Thanks for the tip! I'll give the frameserve a try.

Mark

Commercial DVDs often have lowpass filtering applied to the video, throwing out the finest detail that can't easily be seen on a normal TV. That leaves a lot more room for the rest of the video.

its not so much the encoder as the quality of the source files ..

Would someone be kind enough to explain what this frameserve thing is? I have no idea.
Tor

Frameserver is a plugin for vegas or other nhl that will create a temporary AVI file and serve the footage from timeline to another program. This eliminates the need to render a file to provide imput to an encoder.

Thanks. I suppose you then must encode in something other than Vegas?
I also suppose that if you did render to avi first and then encoded on whatever it is you use, the results would be identical?
Tor

Where can one find this wonderous frameserver? :)

http://www.debugmode.com/pluginpac/

or, more specifically, http://www.debugmode.com/pluginpac/frameserver.php

Mark

Just my two cents...

It seems some are focused on the "quality" of the encoder and I'll bet give slight if any attention to routine level and color correction, something now Vegas excells at. A little extra time fine tuning your project (in my opinion) goes far further than fussing over this encoder does this, another encoder does that and endless fiddling with bitrate adjustments.

I always thought my DVDs looked technically a lot worse than any commercial DVD, so I tried an experiment to see how good I could make it look.

Almost all comercial DVDs come from 24 fps film, which is of course not interlaced like most video. It is scanned at high resolution, color-corrected and downsampled to 720x480 (NTSC) for MPEG2 encoding and DVD authoring.

I wanted to see how good TMPGEnc could look with high-quality input. I made some time-lapse videos of landscapes made by stacking together a series of frames from my Canon D60 6-Mpixel digital SLR. I used AVISYNTH and VirtualDub to make a very clean, uncompressed 720x480 AVI at 24 fps. I fed this to TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to encode a 23.976 fps progressive-scan MPEG2 with 8000kbps CBR. I also tried CCE Basic encoder. (commercial DVD releases seem to have bitrates about 4500 kbps).

The result? Try as I might, even watching slow motion and freeze frames, zooming into the image 4x on my standalone DVD player, I cannot find any flaw in the DVD image quality. Technically, the image does look "as good as" a commercial DVD. Artistically, it's not too exciting to look at, but I can't blame the encoder there :-). Basically if you start with excellent source material, I have found TMPGEnc or CCE is good enough to do the job.

If I take my V-4 captured file AVI and put it directly into DVDA the result is
absolutely incredable. If I encode the V-4 AVI file to CCE 267 (mpg) and then to DVDA the result is the same.
If I render from the timeline then to DVDA (mpg) the result is just OK.
Haven't tried it in V4.0c. The AVI captured files were from Beta SP (film conversion) and some old VHS wedding videos. Anything that starts out digital is always great
from the timeline. (XL-1s)

JJK

In an endless search to fix another problem (fixed), I did come across an interesting outcome. I thought that maybe the answer lay in the fact that DVDA's encoding was the problem so I encoded with the MC standalone, winding up the motion search, no increase in bit rate from 6,000,000 vbr and a few other small tweaks. Quality improved considerably, but the menu which was encoded with DVDA still contained a fair degree of motion in the titles and thumbnails, this was accentuated by the fact that I had a textured motion background. Food for thought in how DVDA allows its users access to adjust settings or maybe redo some of the default settings. Things can be definitley improved.

I think the test of a good encoder is not the fact that it can handle perfect input images well, but instead that it can handle crappy input without artifacts.

We are talking real world here, and when i try and encode an interlaced avi taken from a 10 year old VHS tape, ideally i just want the encoder to convert it to mpeg2 without introducing any artifacts. THIS IS THE REAL TEST OF A GOOD ENCODER.

Im NOT suggesting for a second that the encoder make the video image better than it was before, thats not an encoders job. I just want it to spit out what i feed it in. And how poorly a lot of encoders handle this when youre original footage is from video. Macroblocks and color scrolling abounds. Even from VHS which is a low res medium, different encoders mess with the sharpness too. Its a wild difference.

Im just trying to transfer my ageing VHS collection to DVDr, and for most of us wanting to do the same, encoders sure handle things differently at this end of the input quality scale to what they do when the input image is extremely high q.

For the record, in my tests Mainconcept handles low quality VHS transfers partically badly...

Blackout