[Deborah Curtis]

Wow, trying to remember what I did with these. I’m pretty sure I just gave up!

I think I ended up using the (horrible) software that came with the Zi8 camera for this set of video files. I was making a DVD for my daughter’s cheer team, and I had a small subset that were in this format.

Since I was on a time crunch I just bit the bullet and used Kodak’s horrible software.

Good luck! This made me SO mad. 🙂

[Deborah Curtis]

Really??? Very interesting! I am actually surprised at how nicely my .M2T files render considering their file sizes.

PC prices are coming down, and it’s definitely time for me to consider upgrading 🙂

[Deborah Curtis]

I have a Panasonic HDC-SD60 Full HD video camera. I’m using an older PC as well.

Mine has a 2.0 GHZ dual Pentium processor with 4 GB of RAM. I’m running the media version of Windows XP SP3, and I have a very fast video card as well.

I’m using Vegas Movie Studio HD 10.0 and it’s going fine so far. The render times are rather slow, but it’s worth it to me for the video quality.

If you can bump up the memory a bit, that would be cheap and would probably help the render time. I’m not sure what the maximum is on your model of PC.

[Deborah Curtis]

I have found that the way to get the best picture with the MPEG was to:

1. On the MPEG File properties choose the custom button, and have Vegas set the properties for the MPEG file. It will most likely set the Pixel aspect ratio to 0.9091 (NTSC DV) — change this to 1.2121 (NTSC DV WIdescreen). Keep the Width at 704 Height 480.

2. I changed the Pixel format before rendering to 32-bit floating. It takes a lot longer, but it was worth it if I got a bit mroe quality.

3. When you import each individual MPEG into the timeline, you also have to set the pixel aspect ratio. Right click on the clip, select Properties. Then go to the Media tab and change the Pixel aspect ratio fo 1.2121. Also change the field order to Upper Field first if this is how the MPEG file was imported on option 1.

4. Rendering- Render as a MainConcept MPEG-2

I chose the Template for DVD NTSC Widescreen compatible with DVD Architect- and then MODIFY it.

Project Tab: Best
Video Tab: Make sure the Width is 704 and height is 480. The Aspect ratio should be 16:9 display. Profile and Level are Main. The field order should be Upper field first. Set the video quality to 31. I used a Variable Bit Rate maximum ob 9,500,000 Average 6,000,000 Min 192,000
Advanced Video – no changes
Audio – MUST select Include audio stream unless you want to render audio on a separate stream. If you don’t check this you won’t have any audio.
System- I didn’t change anything.

Good luck! I burned with TMPGEnc Tsunami-MPEG and had great results.
Advanced Video:

[Deborah Curtis]

That was an interesting thread on Premiere Elements… It looks as though they are importing the file at 704 x 480 and then they EXPORT it at a different format of 720×480 16×9

If I had to do it all over again, I most likely would never have purchased the video camera I did. It has been a disastrous nightmare trying to get software to be compatible with the MPEG file structure. I tried Premiere Elements and it crashed consistently when rendering the MPEG files. I hated it.

Sony Vegas has actually been quite good to work with, if I could get the quality of the video where I want it. I can copy the video straight from the camera to a DVD, and it is better than when I import it into Vegas and then burn it. I suppose I should expect some loss, so I’ll just have to learn to deal with it.

I’m going to continue to mess with the settings. I’ll post back what I find works best for other poor souls who have this issue in the future 🙂

[Deborah Curtis]

I started that way- using the default Widescreen setting…

The default widescreen settings are 720 x 480 and I felt this may be distorting the picture more since in reality the pixels are only 704 x 480.

So that’s when I thought I’d try letting Vegas set the file properties by using the custom button- and it did change the file settings from 720 to 704.

I guess I’m just confused why the custom button didn’t choose the widescreen ratio.

[Deborah Curtis]

Thanks! I was able to open one of those and re-save the file. I think it was corrupt.