[Dave Haynie]

[Sorin Nicu] “I have also on my PC Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 13. It is at least twice as fast at rendering compared to Vegas, uses latest GPU acceleration provided by nVidia, ATI and Intel, not a 4 year old encoder like Vegas.”

GPGPU acceleration would be much better with Vegas if Main Concept hadn’t locked their actual acceleration to GPUs that existed in 2011. That might have been excusable in 2012, but it was certainly not excusable in a 2014 release. Yes, there are quality issues in some cases with GPGPU rendered video vs. CPU rendered, but like other things (8-bit vs 32-bit), those ought to be options for us. They also do not support multiple GPUs.. not sure if that’s common yet in the video industry, but it’s mandatory in CAD, 3D animation, and of course gaming. And of course, we will need new CODEC support, HEVC and VP9, pretty soon.

[Sorin Nicu] “Also AMD GPU’s can use GPU even for Windows Media Video files, not only for H264 encoded files.”

It’s not the GPU, it’s the application. True, GPUs drivers include acceleration for video playback, under the Windows DXVA API, but that’s not really useful to an NLE. NLEs are mostly going to benefit from OpenCL acceleration (both faster GPUs and more use of it in the NLE), as well as OpenGL for 3D stuff.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Jaanus Henno] “So right now I use an external drive through usb 3 for the materials, intenal drive has the software, convert videos to another USB 3 hard drive. Now if I’m right, usb uses only one controller, so that means I lose half the speed with 2 hard drives connected through the usb. That can be overcome by using the second bay, but if the cpu is already working good, will it actually make a difference?”

Depends. Some PC chipset have multiple USB hosts, some have an internal hub. Multiple hosts on the same PCIe controller are limited by PCIe, they’re not limited by USB. Multiple drives on a hub share the bandwidth of that single host. You should be able to see if you have multiple hosts, a hub, or both looking at the USB entries in Device Manager.

And given that it’s USB 3.0, you will never find that two external USB 3.0 drives on a USB 3.0 hub will be your rendering bottleneck. Raw transfer speed is never your problem unless you’re working with multiple uncompressed files. The bottleneck you can hit on any HDD is seek time issues, if you have too many assets loading from the same drive. Not an issue with SSD. You’ll know you hit this kind of issue if your rendering doesn’t have the CPU nearly saturated (ideally over 90% for all cores).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “I have also read that the AMD can’t come close to the Intel Core i7’s for video processing. I would not recommend an AMD processor to anyone doing video work.”

I agree. I came to my current i7-3930K from the AMD 1090T. Sure, that’s an older system than the current AMD “Piledriver” architecture.. but not necessarily in a bad way. Video is pretty dependent on floating point performance… the Phenom II 1090T six-core processor has six floating point units, versus four on the AMD FX-8350. I’ve heard claims the FX-8350 is a good match for some of the i5s, particularly if you overclock it (not recommended, but it can be done reliably if you spend lots of time and perhaps money on cooling), but probably not for gaming. Last I checked, most games these days were able to keep four cores pretty busy, but probably not eight. Maybe that’s changed recently, but that was largely believed to be the case when I built my son’s gaming PC a few years ago. Also the reason the X-Box 360 had three cores (six threads). Of course, with both X-Box One and PS4 being based on 8-core AMD Jaguar chips, maybe this is shifting.

The other big advantage of the i7-39xx/49xx (LGA2011) is that it’s a much more capable chip wrt. I/O. All those cores can easily thrash the typical dual-64-bit DRAM bus, so this series has four 64-bit DRAM buses. And a chip-wide total of 40 PCI Express links, versus 16 on the Intel Socket 1150/1155 (usually accompanies by an extra 6 or 8 implemented on the I/O hub chip), or AMD, which supports up to 22 or 38 PCI Express links, but all implemented in the I/O and funneled through the 16 HyperTransport lanes of the AM3/AM3+ socket.

I will say that for video acceleration in Vegas, I have got a better bang/buck with AMD than nVidia. I believe that’s at least in a bit way because AMD is dedicated to OpenCL support, whereas nVidia seems to treat it more as a hobby or necessary evil. Also, it’s pretty clear that nVidia artificially slows select OpenGL and OpenCL operations, in order to differentiate consumer, professional, and computing versions of their GPU boards, all which use essentially the same chip cores. It wouldn’t be a shock to find AMD doing this too, but so far, I haven’t seen a documented case of this, where it’s been pretty well proven for nVidia. I do not know if this is specifically an issue in everyday video rendering (aside from the Main Concept AVC issues, which are NOT, I repeat, NOT, the fault of either GPU vendor or directly the fault of Sony — though Sony’s certainly to blame for not offering a viable alternative), but it’s very real.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Sorin Nicu] “[Dave Haynie] “Now, other than the Main Concept CODEC, Vegas proper will work with any supported OpenCL device.”

Not true for MainConcept encoders. OpenCL will work only with specific ATI video cards (same generation like Fermi-nVidia case, 2010 – HD59xx, HD69xx).
The cards that are allowed to work with MainConcept are hard-coded in their software, it cannot be ‘edited’ like you can in Adobe case.
“

Vegas is a big system. Internally, Vegas only supports OpenCL, no CUDA. It works with any OpenCL device, at least at supported versions of OpenCL: AMD GPUs, nVidia GPUs, Intel Phi, even AMD’s native x86 driver for OpenCL. Vegas is using the GPU, when available, for internal compositing and filter operations. Final rendering is not something that happens in the core of Vegas, that’s handled by a plug-in.

And there are all kinds of plug-ins. Vegas supports Microsoft standards for video plugins, the newer OFX standard, and private interfaces for things like CODECs. Part of those APIs has Vegas communicating the OpenCL settings you set in Vegas preferences to the plug-ins. There are few, like some of the NewBlue stuff, that don’t use that, and have their own independent GPU setup (CUDA-only, last I checked), but the information’s made available to all plug-ins.

Did you see where I wrote “other than the Main Concept CODEC”? CODEC = COder-DECoder. That’s the only place that specific GPUs are hard coded, Main Concept’s GPU-accelerated AVC CODEC. Yes, it hard-codes specific AMD cards as allowed to use OpenCL, and specific nVidia cards to use CUDA. I was one of the first people to figure this all out and report it here in detail. None of these cards are made anymore. Main Concept’s had a fairly rough road of acquisitions… it was bought by DiVX, which was in turn bought by Rovio, and little to no work has gone into this CODEC. Thing is, there was never any good technical reason for that hard-wiring. That was a trick to force Main Concept’s licensees into re-negotiating for upgraded versions of the CODEC for each new application release. Only, with Main Concept the problem, we’re not stuck with Main Concept only supporting GPUs from 2011 or so.

This is a big problem for Sony, not to mention the looming need for them to get support for HEVC and VP9. Sony should really work on their own, or allows for an open CODEC plug-in interface so that it’s easy to add x264 or other open source CODECs to function from within Vegas… a bit nicer than rendering out to a high quality format and feeding that to Handbrake or TMPGenc. Alternately, a built-in frameserver API would enable any external encoder to be driven from Vegas… personally, I like that idea.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Paul McDermott] “Based on what you have said I think the Quadro 4000 fits these needs. This seems like a good price for over here.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/PNY-Quadro-Nvidia-Graphics-GDDR5/dp/B003Y3TPKQ“

The Quadro 4000 is certainly stable. The actual Quadro 4000 is an older model, the current is the K4000… that’s Fermi vs. Kepler. I believe the Quadro 4000 would get acceleration under Main Concept AVC, I know the K4000 would not.

I have a Quadro 4000 at work and an AMD HD6970 at home. They’re equally stable, in that neither has ever demonstrated any kind of problem. But I’m not looking for Beta drivers for either for them. The HD6970 is dramatically faster at GPU-related tasks than the Quadro 4000.

Certainly, one point of the Quadro series is professional features: high color, more stable drivers, at least in a generation more video RAM than consumer models. They get stablility in the pro series largely by using versions of older GPU cores, chips already well proven in the consumer circles. That’s why the pro cards aren’t usually all that fast.

The are faster at a few key 64-bit floating point operations. That’s a trick — it’s a driver thing only, pretty well proven as such, but if you’re dealing with 3D CAD (I use a 3D viewer occasionally at work to view PC board models, but most of what I do doesn’t really use a GPU at all), you’ll get the benefit. It’s also pretty likely that nVidia’s doing the same artificial limiting of CUDA and OpenCL performance in a few key areas, to make their computer-only boards sell better.

As far as speed of playback, you will benefit from a faster OpenCL board if you’re doing compositing or using video plug-ins. That’s an area in which consumer boards usually outperform the professional. For example, I can pretty much preview the whole “Red Car” demo in realtime with OpenCL enabled. Not so with just the CPU, even though I have a six-core system. That acceleration isn’t subject to the limits of Main Concept, of course (just to be clear). And for 3D stuff, like Boris Continuum, you’ll benefit from fast OpenGL, which could in theory favor the pro card, but probably not, as I suspect it’s mostly of not all 32-bit math.

Now, other than the Main Concept CODEC, Vegas proper will work with any supported OpenCL device. Adobe Premiere has traditionally been way more picky about which GPU to use. If you are planning to move to or add Adobe’s ransomware/subscription Premiere CC, you might as well choose based on that. I know they have in the past had full support for the Quadro series as well as the higher end consumer nVidias, and more recently, the AMD boards as well.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Paul McDermott] “I edit with sony vegas 11 and I’m looking to start using CS6 Premier next year. I also want to future proof as I may start editing in 4k in the next year.

Which graphics card would you recommend?”

For Premiere Pro CS6, if you have the latest, you can use either nVidia or AMD cards… prior to the CS6 upgrade, Adobe’s video acceleration only supposed nVidia’s proprietary CUDA system.

Here’s a benchmark done with a variety of nVidia cards:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CS6-GPU-Acceleration-162/#results

In that test, they’re basically hitting a wall… adding additional GPU performance doesn’t reduce the rendering time. So there’s a non-GPU based bottleneck somewhere. Of course, if you’re committing to Adobe, that’ll mean moving to the “software as a service” CC versions, CS6 is still for sale but no longer being improved. You’ll also notice the expected result, that the “pro” cards are, in general, weaker than “consumer” cards on video applications.

Here’s another one, which does include AMD card, but it’s all “pro” testing, and in Premiere CC rather than CS6:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CS6-GPU-Acceleration-162/#results

You can see that in Premiere, you still basically hit that rendering wall. The high-end consumer class Titan has the best performance, but it’s basically the same as many of the AMD and nVidia pro cards. They correctly point out that the system architecture can be the brick wall… their Z87 Haswell system doesn’t see any improvement from single to dual GPUs, because the bottleneck becomes communications, not computing. Switching to an X79 main board, they get better performance with some of the cards in dual configurations, for Titan and AMD, but Quadro didn’t seem to benefit from 16 PCIe links per card.

Anyway, that’s all new stuff. And any of those cards will get good results in Vegas itself. The main Vegas engine is able to use OpenCL on either nVidia or AMD, and you’ll see this well on the “red car” benchmark.

However, it’s really common to just drop in a video and try to render. In this case, Vegas isn’t helping speed things up all that much, it’s up to the rendering plug-in. The best H.264 acceleration available in Vegas is via the Main Concept CODEC… and that’s where the GPU selection gets sketchy. Because that one element, the Main Concept AVC CODEC, hasn’t been updated since 2011 or so. And even that wouldn’t be so bad, except that, rather than support CUDA and CUDA and OpenCL as OpenCL, this CODEC has hard-wide in the GPU versions it supports, and just uses CPU rendering for every other GPU. So unless you have a Fermi-based nVidia (GTX-5xx series or non-K Quadros) or a Radeon HD5xxx or HD6xxx series (and some earlier ones), you will not get Main Concept acceleration in Vegas. A newer card WILL run the Vegas compositing and other stuff done internally faster, but it doesn’t necessarily make up for the loss of performance in rendering. Of course, if you don’t use Main Concept AVC, then there’s no issue.. a newer GPU will make Vegas go faster. I found AMD to be faster than nVidia for the money, but that’s probably something that flop-flops from time to time.

