[D. Eric franks]

You are definitely not lost and I promise you are headed in the right direction, because now we are getting somewhere.

Here’s exactly what I did:
(1) File > Properties, clicked the Match Media Settings button and selected your file (00021.MTS).
(2) Verified “Full resolution render quality” was set to Best.
(3) Dropped the clip on the Timeline and moved to frame 24.
(4) Set Video Preview to Best (Full) and…
(5) Checked out the video with the window displaying 1920×1080 and then windowed.

Result? What you see is what you get: Entirely normal 1080i interlacing, which will look fine (i.e., as good as the original footage) when rendered out 1080i to Blu-ray.

“Interlaaaaaaaacccccciiiiinnnnnngggggg! Yyyyyaaaaarrrrgggggghhhhhhhh!”

When the Preview window is resized (I noticed in your screenies that your window is not full-res), even by a couple of pixels, the interlacing is hidden, but it’s really still there and we are not seeing the actual Vegas output, only a resized version of it.

You can definitely also see that the ghosting in your previews and screenshots is a result of Vegas deinterlacing. So we’ve identified the “problem,” although it’s not truly a problem, just a matter of choice and deinterlacing method. There are two ways to do this:

Blend the fields together. This has the advantage of keeping all 1080 lines of HD resolution, but will result in the ghosting you are seeing on high-motion.

Interpolate which just tosses out one field and duplicates the other. This has the advantage of eliminating the ghosting on motion, but you sacrifice half of your resolution and only get 540 lines of what is now basically SD resolution video.

Two steps to implement this:
(1) File > Project Properties – Field order to “None (progressive scan)”
(2) Switch the Deinterlace method to “Interpolate fields”.

So now the hard part is making the choice: Ghosts or Half Resolution? And the decision will depend on the destination for the video. As I noted, my recommendations would be:

* For Blu-ray destined for the living room television, keep the project interlaced and at full-resolution. If you like the look of the source video straight from your camcorder on your TV, you’ll like the look of the Blu-ray, however…
* If the source video looks interlaced and crappy on on your modern HD progressive scan TV, that can be fixed by deinterlacing and probably tossing away one field.
* For DVD, an interlaced 480i60 DVD might look fine, but you are going to 480 lines anyhow, so I wouldn’t sweat the loss of resolution from deinterlacing at all.

[D. Eric franks]

Nice! Well, the quality of the source video is not an issue at all with what you are doing! Well done. So you are definitely trying to go from 95% great to 100% with the encoding, which is definitely a worthy goal. And not very fun or easy. I watched the Petoskey Celebrates clip: the dark areas are very clean, which can be challenging for the encoder, so that is a victory. The motion seems a little sharp – actually the whole thing seems sharp, which is a better problem to have than soft, imo – the wideshot of the intersection at the 30-second mark reveals something jittery: That may be something you can correct with smoother encoding (sacrificing sharpness – which you’ve got in spades – for smoother motion). Or it could be the source footage or the project settings. Sorry!

So, coming straight out of Vegas, it sounds like you are wrestling with the right problems: I think you are going to get the best results with one of the H.264 AVC codecs, but there are a lot of options that are not revealed by default (e.g., motion estimation vs. sharpness). Higher-end versions of these codecs do, indeed, have more options, at a price, and would require a two-step conversion process (I’m thinking an app like Squeeze). Others here might have other suggestions or maybe the folks in the Compression forum can be more helpful?

[D. Eric franks]

I don’t know why the MPEG-4 would be worse than MPEG-2 after being re-converted by YouTube… at least without knowing the relative bit rate between the two. At similar bit rates, the MPEG-4 should be a lot better, meaning that 10 Mbps in MPEG-4 should always be superior to MPEG-2 at the same bit rate. Where’s the crossover? Is 3 Mbps MPEG-4 = 10 Mbps MPEG-2? I have no idea.

As someone who always discovers mistakes after rendering, I sympathize with your desire for faster renders, but, honestly, I always go for the best quality I can get. If that means 2-pass VBR and takes twice as long, even if I can’t tell the difference, then so be it: 2-pass it is.

Now, as to your Website, you’ll definitely want to go MPEG-4 (MP4, H.264). There are other options (FLV is a good one), but the easiest, cheapest option is going to be the H.264. Shoot for ~2 Mbps for HD and you should get a nice balance between quality and data rate (~1 Mbps for SD). If you haven’t already gotten this far, you might look at the JW Player for playback: https://www.longtailvideo.com/

[D. Eric franks]

Thanks to the screen grab, this question is a few magnitudes easier to answer: Thanks!

First, without understanding anything else, I think you can eliminate the ghosting by right-clicking the clip on your timeline, Properties > Video Event tab and select “Disable resample”. This will “solve” the “problem,” but it’s not necessarily the right way to do it!

