[Scott Morrison]

Thanks for the settings Michael. I applied them and cannot wait to see the results. But you didn’t mention White Balance. Do you make any changes to this setting as well?

Cheers.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

You might try https://www.freeplaymusic.com

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks for the response, but I think you misunderstood. I already use Media Encoder to pre-render H.264 out to Uncompressed AVI prior to using the footage in AE. JPEG would work fine, I’m sure, but I have the drive space so AVI works fine.

My question was whether CS5.5 does any better job working with H.264 natively than CS5 does. If so, it may alleviate the need for the pre-render step (or “transcode” as you call it) prior to using the footage in AE.

Anyone?

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

I had the same issue, but a laptop just wouldn’t work for the reason John mentioned. Instead, I purchased one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E78UQY

Works great, but you’ll neeed a shoe adapter or some other way to hold it (I used an Israeli Arm from BHPhoto). Have fun!

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks Greg,

I had similar settings, but this does not address my questions which is how to create the M4V file WITHOUT having a separate audio file.

What were your Multiplexing settings?

I’m not sure if this is relevant, but I am running CS5 on a Windows 7 machine. Does CS5 encode differently on a Mac?

Anyone?

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Alex,

I have the same issue, but after researching, don’t think there is any easy solution. Basically, until PPro incorporates scripting support (if ever), then it must be done manually.

Sorry for the bad news.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

I believe I’ve solved the issue. By taking the suggestion to change to CBR at 8,000,000 rate AND by changing the project settings to “best quality” and 32 bit (thanks for that Dave), I re-rendered and was very happy to see the quality improved tremendously.

Further comparison seems to have each rendering between the two packages on par with each other, and file sizes are similar as well.

I was still surprised to see the render times for Vegas drastically faster than PPRo. For my small 1 minute clip, here’s what I saw:

PPro – 5 minutes and 12 seconds
Vegas – 1 minute and 33 seconds

That is an incredible difference. Hats off to Sony for an efficient render engine. That alone nudges me back towards Vegas, in addition to the scripting support which PPRo has none of.

Again, I appreciate all the help.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Also, I wanted to mention that I tried using the default VBR settings in PPro and changed Vegas VBR settings to match:

Min – 2,800,000
Target – 5,000,000
Max – 7,000,000

Just for this test, I used those same exact settings in Vegas and the result still looks terrible from Vegas…same “jaggies”. I am trying to do a 1:1 comparison, but Vegas keeps coming up short in terms of quality.

Interesting is that the resulting .mpg filesizes are nearly identical from both packages. Vegas does render MUCH more quickly, however.

Any other ideas? Thanks again for the help.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks for the link and advice Mike. But if you set your VBR to what you specified, did you use that number used for the Maximum, Average or Minimum?

Thanks again.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

John,

Following your instructions, as soon as I slide the switch from Auto to Manual, the “A” indication disappears from all indicators (unlike what you said). It doesn’t seem to work as you described.

Any idea what I am doing wrong? Sorry to be a bother.

-Scott

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn