Best Consumer Video Editing Software for $100

[magillagorilla]

I wanted to thank everyone for all the help. Using the tricks I learned from this thread I have been very busy restoring my footage. I have had some OK success tweaking the color in VMS. It looks good for what it's worth to me. The biggest improvements were from the remove dirt and the proper deinterlace.

Question:

I am using a deinterlace that keeps all my fields and gives me 59.94fps, which looks great. My target playback device will be computer. I'm trying to look in to the future, where I doubt I'll be using optical media. Anyway..... I like the Main Concept H.264 (MP4) codec, very much. Usually with SD at 30fps I can live with 5-7Mbps using this codec. Now that I have doubled my frames, should I increase my bitrate? What settings is everyone else using?

[jagabo]

I use CRF=18 encoding (constant quality) in x264. That way I always get the quality I want regardless of the nature of the video.

[poisondeathray]

vegas doesn't have quality based rate control encoding with either vegas avc, or mainconcept avc

so magillagorilla - the bitrate you require will be dependent on the source complexity of the material. Noisy, lots of movement, handheld will require more bitrate for a certain level of "quality" than a tripod shot interview piece for example

you might be able frameserve out with debugmode frameserver (you can with the pro version, and there are several illustrated guides that show you how to set it up) , not sure if it works with the movie studio version

x264 is a much better encoder in very way possible than the bundled Mainconcept encoder

[magillagorilla]

I guess I'd like to stick with the codecs in VMS. The Main Concept looked good to me, is there a better codec in VMS? Also, assume my video is all like the one on this thread, very noisy, badly shot hand held footage at 720x480p 59.94fps. Under an H.264 codec, choose your container and bit rate.

Right now I am running 9Mbps MAX, 7Mbps AVERAGE, 2PASS in Main Concept. There is some shuttering and I am wondering if I am bit starving my footage or maybe my face has been too close to the monitor for too long. My perspective is that my Canon camcorder does 1920x1080p 30fps at 17Mbps in AVCHD (another h.264 flavor). So 720x480 being roughly 1/4-1/3 the resolution but at double the frame rate puts me in the 7-9Mbps range for the same data preservation. Or am I totally F'd in my logic?


ADD:
I guess what I'm trying to figure out is where the point of diminishing returns is. I could throw 30Mbps at the footage but that would be a waste or storage. I guess I could just run 10Mbps at CBR, this would be overkill for even the worst SD footage ta 30fps. The double frame rate is throwing me off a little.

[poisondeathray]

That might be a decent rough starting point. It depends how noisy (and how well you cleaned it up), how badly shot etc...

On average , in "normal" bitrate ranges , you need ~20-30% higher bitrates with the full featured mainconcept sdk (not the gimped version in vegas) for equivalent quality produced by x264 . In low bitrate ranges, the difference is much higher

One huge benefit of qaulity based encoding, is you set the quality, and presto, the encoder allocates the appropriate bitrate. No guessing. It's also 1 pass instead of 2 (faster)

[magillagorilla]

I think I may try to frame serve and check out x264. If I can get debugmode frameserver to work what do you recomend serving it to for x264 encode?

[poisondeathray]

you can use a gui like megui , staxrip, ripbot, handbrake etc...

the thing is you don't have control over the options in mainconcept avc ; you're limited in setting b-frames, gop size etc...

e.g. for 60p material, usually you would double the GOP size (e.g. for a 1 sec GOP would be 60 for 60p material, not 30), but the settings are hardcoded and not user accessible in vegas - so this leads to very inefficient lower quality encodes at a given bitrate compared to x264. There are many other things like adaptive quantization, psy settings that give x264 encodes higher quality.

But there maybe too many options for the beginner with x264. So you can start with using simple presets that the GUI's offer, and once you learn more you can tweak the settings later

Here is a guide for vegas and debugmode, you probably have to modify a few things, but it should get you started in how to get the basic setup started
http://www.bubblevision.com/underwater-video/Vegas-YouTube-Vimeo.htm

[magillagorilla]

I keep seeing claims that debugmode will work with VMS but I can't seem to get it to work. I install it and it does not become an option on my "render as" selections. Any help?

[jagabo]

Just save as HuffYUV or Lagarith AVI. Then use a simple AviSource("filename.avi") script to feed x264 or a GUI front end like Xvid4PSP.

[poisondeathray]

Check the install path

See this guide for vegas x64
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/332602-%5BGuide%5D-Using-DMFS-on-Windows7-64bit-%28...ro-10-64bit%29

[magillagorilla]

OK, I kinda got it to work. More importantly I tried x264. It cut my file size down about 33% but I'm not too sure what it's doing. I had the quality thing set to 20 on Handbrake. Only change I made was to set he frame size to 720x480. Handbrake wanted to crop it to something weird (like 720x458) I think because of the black border I put on the footage. Now perceptually it looks like the MainConcept version I ran looks better but I also had it cranked up to 9Mbps. The x264 version looked a teenyweeny smudgier but was 1/3 more effecient. I guess with some tweeking it would look great with smaller file size. The encode time for Handbrake was about 4x faster (bonus).

I will read up on Handbrake settings, any pointers/good places to read about it? I am also interested in setting the GOP to 60 for my footage but how to do that didn't seem obvious.

[poisondeathray]

I don't use handbrake , but I would see if you can disable the crop and set the proper AR

1sec GOP size is arbitrary value for PC playback. You can use larger GOP length (ideal and will give you better compression ratio, especially for higher FPS material because there are more similar frames in a given timeframe). The IDR frames are dynamically placed ; the "GOP length" is the maximum interval. So you don't always get a fixed GOP length. IDR frames are adaptively placed. The default maximum interval for x264 is 250 , I don't know if handbrake uses different default values

There is a lot to learn about encoding and preprocessing. There is no simple guide. Certain settings are better for certain types of material.
http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings

If the "20" value wasn't "good enough" , use a better setting . Once you figure out the "quality" value that you're satisfied with you can apply that to everything and the same average quality will be achieved (on complex content this will result in higher bitrates, on simple content this will result in lower bitrates). I can't recall if handbrake uses CRF or a different measurement. In x264, a lower CRF results in higher quality/higher bitrate. Handbrake might use an inverse scale (not sure)