 at the wide end.

If you can’t afford something at that level and want real HD, buy something used on eBay. I just sold a Hitachi BD70A there for about $250, with lots of extras. True, not the world’s best HD camcorder, but it’s day and night better than these evil Flip devices.

And yeah, the Flip, and all those Chinese clones of it, bother me. They’re trying to do to camcorders what the iPod did to the walkman… lower the bar, make “crappy” the acceptable new standard. Anyone smart enough to read/post at Creative COW is smart enough to stand up for better.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You’re a bit off there… a standard DVD-Video disc can’t do HD. Period.

AVCHD DVDs are one alternative… but they use the Blu-Ray file structure and most features. They don’t play on standard DVD players, they may play on a few “enhanced” DVD players, PCs (if you have BD player software), and of course, Blu-Ray players (it’s a standard feature.. AVCHD DVD is a camcorder format, and BD players are supposed to play it).

However, you take a big hit on quality doing video of nontrivial length on a DVD rather than a BD. I used to make WMV/HD discs… same basic idea, only using WMV9 and Microsoft’s web-based GUI (hacked by hand, no authoring tools), rather than AVC or, well, WMV/VC-1. You can get moderate quality HD for about an hour.. but it’s likely to be a step down from the quality your camcorder can produce, albeit a big step-up from plain old DVD.

Far as I know, Sony tools won’t produce a proper AVCHD DVD. You can burn a Blu-Ray file structure on a DVD using DVD Architect 5, but it’s a full compliant Blu-Ray format, not the ever-so-slightly-different AVCHD format. Curiously, most BD players will not play this format. And yeah, I did ask Sony about it… the response was something along the lines of AVCHD being a consumery thing. I still think they should support it.. it is fairly useful for short videos.

On the other hand, BD is doing very well, players are under $150 ($100 on the street), BD-R 25GB discs are $2.50 in bulk, etc. There’s no sane reason to avoid BD if you’re shooting HD these days. As for BD-Live! and other such nonsense… I suppose my PS3 does this, but I haven’t bothered with it. On the other hand, Blu-Ray does deliver the best HD you can get at home. Looks brilliant on my 71″ DLP TV. And it’s the best place to put your finished HD video… well, other than all this 1080/60p stuff I’ve been shooting recently.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

User applications in any 32-bit version of Windows can only see 2GB of memory. If you run a 32-bit app in a 64-bit version of Windows, it may be able to support the 3GB user model… it may not. Depends on the binary (and, given the full 64-bit version of Vegas available, it’s kind of a non-issue).

I haven’t messed with those settings, but it may well be that the 1GB limit is just hard-coded. Obviously, the program needs to keep some resources free for, well, its own operation. It probably doesn’t need a whole GB, but for user interface purposes, it’s common to just set human-friendly limits, rather than some weird technical limit. Or, they would let you set a higher value, but never really use that much.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You get visible macroblocks because, for whatever reason, the boundaries of each don’t line up.

MPEG-2 works by chopping everything into blocks, usually 16×16 pixels. It then runs a DCT (discrete cosine transform) on it, which converts the spatial information into frequency information. Next, based on various parameters, some of the high frequency information is cut out (low pass filtered.. this is the lossy part), then the result huffmann encoded.

When you reverse the process, ideally there’s an imperceptible (or at least acceptable) loss of fine detail, but in a visually organic way. Hopefully. The problem is, when colors in one macro block are low frequency, but that same one in the next macroblock is high frequency, you may see the “seam” between blocks emerge, as a compression artifact.

So that’s the way. One possible way to fix this is to pre-filter. Try a mild Gaussian blur on that background, turn it up until the macroblocking disappears, and see if you like the look of it.

Another thing.. where’s the background from? If it’s a JPEG, you may already have bits of compression artifacting in there, which are thrown off the MPEG-2 compression. Just like noise in an analog video tape converted to MPEG… the compression algorithm doesn’t know noise from content, so it’s spending some of the per-frame “bit budget” to preserve the noise, at the expense of the quality of the good stuff. You can find special filters (for VideoDub or AVISynth, I suspect) that are designed to undo DCT noise.. you might try that on the background, if this is the issue.

Another thing.. is the background moving, frame to frame. MPEG no likely — remember, you’re only encoding one I-Frame out of every 15. The rest are motion vectors based on what you need to change the former and/or next frame into the current one. Slow down that movement, if it’s actually moving, and it might look better.

