John Rofrano
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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The key number with VBR is the Average bitrate. This says that on average, use 6MBps. It doesn’t matter how low the Low is because if it can’t represent the frame with that little amount of bits it won’t. Telling it not to go above 9.5Mbps is within the DVD spec and I would only expect that to happen for a brief moment if the overall video is to maintain a 6Mbps average.
It’s a balancing act for the encoder. That’s why 2-Pass gives better results. It lets the encoder go through the video and determine where it needs the bits, then it optimizes a plan for using the available bits most effectively, and then it encodes using the plan. You might want to try using 2-pass encoding and see if your video looks better but it takes twice as long (as the name implies).
CBR is great when disc space is not an issue because each frame gets the same amount of bits whether it needs them or not but I wouldn’t set the CBR above 8.5Mbps because some older DVD players have trouble with really high bitrates. They should work but some don’t. Why tempt fate?
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Boris Graffiti is an excellent text plug-in that you should look at. I use Boris RED all of the time which includes Boris Graffiti and Boris FX plus some more Boris Continuum Complete filters. I use Boris RED in some way on almost all of my projects.
proDAD makes a text plug-in call HeroGlyph which is rather nice. Those are about the only two plug-ins I know of. All the rest are stand-alone applications that require rendering, exporting, and importing, and generally disrupt your workflow.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
You need to leave the first project open. So open one instance of Vegas to to the copy and a second instance of Vegas to do the paste. Unlike other NLE’s you can have as many instances of Vegas open up as your system resources will allow.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
You can’t. What you would need to do is render the DVD menu fading to black in Vegas, then link to that little video from the button and link the video to the beginning to your movie.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Is your rendered video 24p? I see you mentioned PAL. If this is 25p footage it will always need to be recompressed because 25p is NOT part of the DVD spec. The only progressive footage can be placed on a DVD without adding pulldown is 24p. Everything else must be telecined to 60i or converted to 50i to be compliant.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Also you do not have to render uncompressed. The Quicktime Animation codec will render 32-bit with alpha channel and will result in much smaller files. (and for future reference so you don’t confuse people, you have Movie Studio 9… Vegas 9 doesn’t exist yet)
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> The “No recompression”-thing seems totally pointless – even for people with other cameras. If the cutting is made in Vegas that is. Would you agree?
“No Recompression” isn’t only a feature of MPEG-2. It also works for DV AVI’s. Since DV AVI has a full frame every frame it is not affected by this and works extremely well. So it’s not totally pointless, it’s just that editing DVD MPEG-2 doesn’t lend itself as well to this concept.
You might try changing your cuts to crossfades. This will allow the encoder to gradually change from one scene to the next and it should look similar to what you had before.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
You don’t have to drop any money on infinitiCAM first. There is a 15-day free trial so you can work with it for two weeks on your project and see if you like it before you buy it.
Here is a quick video from infinitiCAM page on the VASST site that shows you how to use it:
View infinitiCAM in action! (wmv file)
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> It seems absurd that now – when I finally know the right bitrate – that same bitrate should totally mess up parts that were ok when the bitrate-setting was wrong! Any suggestions?
Perhaps you didn’t understand my explanation. When the bitrate was wrong, the file was being re-encoded so that the delta and predictive frames were similar to the I-frames (because they ALL got rebuilt). When you splice a long GOP format together, and you don’t cut at an I-frame, you throw too much data at the encoder than it can represent as just a delta from the previous frame so it breaks apart for a second. I don’t know how else to explain it.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
What you are seeing is caused by the way MPEG-2 is encoded. Remember the GOP I talked about? That stands for Group Of Pictures. In your case, a group of 12 pictures where only 1 contains all of the information to build a complete frame. This is called an I-Frame. Then there are 2 B-Frames which are deltas from the I-Frame and one P-Frame which is a predictive frame following the format IBBPBBPBBPBB then it repeats with another I-Frame and so on. When you cut at any location except an I-Frame, the data change is so dramatic that the delta and predictive frames fall apart until the next I-Frame is encountered. Unfortunately, there is no way in Vegas to know where the I-Frames are.
There is a tool called Womble (I used it before to determine the data-rate of your video) that does a great job and cuts-only MPEG editing. You might want to try the trial and see if it gives you better results.
Of course… buying a camera that shoots in a format made for editing is the ultimate solution. I know I keep repeating that but you are doing a lot of workarounds and limiting your potential because of the format you are using.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com