[Dave Haynie]

1. Can we produce/create/make HD videos on regular dvds with Sony Vegas? Or do we have to have Bluray disks?

There are any number of ways to deliver HD content. But as far as standard, DVD-like video discs go, there are only a few practical ones. The standard Blu-ray is the optimal format, and you can create Blu-ray discs using DVD Architect — it works exactly as it does for DVD.

The alternative is HD on a red-laser DVD. DVD Architect will allow you to create a Blu-ray compilation targeted for DVD, but it will only likely play on a PC. No significant number of plain old DVD players support any kind of actual HD (the did exist, but they’re irrelevant now).

The well supported format for HD on a DVD is AVCHD. Pretty much every Blu-ray player supports AVCHD DVDs, because this is a well known camcorder format. AVCHD is different in small ways than Blu-ray.. it’s limited to 18Mb/s data rates (basically, DVD x2), and there are few format differences. For no obvious reason, DVD Architect cannot make an AVCHD disc. You can use a freeware tool like multiAVCHD (Google it) to create AVCHD discs from an HD source. Keep in mind, though, this will only be useful for 30-60 minutes of decent quality video.

Online is another option. Most of the online video streaming services, like YouTube and Vimeo, now support at least some form of HD. It’s not as high quality as BD or AVCHD, but then again, it’ll play on any PC.

2. What exactly is HD? Like . . . can a photoshop file be HD? What determines HD?

There are various opinions. Over the years, the working definition is that, if you’re at 720×480 (720×576 PAL), or less, you’re in standard definition. If you’re at 1280×720 up to 1920×1080, you’re in HD. Anything in-between is dubbed “Extended Definiton”… ED. Anything better is probably classified in film terms: 2K (2000×1000 nominally), 3K (3000×1500), or 4K (4000×2000).

Photoshop deals with still images. If you’re using a digital camera that’s not hopelessly obsolete, you probably have more than 1920×1080 pixels available. Photoshop has no obvious limits on the size of the file you can edit… I’ve done 40+ photo composites from a 6-8Mpixel camera, and it was happy with that. You can use Photoshop-edited stills, backgrounds for greenscreen video, “Ken Burns Effect” videos made from still, etc.. here’s one I did, in Vegas, in HD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGf7xjWc4E

For this kind of video, you actually want still images much larger than your target/ This was created in 1080p, but back then, YouTube only supported 720p uploads, so it was downscaled a little. Most of the photos here are either 35mm scans or digitals from a Nikon D70 or D90.

3. Only thing I know is that when we set project properties starting a Vegas project, there are several that say HD. Does just setting it up like that make it HD? Need very simple answer, if possible!
The project settings pretty much are a suggestion about how you’re going to produce a final project, nothing more. They affect the video preview and some other things, but these can be overridden by your output format (the thing create when you “Render As…”). You can use the Project menu to match your project to the video source (there’s a button for that), which is probably what you want, if you only have input from a single camcorder.

In Vegas 10, when you do select Render As…, you get an “=” indicator next to any rendering preset that matches your project. That’s not always what you want, but it often is. You might render AVC or MPEG-2 in 1080/60i for Blu-ray or AVCHD, use one of the usual DVD Architect MPEG-2 templates for 16:9 DVD to create a video stream for DVD, and then a different AVC output, maybe at 720/30p, for a web upload.

-Dave

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[Dave Haynie]

You don’t need to render 3:2 pulldown for Blu-ray. You did for DVD… DVD really only wanted to support 29.97. But Blu-ray supports native 23.976 progressive at 1920×1080.

I have used both MPEG-2 and AVC with good results. Vegas supports higher bitrates with MPEG-2 than it does with AVC, but that’s appropriate; well encoded AVC will have about twice the coding efficiency as MPEG-2 (eg, a 15Mb/s AVC stream should match a 30Mb/s MPEG-2 stream in visual quality).

What’s missing right now, though, is that the Sony AVC CODEC only supports constant bitrate encoding. Anyone who’s figured out how to produce high quality DVDs knows you get a much better result using variable bit-rate video.

The Main Concept CODEC supports both VBR and somewhat higher bit rates than Sony’s. I have used it for online video, but not Blu-ray. No obvious reason is shouldn’t work, but everyone seems to use Sony’s for Blu-ray. Ok, Sony includes the Blu-ray templates, I’m sure that’s a big part of it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The .m2ts files on my discs will play fine for the first 15-16 minutes, then have terrible frame rate issues (choppy, stuttering video, sometimes briefly sped up) for the remainder.

Not sure what would cause that. The PS3 can play just about anything. I suspect you’ll get in trouble if you’re rendering higher bitrate video to DVD. But if this is to Blu-ray, you should not see performance problems.

Here’s what I’m doing: The original .m2t clips are compiled into .vf files, rendered as Sony AVC files with default options. (PC limitations prevent the creation of files larger than 30 minute runtime.) I then use Nero 8 Burning ROM to create a UDF BD compilation of multiple .m2ts files.

You have done the equivalent of rendering a .mpg file and then burning it onto a DVD. You can use .m2t, .avc, or .mp4 files to create a Blu-ray disc, but the disc compilation is much more than that. And Blu-ray itself uses .m2t files (eg, MPEG-2 transport stream) as its native video format. Nero Burning ROM can burn you a UDF or ISO disc, but that’s still not a proper Blu-ray video disc.

The PS3 shows the discs as “Data” under the Video menu. I’ve tried two PS3 consoles, including a brand new unit, and the problem occurs on both. What am I doing wrong? Many thanks!

Yes.. you have just made a data disc.

If you want to make a Blu-ray video disc, you need to make a Blu-ray video disc. I don’t know all the ins and outs of Vegas Studio Platinum. On full Vegas anyway, you can render either a BDAV disc or a BDMV disc. BDAV is a single video, and you can render that directly from the Vegas time line. BDMV means “movie”, and that’s the fully authored Blu-ray, with menus and all that stuff. In the usual workflow, you create this in DVD Architect. I would assume its somewhat similar in Studio Platinum. Also, there’s no need to run Nero; Vegas is absolutely capable of burning the BDs once complete.

I have made dozens of fully authored Blu-ray discs, and I use a PS3 as my only BD player (well, other than my PC). My discs, created in DVD Architect, play just dandy on the PS3.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You have to decide based on your content.

Blu-Ray doesn’t actually support 1080/30p, though since all modern televisions are progressive, encoding it as 1080/60i doesn’t really hurt anything… that’s definitely your best bet with 1080/30p source material.

Try 1080/24p, which is a Blu-ray supported format, and see if you like it. This is usually included for a film-like look (cinematic films are shot at 24p and shuttered at 48p or higher on playback). Good for low light, too (a 180-degree shutter look at 1/48 second rather than 1/60 second with 30p), but not so good for fast motion (I shoot sports at 720/60p, which is also a Blu-ray supported resolution).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If you’re trying to stuff a standard definition film into 800MB (about 1/2 the bitrate of an Apple iTunes download, about 1/10th the bitrate of a professionally encoded DVD), I would recommend the Main Concept AVC encoder over the Sony.

Both produce AVC, and I use the Sony encoder for Blu-ray. But the Sony encoder doesn’t support variable bit-rate encoding, which is absolutely essential to optimizing a low bit-rate render. All professionally encoded DVDs are done in VBR, for example. You’re talking about an average bit-rate of 850Kb/s or thereabouts… and that’s not even taking into account audio. So you can set up a render with video at 800,000b/s as an average, maximum of 2,500,000b/s, and audio at 48kb/s, and see how that goes.

XviD is based on the original DivX CODEC, which is in turn based on MPEG-4 Part 2, also called MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile video. This was an improvement over MPEG-2, but AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is a similar improvement over ASP. And as John pointed out, it’s a standard. In fact, AVC is THE video standard of our times: it’s on Blu-ray, on the web, it’s the primary video CODEC for portable devices, it’s the European high definition broadcast standard, it’s more recently become the most common consumer camcorder recording format, and it’s used on most satellite and even some digital cable TV systems. Microsoft added built-in support for AVC with Windows 7, even though they were never all that good with NIH (Not Invented Here) technology support.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Also, you can use masking to give the somewhat questionable Vegas chroma key plug-in a little help. Unless you have perfect lighting, you may find the keying shifts a little… you can play with the plug-in to find the optimal setting.

