[Jeff Greenberg]

[Lee Overstreet] “Am I right in my choice of formats at each stage of this scenario? The .avi would be an NTSC interlaced video file, right, just like copying form a DV tape? I’ve noticed such .avi’s from analog sources contain the messy edges that would normally be overscanned on a television, either SD or HDTV”

It’s not bad. You don’t mention which software you’re using for compression which would really help.

On interlacing/avi/from DV or other SD source
If your original source was interlaced, keep it interlaced, period. “Preserve the original quality as best you can”

[Lee Overstreet] “Should my long-term viewing files in the form of MPEG4/H.264 be de-interlaced, as well as cropped and zoomed to make 640×480 4:3 edge-to-edge videos?
“
If you’re intending it to be viewed on a computer or other non-interlaced playback mechanism, then yes, deinterlace. The messy edges are the points where the scan line is supposed to jump to the next line – truthfully, I’d leave it; again preserving quality.

[Lee Overstreet] “1) Sample old tape onto PC (either pass through a 3-chip Panasonic DV camcorder from 2004, or use a XP machine I have with an old Matrox RT X100 card), separate into events, and save as DV format .avi’s. I have the following NTSC formats: VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi8, & DV.
2) Immediately make a DVD for safekeeping, with chapters for each event on the tape. Give copies to family.
3) Keep anything I might be using for said podcast as DV format .avi on a hard drive for later use (3TB RAID1).
4) Convert anything unlikely to be edited to a more compressed, but not TOO compressed, MPEG4 / H.264 for later viewing over my home network on PCs, tablets, a PS3, etc.
5) Along the way, for sharing anything to YouTube / Vimeo / Facebook, export bits to a more compressed MPEG4 / H.264.

I have a 2 year old PC based on a 6-core AMD chip and Windows 7, with Adobe CS4 (no reasonable way to afford CS6 any time soon) and a blu-ray burner.
“

1) Fine
2) Sure. It’s compressed, but if you’re okay about that and your family primarily uses DVD, spot on. The question is how much video to a DVD; more video = higher compression. 90 min at around 7mb/s is about the biggest you can be anyway.
3) Keep as much material in the original capture format? yup!
4) That’s fine. I’d pick a common tablet (i.e. iPad) format in SD
5) Well, this I’d quibble with. Youtube, vimeo, etc are going to recompress your work again – a large h.264 file is probably better than a compressed one.

Last, you do know that adobe is ‘renting’ CS6 for 30/month, right?

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Jeff Greenberg]

Eric,

That’d make perfect sense.

The youtube setting in 3.5 is set to 10mb/s
The youtube setting in 4.0 is set to 20mb/s

Meaning the youtube setting in version 4 should be 2x the size.

Remember that youtube will recompress everything you send it – so the bigger size (on your end) means it’s less compressed…and means a better quality from youtube.

[Jeff Greenberg]

I see you’re exporting a ProRes QuickTime to compressor.
Have you tried the “Share” send to compressor as a comparison (actually, I expect that to be even slower, but haven’t tested it.)

Out of curiosity, could you also run activity monitor to see how many of the processors are ‘working’ during the conversion?

[Jeff Greenberg]

There’s nothing to really sort out.

You’re trying to do a conversion with MPEG Streamclip to WMV; It uses QuickTime for this.

Apple doesn’t make a WMV component. If you see it there as a choice, you have to have Flip4Mac installed somehow on your machine. If you’ve paid for Flip4Mac, you have full WMV encoding. If you’re using the trial version (often installed to view WMV through quicktime) it has a limitation of 30 second encodes.

If you go to Flip4mac.com you can upgrade to the full version.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Jeff Greenberg]

Anna,

What are you trying to convert it to?

best,

Jeff

[Jeff Greenberg]

What did you find out about the Optimus Technology? I mean, I know what it does – why wouldn’t plugging it in make a difference?

Optimus was designed for better battery life; nVidia is who you go to for the gpu accerlation (Via CUDA.) There are some third parties that license cuda as well, but I’m told the performance isn’t as good as nVidias. I’d assume they do the same thing on laptops.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Jeff Greenberg]

Unless you’re over HD, you’ll only get 1/2 and 1/4.

If you’re working with After effects, either render as a editorial codec HD (such as ProRes or DNxHD), especially if you want to keep your alpha channel. Adobe Premiere Pro can dynamically link to AE – so you don’t need to render for Premiere Pro (from AE. You may want to render in Premiere Pro for playback.)

Also, an uncompressed AVI, will require a drive speed of around 100 MB/sec (over 800mb/s.). You’d need 4 of your drives RAIDed together to get that.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Jeff Greenberg]

Have you tried the Rolling shutter/warp stabilizer in CS6?

It should work (internally) as if the file was uncompressed.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Jeff Greenberg]

I never did ask. What format and how many streams of it are you trying to playback? Did dropping the quality help? Is it at 1/4?

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Jeff Greenberg]

An easy way to test the drive speed is with Black Magic or AJA’s disk test.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more