Video Studio 9

[schmosef]

Worth the upgrade from VS8?

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup. Lotsa new stuff, and some not listed on the "new features" page. One great example is the new frame accurate (with zoom & scroll) keyframer I mentioned in another post. It also has some nice new wizards, 16:9 for video and DVD menus, Dolby 2/0 audio, WMV_HD export capability, some new filters and effects and several other nice new wrinkles.

Dr. Mordrid

[schmosef]

Can I install the demo for version 9 in parallel to my retail copy of version 8?

[Dr Mordrid]

That I don't know for certain, but I see no reason why not. I have systems with 2 versions of PhotoImpact, for what that's worth.

Dr. Mordrid

[DarrenD]

Hi Dr Mordrid

I have MSP 7 VE DVD (bought with ADS Pyro Pro-DVD on your advice) and can only use the MSP 7.01 patch (not the 7.2 or 7.3). Is it worth me downgrading (?) to VS9 or sticking with what I've got MSP 7.01 VE DVD + DVDSWS Full 2.231 and hoping for a "$99 upgrade to MSP 7 with free upgrade to MSP 8" so I get to the full MSP 7/8, like Ulead did just before MSP 7.

My needs are moderate. Sitting with my wife editing our camcorder clips of our kids we seem to be just loading a clip into the Source window, pressing F5 at start/stop points, then cutting by cue, then deleting every other cut clip, i.e. the bad bits. Thus, our DVD will be straight cuts, no transitions. Sometimes I have put a 3 second fade to black transition. Then creatiing a 6000-CBR (can't do 2 pass VBR as I don't have MSP 7.2 patch) MPEG-2 file that I load into DVDWS. Now I have the full version of DVDWS it is happy to import the scenes as chapters (my old DVDWS 1.3 SE would stop once it got to the 20th chapter). I would then delete some of the scenes as each cut is classed as a scene, even though I would have several cuts in what I would call a scene.

Can VS9, when creating an MPEG-2 file, define what will become a scene? This would be useful, i.e. if I had a birthday party and I make 9 cuts so I have 5 good bits and 4 bad bits and string the good bits together I would like to be able to say "scene at the start" and also "scene on 4th good bit" since that is the birthday cake part. With MSP I get scenes at all 5 good bit starts. OK, I can delete them in DVDWS but if I make a slight change to the clips and re-create the MPEG-2 file I have to delete the extra scenes each time I import into DVDWS. If MSP could do this by itself (by me using cue points on the 2 that I want) it would be great.

Sorry for the long post.

[Dr Mordrid]

I'd hold off and stick with MediaStudio for now.

Currently MSPro doesn't have scene flags you can set and have them recognized by DVDWS. That's something many of us have been pushing for the next version.

Since scenes are typically at a straight cut or fade to black I'd set 'em up and save each as a separate project file ending at the cut or the end of the FTB.

Once they're set up and saved do a batch encode to get the final MPEG-2 files for inclusion in your DVDWS project as scenes. Then it'll be easier to set up a scene menu.

I'd reconsider using CBR. It uses too many bits during quiet scenes and doesn't really improve action scenes as much as you'd think. VBR is a better choice 99% of the time.

Dr. Mordrid

[DarrenD]

Thanks for the advice. Pity you can't say how long I need to hold on for though (NDA and all that).

I am lost as to your use of separate projects; if you would care to elaborate. One idea I had, however, was...

Once I have my 5 good bits as 5 separate entries on the timeline butted up to each other (by finding/deleting blank timeslots [the deleted bad bits]) to get just the 2 cues that I require at the start of the 1st and 4th bits I could create a video file of that track using smart render which should just copy the 5 bits to a single AVI file (I am currently working on a G400-TV .AVI captured with AVI-IO using the standard MJPEG compressor within DirectX). Then I could replace the 5 clips with this joined clip and then add the cue where the 4th clip would have started. I have not played around with this idea fully but it should work in principle, or am I missing something? How I add the 4th clip cue point is probably a case of pen/paper recording the time, deleting all 5 clips, inserting the new AVI file and putting the 4th clip cue in again referring to the pen/paper records. The smart render should not cause any quality loss and I get the cues that I want. Does that seem reasonable?