Another thing about Vegas: it won’t use dual GPUs… you’ll have to select one or the other. So a dual GPU card is a waste of money if you’re buying it primarily to accelerate Vegas.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Sorin C. Nicu] “I have to add to this that for nVidia, that means Fermi-based cards. “

Yup.. that’s one big reason that Vegas is fast on renders than the newer Keplers.

[Sorin C. Nicu] “The Main Concept CUDA encoding works very well on those cards, but Main Concept OpenGL encoding doesn’t work well on nVidia (several times less GPU utilization).”

Actually, no one has any idea how well Main Concept’s OpenCL works on the nVidia cards, because of that whole chip keying thing I mentioned. They only enable CUDA or OpenCL for specific chips, despite the whole point of CUDA and OpenCL being that nothing chip-specific isn’t needed. They only enable OpenCL for those older AMD/ATi GPUs, HD5xxx and HD6xxx series. Any other card, any nVidia, the GCN AMDs, etc. are all running on the CPU only when set to OpenCL.

OpenGL is something different…. “Open Graphics Library” versus “Open Computing Language”. Vegas will use OpenGL for some 3D graphics plug-ins. OpenCL is used by Vegas internally for some compositing work, and of course, some plug-ins use it for things like rendering.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ok.. there are a couple of things at work here. You probably won’t like any of them.

1) It’s CUDA, not KUDA. Stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture. If you’re German, I’ll give you a pass on this one. But nVidia calls it CUDA. Use the right name so you don’t sound ignorant.

2) Your CPU. AMD FX 8320. That’s actually a very good value these days, so you’re probably getting more CPU per dollar than most folks. You’re seeing a CPU Passmark of 8079. My six core Intel i7-3930K delivers 12135 on the same benchmark. But it’ll actually do better on video rendering. My old CPU, an AMD Phenom 1090T, did 5703 on the Passmark, on six cores. The problem with the new AMD architecture is that you don’t have an actual 8-core processor, you have a processor composed of four “compute modules”. Each compute module contains two integer processors and one floating point unit that’s shared. They also have individual L1 caches and a shared L2 cache. The idea is that you’ll get better performance than a single core, which is true… but less than two individual cores, also true. Yours is a Piledriver chip, at least, which did make a bunch of improvements over the Bulldozer architecture — an 8-core Bulldozer wasn’t necessarily any faster than the six core 1090T.

So in reality, I can render some stuff faster than realtime on my faster system. Other stuff, not so much. It’s dependent on the job. Even if you add little things, like level or color adjustments to a video, you’ll add what can be very noticeable overhead. And when you do a just-plain render of video to output, there’s no much help that Vegas’ built-in GPCPU stuff can give you (see #3).

So should you have gone Intel? It’s a price-performance thing. Your system was probably pretty close to what I have long described as the “knee of the commodity curve”. If you’re looking for value, when an item is found to be a commodity, you basically get at least twice as “much” for twice the money… so you spent on an 8-core CPU, and you more or less get 4x the performance of a 2-core CPU (one compute unit) from the same architecture). Thing is, as you pass that “knee”, you start having to pay exponentially more money for increased performance. So for example, my CPU cost $500 new in 2013. It’s certainly not twice as fast as yours, but I probably paid several times as much. And more for the motherboard, since it’s a rarer part. You have to be the judge of your cash vs. performance needs, but overall, I don’t think you made the wrong decision without more information. Are you under very strict timelines, delivering the final video product? In that case, and particularly when there’s pay involved, you want the faster CPU despite the cost. If it’s more of a casual thing, you did well saving the money.

3) The Vegas Architecture. Vegas is actually a collection of plug-ins plus the main program. When you render a video, you are setting parameters for Vegas itself, and for the particular CODEC that’s doing the rendering. If you find a setting in the CODEC for “CUDA” (and you know that’s the right spelling if you set it), OpenCL, or CPU-Only, you have found the controls for just that CODEC, the Main Concept AVC CODEC most likely. We’ll get to the reason (one of those things you don’t want to hear and no one’s happy about), but consider the other control.