Another thing.. was this “blown up”? What’s the original resolution of the image? If you blow up a small bitmapped image, you can get lots of sharp edges and pixellations, none of which are particular good for MPEG. You might try better resizing algorithms (eg, expand it yourself, if you’re just letting Vegas do the resize). A repeated application of 10% or so separate expansions will sometimes look better than simply expanding once. Another option is a program like Genuine Fractals.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, damn, my post got lost somewhere.

The TMPGenc success may be easy to explain. First, I had a few points of advice. I’ll be more succinct this time…

The background… my guess was that you just had too much variation between DCT macrocells… what looks like high frequency information in one macrocell looks like low frequency information in the next. After the DCT and filter is applied, they no long mate. It’s a general failure of the way MPEG works.. it’s really tuned to work well for normal, fairly organic looking video. Not so much for crazy computer backgrounds.

The only other question I had .. is the background moving (animated)? If so, it’s probably making things dramatically worse, because the I-Frame computed will have very little to do with the next 15 frames, whereas in real video, they would.

My first suggestion: apply a Gaussian blur to the background, until the DCT blocks went away. At that point, see if you have a problem with the look of the video or not.

My second suggestion: if the background is animated, slow it down. That’ll encode into MPEG-2 much better.

My third suggestion.. if the background is a blown-up JPG (eg, something in lower resolution), using a modern rescaling algorithm to get it organically upscaled, rather than full of chunky, high frequency pixellated edges — which are bad news for MPEG. You can sometimes get this on the cheap — in your favorite photo editor, try a succession of 5-10% upscales, until you get to the size you want.

TMPGenc, as mentioned, is perhaps a hint. Back in the early days, when many of use were hacking VideoCD or something else that might play on our DVD players, MPEG-1 encoding was really tricky to get right, and most encoders did terribly. The best was Panasonic’s, the second best (arguably) was TMPGenc, which at the time was free.

Both had one thing in common — they did analysis of visible DCT blocks, and allowed a mode that would gradually apply a low-pass filter (eg, a blur) to each frame. That lowers the instance of high frequency information before the DCT is done, which makes it much less likely for the transform’s own filter to exceed its inherent bit budget and create these DCT block images.

The last suggestion… use pristine video. If you have compression noise (like JPEG… that’s why I asked about JPEG in the background) or other odd sources of noise in the video, the MPEG-2 algorithm will do it’s best to preserve some of that noise, at the expense of losing quality over all. Best to filter the noise… a global LPF, like a mild Gaussian filter, does just that. TMPGenc just did it algorithmically, so, if you were willing to wait for it, it could optimize different parts of the video, looking for exposed DCT virtual lines (there are rarely actual lines, you just see an abrupt change in color from one DCT block to the next).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, first thing, you probably don’t want to render directly from AVCHD to DVD in DVD Architect. You can (though I never have), but you have no control over the MPEG-2 rendering.

I would keep my project settings at HD (based on the video), render to MPEG-2 “DVD Architect Widescreen” for sample, which does encoding pretty close to the DVD max rate. You’ll also need to render audio separately.. use AC-3.

Don’t watch your DVD on your PC if you can help it.. after looking at full HD, of course it’s going to look bad-by-comparison… but most PC players don’t do a nice upscaling, they just magnify the jaggies. Keep in mind, your AVCHD is six times higher resolution than DVD MPEG-2, so don’t expect it to look the same.. but it should look reasonable on a TV, compared to other DVDs, assuming good quality video as a starting point.

You certainly want to sync the video to DVD frame-rate. If you’re shooting 1080/60i or 1080/30p you want to make a 480/60i DVD.. if you’re shooting at 1080/24p, you want to make a 480/24p DVD. Vegas will happily do frame-rate conversion (looks fairly decent if you do it with supersampling, but it will take much, much longer), but don’t do it unless you really intend on doing it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

For online streaming HD, yeah, 1280×720 is the most common format these days. If you shoot on a more advanced camera these days, and you’re shooting for the web, shoot in 30p or 24p ahead of time. If not, render to 30p or 24p anyway (30p gives you a bit better results on high motion stuff, but it’s going to be a bit larger for the same quality).

Now of course, when you’re shooting HDV compatible you’re at 25Mb/s, and with that new-fangled SxS camera you can shoot as high as 35Mb/s. For online, you typically crunch much smaller… probably to one of the MPEG-4 CODECs, at or around 3-4Mb/s. At 2 minute video at 3Mb/s comes out as 45MB (a bit more, depending on whether you consider audio in that 3Mb/s number).

