Why im Going Back To Premier

Reanimator wrote on 12/13/2001, 10:37 PM
One word... Quality Out. I have rendered about a dozen projects now in SVCD & DVD format. The quality out is good but not good enough for me. TMG & CCE both produce a better quality picture. I view most of my footage on a Hi Def 57" Sony TV so im real picky. Artifacts become instantly apparent at that size. All my encoded footage using main concepts encoder Has shown some degree of motion artifacts on it. I have played with the settings as much as the encoder allows and still have yet to get a perfect encode. One of my secondary PC's is actually directly hooked to the TV allowing me to produce & view footage prior to burning the actual DVD ( No bad footage burned ). Dont get me wrong VV3 is a very inovative and easy to use program. I do like it. But Premier still has the major advantage of being able to frame serve to a high quality encoder. I fear VV3 is intentended for the masses and or the casual home user. With out frame serve ability you are limited to the output produced by the main concept encoder. If any of feel im wrong on the quality issue feel free to download a copy of TMG 2.0 ( Its free ) and judge for your selves. As for me... Im back to premier and frame serving.

Good Luck All
Reanimator

Comments

SHTUNOT wrote on 12/14/2001, 3:13 AM
If you obviously have both programs then why don't you edit in Vegas...render to avi...then bring it into premier to be encoded with whatever it was you said. You sound as if you've got a pretty powerful setup already so the extra work will balance out how quickly it got done "because" of using Vegas. If you disapprove then why don't you post an ideal list of things you want the encoder to do. I'm still a little in the dark at what your doing and for what. What burner do you have if you don't mind me asking. I need an education in this area before I upgrade to it. Later.
sreams wrote on 12/14/2001, 5:55 AM
Vegas Video can use any encoder that you install in Windows. If someone makes a better MPEG2 encoder for Windows, use it. Yes, the MainConcept encoder is included with VV3, but VV3 itself is not to blame for the quality of the external encoder you end up using.

-S
wvg wrote on 12/14/2001, 8:33 AM
If there is one failing with Sonic Foundy products you can point to it is in the encoding to MPEG-1. A shame, considering what an otherwise outstanding editor it is. Still not a real problem... just a minor change in how you may want to finish up your videos.

I've been using Video Factory for over a year, not satisifed with the built-in Ligos encoder (yuck) I've used TMPGEnc to render to MPEG. Together, you DO get outstanding results.
Reanimator wrote on 12/14/2001, 10:57 AM
Lets start with my hardware. Abit raid board, 1.1 Athlon, Radeon AIW, Pinnacle DV500 Capture board, 756 Megs Mem, Sb Live.

So this means my footage comes in in a native Pinnacle DV format. Why would I want to degrade my original footage by rerendering it in VV3 just to Rerender it a second time in a different encoder? Then there is the time associated with this. 8 mins footage to rerender back to an avi takes about 1 1/2 hour on my PC. Add to this TMG time and this is taking way too long.

Here is how i usually do it. Footage comes in off of pinnacle card. I pull it over into premier. Do the grunt work. Frame serve out to TMG for SVCD or CCE for DVD's. One other feature premier has that I really like is the abilty to batch convert. so if I have several projects to do, i wait till bedtime then autoconvert them all.

I wish Sonic would visit some of the forums out there to see what folks are doing. Check out dooms or flexion or the SVCD forums. The ability to frame serve is premiers saving grace. Its the only prog I have found that allows Frame serving.

As far as my DVD burner? I went with a Panasonic LF - D311 As low as $340.00 Check Pricewatch.com. Its DVD-R and DVD-RAM. After comparing this drive with the pioneer A03. I found the price cheaper and the ram drive ability great for storing original AVI's. The A03's DVD-RW format is not readable in standalone DVD players ( From the posts I read ) making that pretty much worthless.

Reanimator
SonyEPM wrote on 12/14/2001, 11:33 AM
If you are dependent on the Pinnacle codec (which you are with ther Pinnacle DV500), Premiere is probably your best bet.
wvg wrote on 12/14/2001, 11:48 AM
What is Pinnacle's "native" format that you are using?


Reanimator wrote on 12/14/2001, 2:58 PM
Just for the fun of it I decided to try a rerender into an AVI format. I used both Stills & captured DV. The results are as follows. Im still getting artifacts in both the stills and captured DV. Its not as bad as when rendering into Mpeg but still noticible on my monitor. To best way to describe it would be as a transparent particle buzz. It occurrs in both the stills, transitions, pans and DV footage. Im wondering at this point if its VV3's entire rendering engine and not just the mpeg portion of it? If anyone else is having this problem lets hear about it.

Again I would like to stress this is a great program. What it took me an hour to do in premier took me 15 minutes in VV3. Its easy to use, intuitive and has Real Time effects.

As for the pinnacle DV. Its pinnacles DV format. I purchased a DV 500 Capture card for $800.00 about 14 months ago. Came bundled with premier and several other minor programs. Give's you the ability to do real time effects and capture footage into pinnacles DV format. They claim its superior ( Dont know about that though ).

Reanimator
SonyEPM wrote on 12/14/2001, 3:28 PM
Reanimator: Have you tried "Best" rendering quality?
HPV wrote on 12/14/2001, 7:25 PM
Just for the fun of it I decided to try a rerender into an AVI format. I used both Stills & captured DV. The results are as follows. Im still getting artifacts in both the stills and captured DV.
------------------
Sounds like the Pinnacle DV codec might be causing this. In Vegas 3, you need to go to Options/Prefs and put a check in the box at the "ignore 3rd party DV codecs".