So fire up Vegas, go to Preferences, click on the Video Tab. Look at the third line down, “GPU acceleration of video processing”. That should not say “Off”, it should have your nVidia driver listed. That’s an OpenCL thing… Vegas doesn’t actually use CUDA internally. This the internal control. Some plug-ins get their GPGPU settings from Vegas (like all of the plug-ins that come with Vegas), others make you adjust parameters independently of Vegas.

4) Geforce GTX 750Ti vs Main Concept. So as I mentioned, there are TWO places to set your GPU. If you go to Vegas’ Preference and set your GPU, Vegas will use the GPU for anything a GPU can do for Vegas internally, and it’ll pass that GPU selection on to plug-ins that use Vegas’ preference information. So you want to do that. If you don’t see your nVidia there, get some recent drivers that support OpenCL. This WILL make every video render faster, and it’s also the only thing that’ll enable the GPU to make editing and preview faster.

Now back to that AVC plug-in. Main Concept was a company that just did video CODECs. Sony used their stuff going way back. In Vegas 11, released on 2011, Sony first bought the version of the Main Concept AVC plug-in that did a pretty good job of using the GPU for rendering. The problems were already at work then. While Main Concept was established (in Germany) to make video CODEC technology, they were a little too successful. So they were acquired in 2007 by DiVX, at the time a very successful company selling MPEG-4 ASP products, looking to get more advanced video CODEC technology. This wasn’t a huge problem yet. But in 2010, Sonic Solutions, a division of consumer video products company Rovio, bought DiVX. And they haven’t put much into the company. So Sony engaged with Main Concept/Rovio to get the video CODEC technology for AVC into Vegas. It was pretty good back then. But it was essentially the same for Vegas 12 and Vegas 13.

And none of that would have itself been a problem, except Main Concept did a bad and very evil implementation of the GPGPU computing. The whole point of both CUDA and OpenCL is to allow any kind of device with sufficient math performance, particularly for Open CL, to do computing with applications that known nothing about the specifics of that processor. In fact, AMD has a version of OpenCL for its CPUs, just to allow OpenCL development/support without a supporting GPU. Intel has a few non-GPU massively parallel processor boards, like the Intel Phi, that use OpenCL. It’s a very good thing. Any recent nVidia card can do OpenCL in addition to CUDA — CUDA is a proprietary, nVidia only system.

Here’t the thing: Main Concept hard-wired their CODEC to only work with a list of very specific GPU chips. No good reason… presumably, they did this to force folks like Sony to pony up more cash for the new version of their CODEC for new versions of Vegas. Only, Main Concept was the one that failed to deliver. As a result, the Main Concept CODECs only support GPUs that were around in 2010 and perhaps up to mid-2011. My AMD Radeon HD6970 helps me render video up to 6x faster than I’d get just using my 6-core i7… usually it’s more like 2-3x. Newer GPUs will do the part of the GPU acceleration that Vegas handles faster than mine will. And that’s both editing performance as well as the rendering pipeline for any CODEC. But they’ll take longer in the actual rendering component of your video, since MC refuses to use your perfectly good GPU that should be able to render with either CUDA or OpenCL.

5) The complexity of your project. That matters, big. It’s not just video rendering…. how many files is Vegas loading for your project. Where are they — which HDDs or SSDs? Particularly for HDDs, you don’t want too much media coming from the same disc, or you may thrash. Check your Task Manager/Performance display, and look for around 90% CPU being used during a render. If it’s significantly less, you have a bottleneck tht’s not the CPU. You don’t want that, ever.. the CPU (and GPU, if it’s helping) need to be the bottleneck, because they’re the fastest things in the system.

And finely tuned, some projects are just too big. I had a couple of music videos with animation, composited in Vegas with 40-70 layers, that took 4-8 hours to render. For a 2-3 minute video. Nothing I could do about it but bite the bullet.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The GH4 can output 4K or HD at 10-bit, 4:2:2 over HDMI if you’re not recording internally, with or without the YAGH. If you are recording, it’s limited to 8-bit. In fact, the YAGH gets its video from the GH4 via HDMI.