For YouTube specifically, they prefer MPEG-2, MPEG-4/ASP, or MPEG-4/AVC format uploads, with audio in MPEG Layer 3 or MPEG AAC format. The MPEG-4 formats have better coding efficiency, with AVC (also known as H.264) the best overall. AVC is generally considered the successor to MPEG-2 anyway these days: it’s the generally preferred format on Blu-Ray, it’s being used in consumer camcoders, and it’s commonly used in satellite TV, and pocket video (DVB-H, iPods, etc). As a result, you have this CODEC included with Vegas 8. There are versions from Sony and from Main Concept.. you can set up profiles for Web video based on this sort of thing: 24/30p (technically, 23.9 or 29.97fps.. normal NTSCfilm or NTSC frame rates), set the bitrate to 3-4Mb/s, etc. These are some of the most time consuming CODECs out there — AVC is pretty complex… I get about 3:1 vs. realtime on my Quad core machine.

These days, YouTube transcodes into a few different formats online. H.264 is actually one of the video formats supported under the banner of Adobe Flash video; the other is a proprietary Flash Video format (.flv files). The YouTube server will certainly transcode your upload into these formats, at lower bitrates, and you really have no control over this. But knowning that, you can ensure your video is of reasonably high quality prior to upload, so the transcoding won’t bruise it too much. These days, you can upload higher quality video to YouTube — they accept up to 1GB per upload, but they’ll still cut it down. The message there is, for this kind of service, you don’t have to crunch it so much on your own.

Some services will deliver Flash Video as uploaded if it meets their specs… I think YouTube used to do this, I’m not sure they still do (they have always been a bit mysterious about what they’ll do with your video, which of course gives them the freedom to change that plan). There are stand-alone Flash Video encoders out there, which can render from an MPEG-2 HD original. I don’t know of a Flash plug-in that lets you render directly from the Vegas timeline.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

There are several ways to mix SD and HD on the same DVD. Certinly enhanced DVD-ROM tricks are one such, but given that playback is CODEC dependent anyway, I’ve been making such hybrid discs for over a year now in a simpler way.

Basically, you author the DVD-SD content as usual, and probably include some note abotu HD support in computers. I will probably look into one of the DVD enhancement tools to see about integrating ROM content here somehow. But for now, I build the disc with a standard Windows autoboot menu, using the normal init file and a basic menu generation utility. The PC menu typically offers the option of running HD, running the DVD, or installing a CODEC. Using WMV9 or DivX encoding, today, it’s reasonable to put an hour of SD and HD on one DVD. For video, I generally use 1080/60i; for photo slideshows, 1080/24p.

H.264 is probably the future, but it’s a bit much for many PCs right now.

The only fly in the ointment right now is that, while I have one of the very few red-laser DVD players that’ll handle HD (MPEG-2, WMV9, or DivX/MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile), there’s so far no way I’ve discovered to author a disc that’ll work bi-modal on such players (JVC’s OEMing a version of this IOData player, so this may get a little more visible before long… right now, it’s mostly just known to HDV users). Obviously, standards for this will come with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, but it would be sure nice to have a little more today.

The DivX folks have specific standardization marks for such “applicance” players, including certified profiles for cross compatibility on SD and HD/720p. WMV9 is also certified to work, but I don’t think they get into specific bitrates and resolutions as a part of that process.

PCs and such enhanced DVD players aren’t limited to the 1x speed of normal DVD STBs. But you probably want to stick in those ranges anyway, using red laser DVDs. My IOData will play 25Mb/s MPEG-2 TS straight out of the camera, but you can’t put useful amounts on a disc.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, the accuracy of a digital recording is based on the accuracy of the clock. This is not usually a problem in modern gear, because plain old everyday cheap quartz clocks are usually at an accuracy of 50ppm, at worse 100ppm. Even 25ppm is possible on a limited budget — I use this kind of accuracy in 2.4GHz consumer radio gear I design. So that’s a worst case of something like 0.01% on the clock; 1% would be ridiculous, not much better than the L/R/C oscillators of the past.

With that said, you are talking about at least two of these clocks, totally unsynchronized, when recording with outboard gear. They will eventually walk away, you synced audio-on-video and the outboard recording, the real question isn’t “will they”, but “will they within the hour or so I’m hoping they stay in sync”.

I routinely use MiniDisc and direct-to-PC recording in the field. There’s usually no issue with sync loss, but it’s smart to have good sync points in the audio tracks anyway. If you have a clapboard — that’s what the “clap” is for. In a pinch, I’ve used a quick, high note on a harmonica. Naturally, some recordings offer ample opportunities. You never count on your ability to start them together; that’s also assuming the latencies in your controls are the same, and for that matter, that your video and audio devices are close by. I’ve shot events with a PC near the stage recording from mics, the camera in the back, and an MD recorder or two hidden in strategic locatings, and never had sync problems.

-Dave