[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks.

Do you know of any app that does a similar job with HDV tapes?

I mean: create a superfast index, rename while capturing and keep the shooting date & time?

Unfortunately, Mr. Winter won’t expand ScL to there.

Thanks.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks.

I thought of that way but I was not sure.

In fact, I still am not.

I put the .mpg bad file, the one previously rendered as DVD architect video stream, on the timeline of a new project and on the track above I put the two seconds good clip (rendered as avi uncompressed).
I set the project as the original one (DVD Widescreen PAL None (progressive) and deint. method “interpolated” and set the mainconcept rendering the same.

I’m getting a rendering speed of about 1 min of clip (1%) in one minute of time, where there are no corrections.
I did expect a far faster “encoding” speed for the unrouched sections: how do I know if Vegas is decoding + re-encoding everything instead of just the edited parts?

Thanks.

Fabio.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thank you again for your time.
Unfortunately, I must be a little thick so let me ask you something more.

Lets say I load an HDV 50i m2t clip just for a color correction and then I want to render it to an uncompressed AVI ready to be used again or compressed outside Vegas: which are the project settings that will let me keep the best possible quality?

Reading around I thought it would be HDV 50i UFF with deinterlacing set to none (the “E” example above) but your comments

NEVER set Deinterlace to none if you have interlaced footage

seems to say that we always have to deinterlace, so now I’m more confused than before…

And about the “F”: didn’t you say that Mercalli is able to deal with interlaced sources?

So, why deinterlace?

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks.

@Hallgeir
Yes, I know what interlacing is but, for me, sometimes it’s not so clear who-does-what in a workflow chain where a clip is dealt with NLEs, plugins, AVS script with commands and functions and software or hardware players to whatch the end result.
As you surely know a “not mentioned” deinterlacing can take place at any of the steps above. I think that if you don’t care about it you could even end up with applying more than one deinterlacing process to you clip with the consequent degradation in quality.
As John and all the learned guys here and elsewhere are never tired to repeat, from an interlaced source, the best quality you can get is to keep it interlaced from the camera till your (or your clients’) PAL DVD player will send it to that amazing TV set they’ve just bought! Or am I wrong?

@John

Well, I did some homework about this subject and this is the workout, for the moment:

Source (resting on a Vegas 9e pro timeline) = m2t 1440×1080 50i
Project settings = HDV 1440×1080 50i PAR1.3333

I did six different renders, all of them frameserved with Debugmode to an AVS script (with just avisource(“..”)), opened with Virtualdub and saved from there to AVI uncompressed with no Vdub filters. (I did this to have an easy preview of at least the first frame)
Then, with another AVS script I put them six together (cropped) for easy comparison. Here is a screenshot of Vdub:

The caption has this meaning:
mercalli[no/on] + prj settings field order[upper field first/none] + Prj deinterlace method[interpolated/none]

I’m doing all this not just for learning – even if I find it very interesting, but because I want to make some slow motion through AVS MVtools 2 and, thanks to a well explained script of John Meyer, I’ve been able to get nice results.
In fact, this is true for the plain m2t files (the script can manage interlaced clips) but I’m getting bad output after applying mercalli. Unfortunately, being just an amateur, I’m dealing with hand shot clips that need deshaking and you have already hinted me to feed mercalli with the original speed clip instead of applying it after the MVTools interpolated frames are added.

The final rendering for “the public” (proud parents…) will have to be a DVD Widescreen (PAL land) but I would like to keep a higher quality original on my media center.

While I go back testing – this time with the JM script, to see the different results I can get from different sources and with different settings, I would be glad to listen to your comments about it. Thank you.

Fabio.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thank you for your hint. It looks as a good cheat. I’ll think about it.

The object of this DVD is a footage of an “end course show” with about fifty girls from 4 to 20 years old and my 8 years old daughter is involved too.
So, my (not paying) “clients” are the parents and relatives of all the other girls.

Nonetheless, not wanting to release the usual unwatchable crap home movies are in general, I took this opportunity to try and learn something interesting and useful about video making/editing.

