[Dave Haynie]

[Chuck Pullen] “Can you just imagine for a second if versions of Windows operated like Vegas?”

Actually… I remember very vividly when it did… or worse. So, there was this new thing called Firewire, and you could buy a very expensive proprietary interface for Windows 95 to be able to hook up your shiny new digital camcorder… often for more than the camcorder cost.

So Microsoft put out Windows 98, and aside from all that “desktop = internet” nonsense, it had real, dedicated, built-in support for industry standard Firewire and USB interfaces. Only… once you bought it, installed it, etc. not so much. It crashed, it dropped frames, it didn’t work with some cameras, etc.

But hey, a little while later, ALL THIS STUFF was fixed in Windows 98SE, and the upgrade was only $20 or whatever… Cheap. And while that actually did help with USB, it didn’t actually do much of anything for Firewire.

But hey, a little while later, ALL THIS STUFF was fixed in Windows 2000. Ok, this time, it actually was….

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

There is no standard format that embeds DVD-style navigation.

The DivX company has a proprietary format (they use some standard building blocks like AVI and maybe Matroska file wrappers, but the menus are not standard) that does this, when using their player. You need to spend a little money to get the authoring tools. The result probably plays on media players — they’ve been pretty aggressive about this. But not may will support the menus.

If this is really important, this is the only such solution I know about.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Chuck Pullen] “So I just uninstalled 11 and reinstalled 10…Guess what??? Registration server is down, can’t use the program without it…THANKS SONY, YOU’VE COST ME ANOTHER DAY OF EDITING!!!!”

With pretty much ANY professional-class piece of software that permits it, I keep the last version or two installed, as well as the most recent. And if this isn’t permitted, I seriously question the “professional” monikker. Applications don’t eat all that much space on disc… and given the crashiness, and in particularly, Cineform issues, I have kept Vegas 9, Vegas 10, and Vegas 11 installed… but I am finding Vegas 11 better in my use than Vegas 10. Clearly, mileage varies, and unfortunately, no one’s effectively isolated any predictor of success or failure, far as I know.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Try Guinness… I have yet to have a Vegas 11 crash with Guinness.

In all seriousness, I have on the overall found it more stable than Vegas 10. Maybe I’m the lucky one, or maybe I just got unlucky with Vegas 10. Last fall when I first got Vegas 11, I bought both AMD/ATi and nVidia cards, each around $300. At the time, the AMD card was very stable, the nVidia card slower and with some very obvious card-relased crashes. So I kept the AMD. But if you know the weird world of video driver releases, that situation could flip around overnight.

Some of that may be simply learning to work around bugs. Vegas 10 totally and completely broke Cineform for me, on several levels. It was DOA on release, forced an upgrade to the latest, which still crashed on any Cineform video (Vegas 9 still worked, either version of the CODEC). They finally fixed the reader, but it still wouldn’t write without crashing. By 10e it did, but the video levels were always screwed up… and this seems to remain the case in Vegas 11. And this was a totally avoidable problem… all they needed was a single switch to disable the use of the “special” API between Vegas and Cineform, and just drop back to VfW like Vegas 9. So in Vegas 11, I’m using RAW or DNxHD depending on the situation, for the most part, and so Vegas 11 is more stable… not for good reasons, though, it still has problems with Cineform.

I have hit only one major problem in Vegas… naturally, working on a 24 hour project that was supposed to be a 48 hour project, animation and custom music in there as well. I hit a full on crashing bug in some plug-in, only during a render, no diagnostics other than a good idea just where it crashed. I was able to remove that effect and all was good.

So recently, no complaints. It’s sad, though, mainly because there was a time when Vegas was the single most reliable piece of software I used in several industries, including $10,000 electronics CAD software. No longer, not in a few revisions.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Angelo Mike] “I didn’t realize that you could render an anamorphic DVD (which many DVDs are now, apparently) and that a DVD player will letterbox it on a 4×3 tv as long as you set it correctly. Should I be doing that with DVDs I make?”

Most DVDs have always been 16:9, though in the early days it was fairly customary to offer both “Widescreen” and “Fullscreen”. There are Main Concept MPEG-2 templates for “DVD Architect Widescreen”, your choice of PAL or NTSC, which is a good starting point.

Keep in mind that the only actual different on the DVD are a few bit settings…. all the DVD knows is that there’s a 720×480 or 720×576 MPEG-2 file; the “widescreen” setting is a hint to the player how to interpret the data.

Players have a typical setup option which determines what to do with a 16:9 video. They can just play fullscreen (which is what you want on a 16:9 TV), or they can add “letterbox” bars, to represent the 16:9 video in a 4:3 frame. Or they can “Pan & Scan”… the player can show a 4:3 crop of the 16:9 video, fullscreen. Some DVD authoring tools can even provide Pan & Scan vectors, which automates movement of the cropping frame over the 16:9 video.

