Best workflow for HD to DVD?

[dishan]

I have a concert recorded in AVCHD that I've edited and want to put on DVD as the final delivery format.

I know that in the past there has been a lot of talk of NLE's using poor bicubic resizing which actually makes the final product look worse than if it had been shot in SD to begin with. I've tried some of the tricks, including setting the Sony Sharpen filter on the clip to 0, but the quality was just OK compared to a clip I rendered out to HD and resized using VirtualDub and the Lanczos scaler to make it standard def.

To be fair, the clip out of VirtualDub was in Cineform and not MPEG2, so we aren't comparing Apples to Apples here. But they were both Standard Defintion, and the VirtualDub one looks worlds clearer.

I'm at a point now in which I'm trying to figure out what the culprit is out of Vegas- is it the poor scaling down to SD? Or is it the poor mpeg encoding? Or is Mpeg2 just bad no matter how I slice it? Or is it all 3?

I'm afraid if I render out this while 45 minute concert to a large AVI, then convert it with virtual dub, then encode again with Vegas, I might end up with something that wasted a ton of space and time and doesn't look THAT much better.

What is a preferred workflow to do this?

 

[dishan]

Just to add- I have Vegas 9c, and Adobe Production Studio CS5.5 (which means I have access to AME if that helps), as well as virtual dub. Any combination of these tools that I should use for the best workflow out of my Vegas timeline is welcome.

 

[David Jimerson]

I never used Vegas 9, but with Vegas 10 and above, I had no problem taking 1080 AVCHD footage and rendering straight out to MPEG-2 for DVD. Just had to make sure the Project properties are set to Best.

With Vegas 8, I exported from 1080 to 720 and then took those files and rendered them out to 480 MPEG-2 for DVD.

 

[dishan]

really? So you think Sony's Mpeg2 encoder is good enough to deliver right off the timeline? And the resizing of the footage too?

 

[David Jimerson]

Vegas's render quality is outstanding, and the scaler is, too. But that's why you want the project quality setting to be "best."

 

[dishan]

So all this stuff about needing some sort of crazy workflow to use Lanczos instead of bicubic resizing, how all NLEs have poor resizing, etc, doesn't apply to Vegas? Is Vegas really better than all the others??? Because this seems like it used to be a pretty well discussed topic.

When Adobe CS5.5 started pushing its new GPU acceleration, which supposedly finally employs Lanczos, it was heralded as a huge step forward in the land of NLEs. I'd be surprised if Vegas did this all along and no one spoke of it!

 

[KyleProhaska]

It depends on what you're compressing in I guess. If I'm using Adobe Media Encoder it still has that issue where it'll put black bars on the left and right of 16x9 video. They're small but it's an annoying bug. My only work around for the longest time (if I'm using AME to make the DVD MPEG2 that is), is to render out either an HD master then go to SD, or go straight to an SD file. However, I render it out to 720x480 with Prores as a selection. 720x480 is what the MPEG2 encoder is going to render it to anyway, so rendering out that well scaled but stretched version helps avoid that bug in AME. I don't render that SD file with an aspect ratio stretch built in because it makes it harder to QC the file afterward since it's already stretching it for you. I like to do it square pixels and let the MPEG2 encoder add in the aspect flag later.

That's the better workflow I've found at least. I like rendering out a nice HD master first and then doing an SD master and THEN going to DVD. Won't be economical for every project, but compiling everything out of the editor right to DVD has always been a pain for me.

 

[dishan]

It depends on what you're compressing in I guess. If I'm using Adobe Media Encoder it still has that issue where it'll put black bars on the left and right of 16x9 video. They're small but it's an annoying bug. My only work around for the longest time (if I'm using AME to make the DVD MPEG2 that is), is to render out either an HD master then go to SD, or go straight to an SD file. However, I render it out to 720x480 with Prores as a selection. 720x480 is what the MPEG2 encoder is going to render it to anyway, so rendering out that well scaled but stretched version helps avoid that bug in AME. I don't render that SD file with an aspect ratio stretch built in because it makes it harder to QC the file afterward since it's already stretching it for you. I like to do it square pixels and let the MPEG2 encoder add in the aspect flag later.

That's the better workflow I've found at least. I like rendering out a nice HD master first and then doing an SD master and THEN going to DVD. Won't be economical for every project, but compiling everything out of the editor right to DVD has always been a pain for me.

Interesting. But that's not my problem- my workaround for that is to nest the HD project into a new 720x480 timeline, and crop the frame to fit perfectly (loses a few pixels off the top) then render off that timeline. I was more concerned about the well documented issue that most NLEs have with resizing and poor mpeg2 compression from MainConcept. It would appear, however, that perhaps Vegas does not suffer from the same woes as other NLEs... http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/high-de...parison-nle-hd-sd-downconversion-quality.html

 

[David Jimerson]

So all this stuff about needing some sort of crazy workflow to use Lanczos instead of bicubic resizing, how all NLEs have poor resizing, etc, doesn't apply to Vegas? Is Vegas really better than all the others??? Because this seems like it used to be a pretty well discussed topic.

Well, I don't know exactly what "stuff" you're referring to, but Vegas has always done an excellent job at scaling. As I said, since Vegas 10, anyway, going from 1080 AVCHD to 480 MPEG-2 has been no problem at all.

When Adobe CS5.5 started pushing its new GPU acceleration, which supposedly finally employs Lanczos, it was heralded as a huge step forward in the land of NLEs. I'd be surprised if Vegas did this all along and no one spoke of it!

People only squalk when there's a problem. If it's not a problem, there's usually not a reason to say anything.

But I will say that in my experience, Vegas's rendering has been superior to many others', including Adobe Media Encoder's. (AME has improved over the years.)

 

[David Jimerson]

It depends on what you're compressing in I guess. If I'm using Adobe Media Encoder it still has that issue where it'll put black bars on the left and right of 16x9 video.

That's because SD 720x480 at a 1.21 pixel aspect ratio works out to 1.81:1, rather than the 1.78:1 of true 16:9, which HD is. The black bars are there because you rendered to a proportionally-wider format. SD widescreen is not true 16:9.

At least as late as Vegas 8, you had to crop manually to compensate for this, too. As I said, I never used 9, but as of 10, Vegas handles this automatically as well.

 

[dishan]

That's because SD 720x480 at a 1.21 pixel aspect ratio works out to 1.81:1, rather than the 1.78:1 of true 16:9, which HD is. The black bars are there because you rendered to a proportionally-wider format. SD widescreen is not true 16:9.

At least as late as Vegas 8, you had to crop manually to compensate for this, too. As I said, I never used 9, but as of 10, Vegas handles this automatically as well.

Right, so in version 9 and under (which I'm using), I just open a new project with DVD sized properties (720x480 widescreen), drag the VEG file of the project in question onto it, right click on the video in the timeline and hit "match output aspect" in the pan/crop window. Then render off this timeline.

The day I realized you can nest VEG files and treat timelines as footage was a very happy one indeed for me.