Terje A. bergesen
Forum Replies Created
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The current state of H.264 encoders is not a happy one. I would like to move a lot of my stuff to H.264, but none of the codecs are 100%. Apples Quicktime 7 is about 4% I’d say. A sad thing indeed that only rarely works. I have so far encoded to DV-AVI from Vegas and then re-encoded to H.264 using Nero Digital. This works well apart from the fact that Nero has a horrible (probably “user friendly”) user interface where it is almost impossible to chose the settings for your video the way you want them.
I was looking forward to the Main Concept encoder, and there are good things about it. On my AMD 64×2 it is fast for an H.264 encoder. I was less than impressed with the quality however. Comparing a DV clip encoded with Nero and the same with MC, the Nero clip is significantly better than the MC clip. Color quality and detail is much better, and the Nero clip is 1 meg smaller.
Oh well, there will be improvements going forward I expect. In the mean time it will be Vegas -> DV-AVI -> Nero -> H.264 for me.
I have An illustration here: https://terje.bivrost.com/mc_vs_nero.html
People may of course disagree with my opinion 🙂
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Terje A. Bergesen -
For video editing, if you have 1G of RAM and reasonably resent hardware, the one thing that matters is CPU speed. You need ample HD space, but anything that is sold today will essentially do. SATA is the way to go. Memory will not hurt, but it may not have a significant impact on your performance.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
Not only should it be avoided, with the astonishingly bad response I am getting from Apple, I’d say stay away from that company all together. If their support is anything to go by, and the quality of QT the same, I’d say they are generally cr@p. Compare the two support problems I have had to deal with lately:
Issue 1, Company Apple, product QT 7. Problems:
– It doesn’t read DV-AVI files in 16:9 format properly.
– It crashes 99% of the time part way through the encoding process
– It is astonishingly slowSend email to Apple support, get answer back after 48 hours saying essentially: RTFM and RTF Website. Answer back that I have, and that the problems with their software persists no matter what I read. Apple responds that they are sorry for my problems. Have a nice day.
Issue 2, Company Microsoft, product Windows installer. Problem:
– Latest version of Windows installer will not install.Send email to Microsoft. Get a call back in about 2 hours. Asks me to connect to their website. Takes a look at my problem. Asks if I will allow him access to my PC. I say yes. He takes control while I watch exactly what he does. He fixes one or two registry settings. Asks me to re-boot. Problem solved.
If support is anything to go by, Microsoft still has a glorious future ahead of it, and Apple is doomed.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
You are probably SOL when it comes to finding a firewire driver for DOS. If your PC is a desktop, your Firewire drive is actually an ATA drive in an enclosure. You should be able to remove the HD from it’s enclosure and install it as an internal harddrive.
This requires you open the HD enclosure and the PC it self. It may also require you purchase an ATA cable if there are no available internal cables.
If you are uncomfortable with gutting your HD and your PC, you may want to leave this to an expert.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
Vegas can render H.264, select Sony AVC/AAC in the Render As dialog box. For some reason the H.264 rendering in Vegas is limited to max 1.4M/s of video and a few other restrictions. I have no idea why Sony would limit it like this, but there you go.
Installing QT v 7 will not let you render from Vegas using the new H.264 rendering engine in QT. I assume you got the pro version, which means you can render directly from QT. From Vegas you render as DV-AVI open in the QT player, and then chose File -> Export and chose your settings there.
I wouldn’t recommend it though. QT 7 is, in short, pure and utter garbage. It is so amazingly unstable that I have only been able to creat a single H.264 movie with it, and that was a very short one. All the other times it has crashed half way through or less. That is painful, and doubly so because the QT H.264 encoder is the slowest piece of software ever written by man. It is astonishing that a company like apple will release this junk.
To add insult to injury, QT 7 doesn’t understand when a DV-AVI is in widescreen perspective, it thinks that all DV-AVI movies are in 4:3 perspective. I shoot exclusively in 16:9, and QT won’t even read my DV-AVI files properly. All other software on my computer does. I can also render to 16:9 MPEG-2 from Vegas and QT will then open it in 16:9.
I would recommend you, as a PC user, demand your money back from Apple. They should not be allowed to get away with such bullshit (pardon my french).
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Terje A. Bergesen -
I am an old ULead MS Pro user. I started out on Vegas because it has a couple of features I wanted which were not available in MSP. I started out playing around, there were quite a few things that were different, but I quickly got a feel for the UI.
I discovered that when I moved from MSP to Vegas, there were very few things I was used to in MSP that I tried to do in Vegas. In other words, it didn’t seem that a lot of the stuff I did in MSP was automatic/spinal/second nature to me. The other week I had to do a few things in MSP in some old projects, and I found my self pushing buttons, searching for tools etc all the time. In 9 months a lot of what I do in Vegas is “spinal”, and going back is not easy.
To me Vegas is very intuitive and work-flow is much better than with MSP. Get a book or two if you like to learn that way.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
The strange thing is that the Cow remembers which posts I’ve already read, and it knows my time zone, so it does sort of know who I am, but no red name till I reset cookies.
I don’t think the Cow tracks which posts you have read, the browser does through your history. What seems to happen is that your browser expires your cookies after some time frame. Check your settings for how long your browser stores your cookie.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
The easiest, if you have the budget, is to get the movie upgrade to Google Earth. Other than that Camtasia would be an option, but as you say, it’ll be hard to get the proper frame rate.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
To me the best thing I ever did with my digital video was to upgrade to a three chip camcorder. I got the Panasonic 400, which seems out of your price range. It is really good camcorder, rivaling far more expensive offers.
If about $1200 is out of your budget I would look into the less expensive 3-chip camcorders. I don’t think anyone out there today has anything close to what Panasonic has for the low-end, look at the Panasonic PV-GS150 and 250. I seriously doubt you can get anything of a similar quality at this price.
https://www.camcorderinfo.com/ is a good source of information.
It would seem I am partial to Panasonic, which actually isn’t the case. I would much prefer a Sony HD camcorder or the Canon GL series, but they are way to pricey for me 🙂
The only advice I would above and beyond that is to stay away from, at all cost, anything that has a CD, DVD or similar storage media. The DVD camcorders store in highly compressed MPEG-2, making it more or less non-editable.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
Works fine in Firefox here, and I would never go back to IE, IE isn’t really a browser it is a spy-ware and virus delivery vehicle.
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Terje A. Bergesen