I made a plan for the shooting but having limited gear and experience I ended up with a stable DV SD footage in need of cleaning (tripod) and a quite unstable HDV couple of hours full of close ups and alternate point of view shots (taken by hand often over my shoulders).

Than I did the multicam, the cleaning and the stabilizing and now I’m quite satisfied.

The last step is to “distribute” a standard DVD Widescreen (PAL land) and I’m trying not to be boring here too. That’s why I’m bothering people here.

Going back to the menus I imagine the user will watch the whole show the first time and it will be pleased to be able to directly choose the performance her/his daughter was involved to the other times. But these are those kind of things that, when you start watching them, you’d rather let them go to the end than cutting them off after one chapter alone.

But maybe it’s be simpler than that…

Thanks.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks for your answer.

In the end, I think I will simply create a three pages scene selection menu with the playback always going to the DVD end, and leaving the user the choice to use the stop button (or the top menu one), if i likes it.

Thanks again.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Yeah, I saw that thread, thanks. (By the way: someone should really cut out all the doubled parts, there).

I have already done all you mention there. I also checked that the navigation was right for each of the button because, as you surely know, if you insert or move some buttons in the three you could end up with wrong navigation behaviour.

What I would like to be able to do, instead, is to give the user the ability to change the end action of the chapters before playing them.

Example:

– if the control box “watch to the end of DVD” is checked, when a chapter ends go seamlessly to the next until the DVD end is reached

– if the control box “watch to the end of DVD” in NOT checked, when a chapter ends go back to the menu page from where you started the playback and find the next chapter button highlighted

I don’t know if I can put an interactive control box on a DVD menu.
If not, is there another way to dynamically change the end action of a chapter?

Thanks.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Maybe the “disable resampe” hint came from here?

https://eugenia.queru.com/2009/02/09/butter-smooth-slow-motion/

If I got it right, this it’s ok because you’re dealing with a (fake) 50p footage, isn’t it?

(In general, being a newbie, I’m often confused from what I can find on the net. But sometimes I later discover that I had just overlooked some tiny detail in what I read and that made it sound different.)

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks.

Yes, it bothers me.
If you have time have a look at the first clip yourself and then at the third.
Now I’ll go and watch them on a TY though, because I only watched them on my PC display, till now.

Thanks again.

P.S.

Any opinion on the “resize” in/out the render engine?
I’m making some tests to see if the straight way (Vegas->Mainconcept) is far worst than frameserving to Procoder, CCE or HC through a smart resizing Avs script or not.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

I didn’t know of the different allowances between PAL and NTSC. I thought I could encode a progressive PAL DVD.

I’m not a fan of progressive encoding. In fact I’m a fan of MPQ (Maximum Possible Quality).

In my search to understand which path to follow, I made some tests, rendering little bits of the project I will have to put on DVD.

Today I rendered a few seconds of an HDV event deshaked with Mercalli 1.

As I wanted to see the differences, I first rendered to Mainconcept MPG2 with everything at default (interlaced) and then with everything progressive (project and render).
Watching the interlaced one with MPC HC I noticed that in many points (in time) of the HDV clip I could see a sort of a general blur for just a few frames.
The progressive render don’t show that.
So I went and captured the same frame from the two clips and you can clearly see the interlaced one is quite blurred.
My explanation is… yours! I mean, in another post I asked you if a deshaker would introduce blurriness and you answered that it won’t but, after the process we can see as steady some frames that before were not steady = blurred.
Is it correct?

But I don’t understand why the progressive render doesn’t show the same effect.

Have a look at the three clips, if you like.

1100_interlaced1.mpg.zip

1101_deintatrender1.mpg.zip

1102_deintatmethodandatrender1.mpg.zip

And here are the captures from the three clips:
(I don’t know why MPC HC captured them shrinked while played them wide)

This is interlaced at project and render

This is interlaced at project and deinterlaced at render (Mainconcept MPG2)

This is deinterlaced at project settings and at render.