Since nearly every production television made today is 16:9, the Pan & Scan options don’t get much attention these days.

Now, what’s really going to pop your cork… most films are not only released in 16:9 on DVD, but in 24p, at least for NTSC release. There’s also a template for that….

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Jonathan Lee] “The problem is that the playback is incredibly choppy and slow. I can play the H264 file fine on Media Player; it’s just slow in Vegas.
“

Your PC is well below spec for smooth playback of AVC/H.264 HD video using the CPU only. Any chance you have help from your GPU on playback? If you’re playing back in Windows Media Player, you either have Windows 7 or some 3rd party add-on… Microsoft supplies the Windows 7 H.264 CODEC, which uses the DXVA 2.0 system to accelerate video playback.

Either way, it’s simply way more complex to play back video for editing than just for viewing. Editing H.264 on my laptop (Core2 Duo at 2.4GHz with 4GB memory) is too slow for regular use. Of course, that’s a five-year-old laptop…

The usual solution is exactly as you suggest, an “intermediate” format. Using Vegas built-in formats, try a high definition Sony MXF output — that’s very high bitrate MPEG-2, which will take up more space, but is much, much easier to decode than the H.264format. The first (not only) consideration in preserving quality is preserving resolution; assuming high definition H.264 sources, DV will be 1/6th the resolution.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Dude… try actually reading. ATSC is MPEG-2, identical in every way to the MPEG-2 used on DVD. Only it’s somewhere between 12Mb/s and 19Mb/s or so (depends on the number of SD secondary channels they drop into that MPEG-2 transport stream; I have not seen more than four, but the physical limit is a total of 32).

So do your calculations, but it’s MPEG-2 in both. One is 8Mb/s and 720×480/60i, one is say 15Mb/s (or so it for each) and 1920×1080/60i or 1280×720/60p (same basic issues for PAL, of course).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Here’s a simple exercise for your mathematics, one I alluded to long ago. If you want to understand compressed video, you’re going to have to expand your mental and mathematical model to explain this. And it’s very basic.

ATSC. US digital HDTV. Like DVD, it uses MPEG-2. There are a few delivery formats, but the two common ones are 1280×720/60p (demanded by ABC’s ESPN division, and they have a point… I filmed soccer for some years, always found 720p superior to 1080i) and 1920×1080/60i. These formats contain, respectively, 5.3 and 6 times the information of DVD video at 480/60i.

Well encoded DVD runs at an average of around 8Mb/s. The peak available bandwidth for ATSC is 19.4Mb/s, and most actual network broadcasts are around 15Mb/s. So here’s the problem for you: no one anywhere denies that HDTV as broadcast in the USA and viewed on a proper modern display is much better than DVD. And yet, we’re talking about 6x as much information in only about twice the bitrate, and it’s exactly the same algorithm.. no AVC magic here. Your mathematics, as presented, will claim that DVD is far, far better. But it’s not even close.

That’s the cognitive psychology aspect here… unless you have an accurate mathematical model of the brain, you can’t make absolutely predictions based on the mathematics of video compression. Which is why this has been an engineering problem, not a science problem: engineering = science + art.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah…. I guess “levelator” does what I was about to suggest, or something like it.

The Vegas “normalize” setting is almost never what you really want. It does peak normalization.. that means, it finds the loudest part of your audio, and makes that 0VU (0dBfs) (aka, full volume).

The problem you’re going to get right off noise. If someone coughs, if someone bumps something, etc. you may have a momentary but meaningless peak. And while your average audio levels may well be the same from clip to clip, this noise is not going to be .. and you’ll be selecting that as the basis for normalization.

What you really want is some kind of RMS normalization, and across the whole project as one thing. “RMS” means “Root Mean Square” — mathematically, it’s the square root of the average of the squares of each sample. A basic RMS calculation will deliver what’s in essence the average perceived volume of the that audio sample. Once you know the average, you can boost the level to put that average where it ought to be (there’s a whole different set of ideas about what the average level should be for speech, music, etc), probably running that as well through a compressor/limiter to ensure that the occasional peak doesn’t clip — clipping is baaaaad.

There are more sophisticated calculations, which may be able to isolate the greatest sustained power in the audio clip. If you can get such an “average sustained peak”, you can set that closer to 0VU… I’d still use the limiter.

You can probably find plug-ins in Vegas for this… I usually do my normalizing in Forge, and usually split up the tracks. I’ve shot many dozens of stage productions. First thing I do is split music and voice/narration, if I wasn’t lucky enough to have separately recorded tracks for each of these to begin with. You want to separately normalize each, even if you’re going to ultimately mix to 2-channel. You can, and often should, apply heavier compression to speech than music… compressing music too much crapifies it. For speed, it depends a great deal on the content. A typical narration is something you can compress quite a bit; some actor’s speech may well have the same kind of dynamics as music, and shouldn’t be messed with much.

And of course, most of the time, compression is added in this scenario, as your normalizing is, to make up for flaws. If a speaker is properly miced and doesn’t somehow wriggle out of that, you probably don’t have much to do. But if the production counts on stage mics, or if you just get a bad lapel placement. I saw a show a week ago where one of the leads seems to have his mic clipped to the outside of a large collar, so every time he turned to the left, his voice dropped WAY off… fortunately, I wasn’t the sound guy that day :-)…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You are still missing the most fundamental issue which, which I explained before. While yes, mathematics are involved (and we’ll get to the part of that you’re ignoring in a few… I’m not staying long), this is not a mathematics problem. It’s a psychology problem.

In short, you cannot predict with any level of certainty how an individual will perceive the encoded video, when you’re mixing different kinds of video. All video compression algorithms are designed to fool the brain, and more advanced algorithms work better: MPEG-2 better than DV, MPEG-4/ASP better than MPEG-2, AVC better than ASP, and perhaps this new H.265 (claiming a 33-66% coding efficiency improvement over AVC) better still.

Bottom line: you have to look. With your eyes. The experiment I put up here presents just such an opportunity. Maybe I’ll find some other higher quality source and run another set of clips; I’m getting some feedback from a variety of sources, and a few of the better rated clips aren’t what I would have predicted. Your continued refusal to rate these sure suggests you don’t trust your own eyes. That is the only thing that actually matters here.

YouTube uses an undocumented algorithm to decide what bitrate to encode, based on the incoming video. I have never had a problem getting it to deliver 6Mb/s AVC for my 20Mb/s well shot AVC 1080p uploads. I haven’t analyzed all possible outcomes of their process; I do know that 720p is often (maybe not always) encoded at 2Mb/s. And that’s actually fairly well accepted by consumers are “better than DVD”… I don’t always agree.

But look at Netflix. Their “HD” streaming runs at 2.4-3.6Mb/s last I checked, using Windows Media 9 (aka VC-1), which offers somewhat less encoding efficiency than AVC, certainly more than MPEG-2. I’m not defending Netflix against Blu-ray… I always want the best possible quality for my viewing. But when it’s DVD vs. Netflix, the average consumer will pick Netflix HD based on their judgement of visual quality.

In the early days of HD video, Microsoft offered up a format using similar techniques, dubbed WMV/HD DVD. Before Blu-ray became possible, I had figured out how to make these (pretty much by hand… no authoring tools other than the WMV encoder), and they called for WMV in 720p at about 3-4Mb/s. I happened to have a red laser DVD player that supported this format, in HD, as well. It was unambiguously better than DVD… this was before upscaling got to the point of actually working well; I haven’t done a comparison.

This was actually used on a few commercial discs… I have HD Net’s “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” on WMV/HD-DVD. Worked much better when the film was only 1-1.5 hours (and I had a special interest in the film, having once had business dealings with Enron, though a weird set of connections).

When you’re considering modern algorithm, too, as I mentioned, one of the main impacts on quality has nothing to do with the I-Frame (keyframe) mathematics you seem so preoccupied with. Yes, AVC offers more efficiency in I-Frame encoding than MPEG-2 or DV; that’s the whole point of AVC-Intra. But we’re not dealing with AVC-Intra. Camcorder use of AVC is going to always use fixed GOP sizes, so there’s at least a prayer of editing it. Delivery formats are no so kind, and of course, they can spend a very long time on motion search.

You can’t really factor motion search in easily, because that’s not really part of AVC or MPEG-2, not arithmetically. There’s a black box in there for “motion search”, but every encoder has its own approach. The things used on Blu-ray and YouTube can’t be done in a camcorder… and in fact, never will be. And because of this, you can argue about mathematics until you’re blue in the face (and you seem to have been… and they are getting more correct, so at least you’re learning SOMETHING), but that won’t give you the answer. Only your eyes will.

I thought my web test was fair, particularly since, as I said, there was only one “right” answer. But I’ve had a few people now pick one of those I’d suggest might be second best as best, and there’s even of the videos with upscaling getting pretty high in the ranks. No plays to post a “gimme”, either, but maybe another clip set with the same encodings. Or not, if I’m too busy (it’s actually less than an hour, all told, to make)…

-Dave