There seem to be some issues in getting a proper handshake via HDMI for the proper progressive formats, depending on your external recorder. Sometimes you will get progressive sent as interlaced, which of course has to be non-destructively de-interlaced after recording. I haven’t actually used an external recorder (and the GH4 I used was borrowed, though I’m not sure I can hold out much longer on that inevitable purchase… I already have a bunch of m43 lenses), but this is how I understand it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Keith DuBose] “I’ve just finished completing a film that has literally taken me 4 years to make. Its a quicktime mov file exported out of final cut express 4 in 640×480 resolution (the first footage we filmed started out that way as yea we didn’t quite know what we were doing. I got a new HD cam and still used that footage but downsized those clips for my fx program visionlab studios, did my fx, exported those as raw animation files, then threw those into my final cut timeline so i’d keep as much quality in that format as possible.)”

What is the original format? You’re FAR better off rendering directly from your source film project to your target format than from some intermediate format. 640×480 is certainly an acceptable SD format for computers, but DVD is 720×480. At 12.5GB, I assume you’re using something like ProRes in Quicktime, so you’re not likely to suffer from re-compression artifacts rendering from that output file. But unless your original film sources and effects are all in 640×480, you will do better rendering to a native DVD format from the originals. If everything’s in 640×480, well, that’s unfortunate, particularly given that HD is 16 years old at this point, and people are going to be viewing most content on HD-class monitors.

Another thing… you’re rendering lots of FX, right. Just how you create those will have a big impact on how it looks. Either rendering from an animation program or downsizing from HD, you need good software with anti-aliasing support to make these things look smooth as you deal with lower resolutions.

If you don’t have that available, you may be able to get a similar effect with very careful use of blurring effects on your FX. Basically, very sharp edges can turn into jaggies when you down-rez from a higher resolution video stream, and pure “computer” graphics have much the same issue. Applying a good quality Gaussian blur filter to your video before you downrez will dramatically improve the look of many sorts of animated video in SD. And yeah, I’ve done lots of animation… I usually deliver in HD, and it’s awfully annoying to get it acceptable in SD when authored as HD.

[Keith DuBose] “I’m quite happy with out it looks on the playback on my mac. It looks “good” on regular dvd-r’s (dvd+r’s apparantly never work through my mac).”

DVD-R vs DVD+R is just a low-level thing… both are supposed to look to a drive pretty much like glass mastered DVDs (DVD+Rs can even be told to “lie” and claim they are glass mastered DVDs), but not every drive is made to spec. And Apple was certainly an early proponent of DVD-R, before they decided none of use needed physical media anymore (they’re wrong, of course).

Anyway, there’s no difference between the DVD and the MPEG-2 file you generate to master a DVD. iDVD is probably doing this for you, but in professional DVD mastering software, you do this from your video NLE timeline or an adjunct encoding program, so you have far more control over the characteristics of the MPEG-2 you’re rendering. But different things can happen on playback. For one, when you play a DVD on a televisions, that DVD’s video is always perfectly synched to that TV, and either going to a television designed specifically to that format, or being upscaled by a computer in your TV specifically designed to make that format look good (well, hopefully) on your higher resolution TV.

When you play a DVD on a computer, your monitor is usually still running at the computer’s refresh rate: could be 60Hz (most LCD screens are), could be higher. Either way, they playback may not be in sync. And it’s definitely not a video screen at video resolution (well, perhaps with Blu-ray, we’ll get to that). So early on, video playback looked pretty ugly on computer monitors. But as computers got fast enough, they started doing the same kind of digital signal processing on a video image to make it more suitable to the screen. And some go way beyond what most TVs do, simply because they have far more CPU cycles to spend on the problem. It depends on your player.

In short, your Mac PC is probably hiding the defects from you. That’s why it’s critical to ALWAYS preview any media content on the device you will use for delivery. CDs should be played in real CD players, DVDs on real DVD players connected to real televisions, etc.

Now, a word on MPEG-2 creation. At 90 minutes, you’re going to encode video at about 6500kb/s in MPEG-2, assuming that your soundtrack is stereo and encoded in AC-3 at 192kb/s (a typical bitrate for stereo audio). If you’re spending more of your “bit budget” on audio, you’ll have less available for video, so do make sure you’re rendering the DVD using AC-3 audio, not PCM or MPEG Layer 2.

But you probably don’t want to encode at 6500kb/s. You can get pretty much all the quality you’ll ever need for a 90 minute SD film on a single DVD, but you need a good encoder that can do variable bitrate encoding, ideally 2-pass VBR. What this does is boost the bitrate when it’s needed, and drop it when it isn’t, to get better quality video in the same space. If you have no controls on MPEG-2 quality in iDVD, there’s a virtual certainty you’re just getting constant bitrate (CBR) MPEG-2 at about 6500kb/s. DVD video can go in excess of 9000kb/s. Yeah, a dual-layer DVD will get you that ability, to just brute force it. But there are many commercial DVD players that do not work well with DL discs. So it’s not a format I would recommend for distribution.

[Keith DuBose] “Now for BluRay a friend of mine was able to help me put my mov file through Final Cut X to burn onto his external BluRay player that would burn off his mac. The video definitely looked ALOT better. However one problem. All my optical laser effects and objects that are red in my film will either appear a bit pix-elated or have vertical or horozontal lines through it. But when I play the mov file back on my computer and my dvds though, it doesn’t have that.”

Well, you have the same resolution issues I mentioned if you’re rendering to standard definition video on Blu-ray. I mean, basically, you’re blowing up an SD video 6:1 to play it on any HD screen, whether it comes from a Blu-ray or a DVD that’s upscaled by the television. Depending on the TV, some actually show interlaced video… hopefully your video was mastered as progressive — you didn’t include many technical details.

One possible solution here is to render your own Blu-ray compatible video. You can control some of the characteristics it when rendering, and your PC playback will hide fewer of the details, since you’ll control most of the upscaling. I’d recommend 720p60 or 1080p24 video on Blu-ray for animation and film — 1080i gets you interlaced. And those are the high-def options.

And yeah, I am getting a bit technical here. It’s a technical topic. There’s a reason some folks’ video looks much better than others’… in fact, many reasons. I once spent about 12 hours trying to tweak an animation to not look like crap on YouTube.. and it wasn’t all that long ago, YouTube in HD, in fact. You do have to understand what’s wrong before you can fix it. Thing is, experimenting is how you can learn… try some of the stuff suggested here, see what works, and you may be on your way.

[Keith DuBose] “I’ve tried flashdrives (even as a back up device) only to find that multiple sandisk 64gb flashdrives all gave me an “error code 0” and later discovered that files over 4gb won’t load onto the flash drive unless you change whatever format it says you have to and even after you do that, you limit its playback capability. Is there a high memory mac flash drive that won’t do that to me and won’t require me to “jump through hoops” to make it work??
“

It has nothing to do with the manufacturer, it’s the formatting. The long standing standard for Flash Drives, SD cards, etc. is Microsoft’s FAT32. And FAT32, as the name suggests, is a 32-bit file system. 2^32 bytes = 4GiB… not much of a way around that, that’s the math. The SD standard, which is actually a standard (Flash Drives are more of “just a thing that happened”, change to exFAT (sometimes called FAT64) when they went to the SDXC standard. exFAT supports files over 4GB in size, and all modern PCs and Macs support it. If you have an older Mac and haven’t updated MacOS, you may be in trouble, but otherwise, that’s what you want. However, exFAT will not work on “devices” … not on your Blu-ray player, not on your TV, not on your PS3, etc. Maybe eventually… I think you need MacOS 10.7 (2011). It’s often hard to do new things on old systems, and while Apple offers much cheaper, or even free, updates, they’re also completely willing to burn old OS versions, introducing things that break new software, ignoring support, etc. So if you’re on a Mac, you really need to keep up with the OS releases, or you will be left behind. Only the iPad/iPhone are worse, in the PC industry. Naturally, since the updates are cheap or free, that is a strategy, rather than Microsoft being very good (not perfect) about backward compatibility, but charging $100-$200 every three years for the new thing.