As to my CBR/VBR issue I am quite happy to waste some space on my DVDs since they will form a continuous stream of about 50 overall; they will not be "Christmas 2004" and another one for "School Play 2005", but simply "Disc 1 - date 1 to date 2", "Disc 2 - date 2 to date 3" and so on. Will VBR always be as good as CBR? It's annoying that I have the 2 pass VBR in DVDWS 2.231 but not in MSP 7.01 (although I guess DVDWS suffers from the 20% overshoot that MSP 7.2 had?). I don't really want to encode in DVDWS since I have the template set to a low CBR for menus with a low DD audio setting. If I encoded in DVDWS it would make my videos worse quality or increase the settings to get back to good videos but use more space for menus. I don't believe DVDWS can encode part of the project with different settings. Or am I wrong there as well?

Once again thanks

[Brian Ellis]

I'd reconsider using CBR. It uses too many bits during quiet scenes and doesn't really improve action scenes as much as you'd think. VBR is a better choice 99% of the time.

Sorry, can't agree wholeheartedly with you there. I've done extensive practical trials and had a look at the results both visually (as video and extracting individual frames) and with bitrate analysis on both real video and with stills with some violent pan/zooms.

With DV video as input, anything over 6000 CBR does not improve the image as the DV artefacts prime over the MPEG-2 ones. With RGB input, yes, you can go higher, but I did not test that. At 5000 CBR, you could just start to detect some MPEG effects and at 4000 CBR, they can become apparent, although the casual viewer would hardly see them.

With VBR at max/avg/min bitrates of 6000/4500/3000 kbit/s, there was almost zero visual improvement over 4500 kbit/s CBR. Analysis of the clips showed that most of the higher bitrates took place at transitions and NOT at fast movements of the subject and there was almost no reduction of bitrate when a still was inserted in a video which was re-rendered to DV before encoding. 2-pass was slightly better than 1-pass, but not significantly.

My advice, at least with prosumer encoders (it may be better with fully professional multi-pass encoders with manual control between passes, but I haven't tried any of those), is, for DV quality input, to encode at 6000 kbit/s CBR for projects where you can fit it in to ~4.1 Gb including audio and authoring and 7.8 Gb for DL. Personally, I use VBR only for projects where I have to drop well below 5000 kbit/s but, even then, I think that this is more optimism than scientific!. Using CBR is a time-saver into the bargain!

[Dr Mordrid]

Most articles put it this way;

CBR vs. VBR?

In constant bit rate (CBR) mode the encoder assigns a fixed number of bits to scenes regardless of the source video's complexity. If the incoming video contains high-motion or color-complex scenes, the encoder must increase the relative compression in these scenes and therefore reduce picture quality in order to maintain the constant (specified) target rate.

In variable bit rate (VBR) mode, the available bits on a disc (approximately 36,000 million on a DVD-5) are assigned according to a scene's complexity. Scenes with greater motion or color nuances receive more bits; scenes with low complexity, like talking heads, receive fewer bits. Owing to this inherent efficiency, VBR encoding produces a much higher overall quality than CBR at the same target rate. The DVD-Video format allows for the encoding and transfer of data at variable bit rates between 0Mbps and 9.8Mbps.

The bottom line is that if there is a complex segment in the source...even for a second or less...the bitrate required to encode that segment will overshoot the set CBR bitrate and the encoder will be forced to increase the Q (quantizaion level) to compensate. This increases compression and thereby lowers the MPEG's quality for the duration of the overshoot.

Setting a CBR close to DVD's maximum of 9600 kbps will intercept this problem at the cost of recording time on the disc and will also run the risk that a given DVD player will not be able to handle this high a bitrate.

Make no mistake; there are a lot of DVD players out there, cheap and expensive, that cannot handle the full DVD max bitrate of 9600 kbps continuously. Some can barely handle bitrates north of 7000 kbps. Sad, but true.