Craig H.
SHTUNOT wrote on 12/14/2001, 7:40 PM
I agree with HPV on this.Are yousure that you've checked your settings entirely? I'm curious on hearing a response from the guy from mainconcept. Usually he's pretty quick at getting an answer out there. If anything why don't you email them as well to see if you could resolve these issues. I wonder if they have something in the works to address this[ if it is at all a problem at there end of course].Later.
MCTech wrote on 12/14/2001, 10:10 PM
Hi,

I have to say I'm very surprised to hear any complaints about motion artifacts. That's just something we don't hear -- most people seem to be blown away by the quality of the MainConcept MPEG encoder.

However, if you also get artifacts in AVI, I'd say it could be the source codec (Pinnacle DV) causing this. When rendering to a DV-AVI you generally shouldn't see any artifacts at all. This points to something else.

Can you try capturing from an OHCI-compliant FireWire card and see what the results are?

MainConcept Tech Support
sreams wrote on 12/14/2001, 10:20 PM
Again... it's the encoded, not Vegas Video per se that is at fault. Find a better MPEG encoder and all is well.
sreams wrote on 12/14/2001, 10:22 PM
What are all of you talking about? The Pinnacle DV codec works just fine natively in VV3. You can open Pinnacle DV files directly... andyou can render directly to them. Are you all using the same DV500 I am?
sreams wrote on 12/14/2001, 10:24 PM
Have you tried rendering to from VV3 -directly- to a Pinnacle DV encoded AVI? The Pinnacle encoder/decoder works in VV3, you know.
Reanimator wrote on 12/15/2001, 12:07 AM
I have been playing with various settings through out the afternoon, including different codecs. Quality has been set to best from the beginning. Ignore third party codecs was also checked & then unchecked during the testing. I even went as far as making an uncompressed avi to check quality against that ( Ya...It took up alot of space ). I just finnished cutting a chunk of footage thats shows the pulsating transparent artifacts on it. File size is about 3 megs. Footage was rendered using dvd standard 6k CBR. The footage shows the transition between two of my bryce images and then a few seconds of the second image. First image looks great, transition is fair, second image looks horrible. Both images are the same size and in Jpeg format. Will post a link as soon as I can. Next two days are working days for me and will allow for little play time. I will check back though.
MCTech wrote on 12/15/2001, 12:43 PM
Can you send us the images and tell us which transition you used? If so, please send to:

usa@mainconcept.com

We'd like to see what our results are with the same material.

Bear in mind that by converting images to JPEG you have already introduced some degradation which might affect how the images are rendered. When using a 3D program I always export in a lossless format if I'll be editing further.

Best Regards,
MainConcept Tech Support
wvg wrote on 12/15/2001, 2:55 PM
"I view most of my footage on a Hi Def 57" Sony TV so im real picky. Artifacts become instantly apparent at that size."

Have you set the aspect ratio using the 16x9 preset available off the event pan crop icon at the last frame of each event?

I also just tried dragging some of the TIFF format images I made in Bryce and Poser and they all render very high quality using the 1 MBPS RM template. I'm waiting for the boxed version of VV3 so can't export to any MPEG directly right now, however rendering to AVI and finishing up in TEMPGnc using just the standard NTSC VCD template the images and transitions do NOT pick up any artifacting.
FadeToBlack wrote on 12/15/2001, 4:38 PM
InformationSponge wrote on 12/16/2001, 8:24 AM
>> The A03's DVD-RW format is not readable in standalone DVD players ( From the posts I read ) making that pretty much worthless.
Not true. I've played DVD-RWs in several different DVD players (Sony, Panasonic). If you find one that it won't play in, just burn a DVD-R instead -- they are write once but tend to be more compatible with the more finicky of players.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/16/2001, 6:04 PM
Ahh. . . a return to the basics! How refreshing it is to have someone bring us back to earth after such a flight of fancy, albeit a misguided one.

Thank you, Gary!
Reanimator wrote on 12/16/2001, 9:57 PM
GG

I'm going to not try and get into a flaming war with you but... I did post that I have a pc connected to my HDTV. Im not going to bore you or bother to educate you on what this means, but my output to my HDTV is BETTER than most Pro scan DVD players costing thousands of dollars. Don't believe me...lol Take a visit to the Home Theater Computers section of this web site ( http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ ). After lurking and reading about this exciting ( May take a while ) new technology feel free to follow up with an updated post as to what resolutions I may be using to produce a high quality image on a big screen TV. And then again tell me how bad big screens really are. And lastly... how bad can a line doubled image that starts at 720x480 Be?

Anyways... Im going to mail in a copy of quality im getting frame serving and quality im getting in VV3.

Well im off to work again ( gets out his whip and starts whacking the citrix servers )

Reanimator
FadeToBlack wrote on 12/16/2001, 10:12 PM
FadeToBlack wrote on 12/16/2001, 10:14 PM
wvg wrote on 12/16/2001, 10:35 PM
Thank you Reanimator. With your attitude you gave me a reason to see how well the 'ignore this user' feature works in the forum. LOL!