[Keith DuBose] “I also tried getting external bluray drives and software considering that blurays hold 25gb which theoretically would be more than enough and probably show the same playback quality i’m seeing on my mac here. Unfortunately there are a TON of hoops to jump through and other extra softwares you have to purchase after you get all that stuff as “unfriendly with blu ray that mac is.” “

Well, yeah. Apple got the “discs are bad” religion just around the time the HD format wars was happening, and maybe that cemented their decision. Or big money from the iTunes video store. Either way, the Mac is the absolute worst platform for Blu-ray, simply because there’s a culture of hostility against it, even when Apple does offer support (like rendering Blu-ray compatible AVC from Final Cut). I’ve been using Sony Vegas since it came out, and as you might guess, Sony’s been an extremely pro Blu-ray company… they’ve had full Blu-ray support since 2008.

[Keith DuBose] “I’m currently trying Encore with the Dual Layer dvd’s, however as I set it up, I noticed that when I set the DVD thing to Dual Layer 8.54Gb space, the project would only fill my file up to 5.64GB. Why won’t it go to its full 8.54 size there”

The maximum bitrate you can use for DVD video is 9800kb/s. 90 minutes of video at 9800kb/s will not fill up your dual-layer DVD. As I mentioned before, a single-layer DVD is all you need. Your problem is producing a good standard definition result. I suspect the Quicktime playback is hiding the flaws on playback with their signal processing. Maybe there’s a way to switch it off? Might be something to look into. Or a different video player.

[Keith DuBose] “Everyones telling me I should go back and just do a regular export of my whole film in FCE without quicktime conversion (but i’m afraid if I do that, everything will look wrong or pixelated as everytime I render my effects clips for playback the red objects look bad and unless I eliminate that render, the export brings out the clip to look that same way and I don’t want that.”

If you’re having that much trouble getting a good result, the problem is your material. You’ll have to fix that. “Everyone” is correct that, in theory anyway, if you want the best possible result, you start with your original project files and render to the medium you’re after, as I mentioned. Now, given the size of your Quicktime file, it sounds like you have something high quality in there, maybe ProRes. But as I mentioned, it’s rendered at the wrong resolution for DVD, so even that is reason enough to go re-render.

Go take a look at videos posted on YouTube sometime… there’s a ton of stuff out there that’s just horrible in quality. And some that’s very good. That’s not an accident… getting good digital video results, particularly when mixing different kinds of video, adding FX, etc. isn’t something you necessarily get right the first time. Or the 40th. Don’t be afraid to try something — that’s what this hobby/avocation/profession is all about. You will not learn to fix this problem if you’re afraid to experiment with different suggestions. If you’ve actually spent four years on this, even a month or two getting the result right shouldn’t be any kind of a problem for you.

[Keith DuBose] “And here’s the big question: HOW DO I MAKE AN ISO FILE??? (I’ve tried googling it and there’s no site I can find that explains how to create it from files but rather how to do it by ripping from other dvds).”

Those people don’t have a clue. You have been getting some good advice, that is not an example. ISO = International Standards Organization. The CD uses the ISO9660 standard for its file system. When you copy a whole CD image to a computer, it’s usually just a raw image of that file structure. Thus, an ISO file. DVDs actually use a different file system, called UDF (Universal Disc Format), which is also a standard, ISO/IEC 13346. Higher-end DVD authoring systems can write a DVD or Blu-ray file structure directly an ISO file rather than to a disc. That won’t do anything for your problem.

[Keith DuBose] “I’m a guy that really needs things explained step by step as I don’t understand alot of file types that well.”

You need to learn far more than one post can teach you. There are lots of resources online for learning about DVD and Blu-ray. One useful site is VideoHelp, https://www.videohelp.com. Creative COW is certainly another.

[Keith DuBose] “So my big question (with all these circumstances is this). What options with my present equipment do I have to make a better presentation of my mov file film than regular dvd-r with iDVD burning????
“

I think your MOV file is the core problem. You need to back to you originals to solve this problem, as I have suggested.

-Dave