OK, now the unfun part: What you are seeing is Vegas interpreting and drawing a frame at a particular frame rate from source footage that does not match the frame rate. This can happen at the project level (although it looks like your project matches your source) or on the render (which probably does not match the source, unless you are rendering out interlaced). You can troubleshoot this BEFORE you render (which is a huge timesaving deal!) by setting your Project Properties to match your output and then toggling through the various Preview window quality settings: the Preview window will show you exactly what your very helpful screenies show. Handy!

So this raises the REAL question: What render settings are the right render settings? But first, you need to ask: Are the still frames with the ghosting a problem? Yes, if you want still image screen grabs, but the video might look best this way in full motion and Vegas’ interpretation of the frames might be exactly what you want. If you disable resampling, you will get rid of the “ghost”, but the motion might become noticeably sharp and unnatural. And this depends on the destination: Blu-ray? YouTube? iPod? Old skool CRT? Computer monitor?

We know your source (thanks for posting that detail too): What is your intended destination?

[D. Eric franks]

To be honest, compression is probably only part of the issue. Movies and television shows on Hulu look so good because they start with excellent source material: expertly lit, professional stabilization, expensive cameras, gorgeous design and then, at best, they use compression that doesn’t screw it up. Consumer gear is notoriously noisy, most home videos are not lit all that well and, oy, if it’s handheld? There’s no hope any amount of magical compression can fix that and, in fact, given exactly the same compression as Hulu, the poor encoding algorithm struggles mightily to encode all kinds on on-screen chaos, artifacts and motion and there’s nothing to be done.

Not saying this has anything at all to do with your video, which I’ve never seen a single frame of, but more often than not, when people have asked me “What compression did you use to make the video look so good?” it hasn’t been the right question. When you start with the source video Hulu starts with, getting excellent compression is relatively easy: Any old H.264 implementation will work just fine, from WMV to Apple.

[D. Eric franks]

Definitely never heard of this before, but you might try:

– toggle View > Active Take Information on/off (Ctrl+Shift+I)
– Option > Preferences > Video tab and change “Show source frame numbers on event thumbnails as:” item

Just be random luck if this works, but it’s easy enough to try.

[D. Eric franks]

Not sure what you mean by text frames, but if they are generated by Vegas, won’t they be “re-generated” when you reinstall? I can see how this would be a problem when moving to a different app, but if you are going Vegas > Vegas (even on a different machine or a clean install), the generated media should work (well, it should anyhow!).

[D. Eric franks]

Bring your map into Vegas at as high a resolution as you can and then use the “Event Pan/Crop” tool to zoom in. It’s a “crop” button on the right side of the clip (event) on your timeline.

(Sorry, I’m in the middle of a render and can’t give you a better screenie.)

There are some tricks here:
* The crop tool will match your image dimensions/aspect and not your project. This is a good thing, because you can work with all of the extra resolution of your larger image however…
* The crop won’t match your project’s aspect, so you’ll get back bars top/bottom or sides until you match the crop to the project. I’d do this by first getting it roughly right and then using the numerical values in the dialog to get it perfect.
* You can also use the numerical values to enter the dimensions of your project first (say, 1280×720) and then click the Maintain Aspect Ratio button in the dialog to keep everything perfect as you resize. This is often how I “cheat”.

The Track level Track Motion tool will also work and is a more intuitive to use (in my opinion), but it only works at the project’s resolution, so when you zoom in, things may become pixelized, even if your map is a gigantic high-res image. This is why the Event Pan/Crop is a better tool to use.

[D. Eric franks]

Oh, hey Ken and thanks! I do remember meeting you and have your card in my file: WEVA 2008. Thanks for the welcome!

[D. Eric franks]

That’s enough info to tell us that it’s the codec and not anything Vegas is doing, especially if you NEVER see it in Vegas before the render. I have seen intermittent issues with v9 that show up in the preview window AND on render, but not consistently with a drop shadow. Crazy, I know, but the drop shadow would just freak out for no reason. I couldn’t reproduce it on the same frame every time. And, like all the best bugs, it went away all by itself after rebooting.

One possible (pain in the butt) solution would be to render out uncompressed first (AVI, QT, whatever) and then render that file to DVD. That’s solved issues with complex sections of video for me.

All this assumes this is not a consistently reproducible issue: If you can consitently get ghosts on a particular letter at a particular frame, render after render, that’s something else, probably the codec in combination with the letter you are rendering. Not as strange as it sounds, for example, single pixel horizontal lines on interlaced signals will flash and flutter when scrolling. So it could be that a very narrow vertical bar of a certain width (and maybe a certain color) gets stretched 4 pixels by the MPEG-2 encoding creating a ghost, but if that’s the case, it’ll be 100% reproducible, render after render.