But in many cases, you’re shooting a talking head or some other stationary subject against the green screen. In about a minute, you can create a mask for that subject. At that point, you’re only dealing with keying on the immediate surroundings, not the entire backdrop. This may be much easier than getting the whole backdrop clean.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Nope; nor can you burn a AVCHD disc.

On the other hand, Vegas (9,10) itself will burn a BDAV disc from the timeline (or create an .iso for later burning).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m saying MainConcept, only because Sony AVC doesn’t support VBR. One reason this video looked so good, so small, was the fact the shooting style was mostly just about ideal for AVC-style compression. But the second factor was the variable bitrate compression. You had large chunks well below 1500kb/s, and some segments near 5000kb/s. Assuming the render is essentially working on a constant quality basis, going to CBR, you would be wasting bits on that simpler video, and killing quality when the bit rate wants to jump up.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The real fix is to use 64-bit, when you can.

The hack here is potentially a problem, depending on the code. Windows user space in 32-bit mode is limited to 2G normally. The reason for this is simple: some bad programming techniques sometimes treat memory pointers as integers. If those are not expressly written as unsigned integers, then manipulation of pointers over 2GB works in signed math, and produces incorrect results.

Setting this flag allows Windows to devote up to 3GB in a 32-bit OS, or 4GB in a 64-bit OS running the things in 2GB mode. It’s not an issue on 64-bit resources in a 64-bit OS. But if they’re not “4GB clean”, changing these flags will bring on errors.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ok.. this did get me curious enough to take a closer look. So yeah, the streaming link gives you a 66MiB (69.2MB) file. That’s spot on for 2000kb/s, which is lower bitrate than I was expecting from Vimeo. Could be they use 2500kb/s for 720/30p and drop to 2000kb/s for 720/24p, which is what you have here.

The original upload was 158MB (they claim… don’t know if that’s really MB or MiB), which is spot on with the 160MB I calculated for this length of video encoded at 5000kb/s.

Thing is, they’re using variable bitrate, just as I recommended. If you used the Sony encoder on this video, you’d have the whole thing encoded at 5000kb/s on the way up, and 2000kb/s on the way down.

But look over this video… there’s a little bit of fast motion here and there, but most of it is nearly ideal video for AVC encoding. There’s practically no camera movement, which is the hardest thing for encoders to do well. There’s a whole section of talking heads, lots of scenes that are shot very photographically, with very little movement. Keep in mind, AVC encoders need bits to encode the changes from one frame to another… if they are very few changes, very few new bits need to go into P and B frames.

The video starts out at around 750kb/s… the opening shot in the dark. The dancing scenes vary from about 1300kb/s to 2800kb/s. The talking heads rately get beyond 2000kb/s, mostly staying in the 1500kb/s, down as low as 1300kb/s. The higher rates here are largely because of the jumping back and forth between the bride and groom, they settle down once the subject stabilizes.

Then we look at the scene out the window, and bitrate drops to nearly 500kb/s… both a fixed, non-moving subject and blur goes super efficiently into AVC.

Next, the construction scenes. There’s a fair bit of jumping around, but most scenes have a fixed camera and little motion, also lots of depth-of-field blur. So you see fairly small numbers here, too, a few peaks to 2500kb/s, most under 2000kb/s. The jump to the bride opening packages peaks over 3500kb/s, but drops back down… again, little motion, lots of DOF blur.

We go to the street scene, and a few sequences peak over 5400Mb/s… keep in mind, this was a 2000kb/s encoding… on average. You also see peaks over 5000kb/s when the groomsmen are walking up, but mostly, lots of sub-2000kb/s sequences. Most of the crowd scenes are shot with shallow DOF, so again, lots of blurring, which encodes very well.

Some of the early church scenes are peaking up again, near 4000kb/s, as there’s camera motion. Then we see a shot of just the couple, down at 1000kb/s.

So basically, at least in the delivery video, they’re doing some close to a constant quality encode, with a very wide range of peaks and valleys. Particularly for a video with this kind of variation, you’ll never get close to the same quality at the same bitrate using CBR. On a similar kind of video, I’d set the average bitrate to 2000, the peak to 5500-6000, and run it 2-pass. Try without the de-blocking filter, but if you see block artifacts, run it again with the de-blocking filter and compare.

-Dave