On the other hand VBR would simply up the bitrate to whatever is required for that segment in order to maintain a constant quality, then drop the bitrate again to a value closer to the average bitrate setting specified when you set up the encode. This allows much more content to be placed on the disc, fancier motion menus, extra content (photo slideshows in addition to the events video) etc. etc..

For family video I especially like adding the photo slideshows to the normal video content. This is particularly nice when doing things like weddings, birthdays, outings, bar/bas mitzvah's etc. etc. as many of the good candid images are not caught by the video camera but by individuals with their still cameras.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

I agree that many DVD players have problems at high bitrates, but this is also, to some extent, media-dependent. My first DVD player, a Grundig (reputable German marque of the time, although it was made in Korea) baulks at ~8000 kbit/s, even on pressed discs. It is supposedly DVD-R compatible, but its limit with DVD-R is ~6000 kbit/s on DVDs burnt at 1x on a Pioneer A03 or a Samsung at 4x on good quality media, but it drops to ~5000 kbit/s on some poorer makes and, I suspect, slightly when written at higher speeds. My Philips player takes everything in its stride, whether DVD±R/RW at up to at least 7000 kbit/s (haven't tried faster) and I've not seen it baulk with any pressed disk; amazingly, even passage between layers looks seamless.

[DarrenD]

Unfortunately I have MSP 7.01 VE DVD edition which seems to have a bug in the VBR mode. I tried to use 9000-6000-2000 and it kept coming back with 9000-8100-192 (in the ADVANCE=1 menu). With those sort of settings I thought I might as well stick at CBR-6000.

Do you have any further advice? I know Dr Mordrid that you used to have some later mpgvout.zip files from Ulead in days gone by (on DMNForums)

[Brian Ellis]

Unfortunately I have MSP 7.01 VE DVD edition which seems to have a bug in the VBR mode. I tried to use 9000-6000-2000 and it kept coming back with 9000-8100-192 (in the ADVANCE=1 menu). With those sort of settings I thought I might as well stick at CBR-6000.

Do you have any further advice? I know Dr Mordrid that you used to have some later mpgvout.zip files from Ulead in days gone by (on DMNForums)

This is a known bug with MSP7 and was, at last, cured in SP3, but I'm not sure that this can be applied to special editions. As I explained earlier, CBR 6000 is good enough for most jobs. Certainly, going up to 9000 kbit/s max is probably not very clever, for player compatibility problems. I have never used max >7000 kbit/s, usually 6000 kbit/s, on the rare occasions of using VBR for a project (as opposed to testing).

[Dr Mordrid]

Darren,

Those MPEGVout files were upgraded in the SP3 patch and a later download of SP2, so using them isn't necessary if you install either.

As far as MPEG quality goes;

Bitrate isn't everything. In fact many other settings can do more for quality than even moderately large bitrate settings;

Going into the Advanced menu and set "Advanced Video Settings/Additional Settings/General/Intra DC Precision" to 10 improves rendering quality quite a bit for a given bitrate. This is often referred to as the "DC component", but "Intra DC Precision, "DCT" and "Discrete Cosine Transform" are the correct terms.

Most encoders (including Uleads implementation of the MainConcept encoder) default the DC to 8, which is the minimum value and the only one legal for MPEG-1, but DVD MPEG-2's MP/ML profile (MP/ML = Main Profile at Main Level) can accept values as high as 10. High profiles like the one used for HDV can use a DC of up to 11.

Motion Search: While the control in the Advanced menu can be moved and doesn't stick Ulead has this already set in MSP.ini to a value of 20, which is rather high. The typical range is only 3-11 (higher = better). If you want to go higher just edit the copy of MSP.INI in Documents and Settings/All Users. It's in the [VIODRIVER] section.

One control you can set in Advanced/Advanced Video/ that has a big effect in high motion video is the "Auto Set Motion Vectors" switch. This defaults to just a 3x3 pixel search pattern. This is great for talking heads, but in high motion video moving objects can go a lot further than that between frames. In such sources a higher motion search value is therefore something that can help the encoder a lot.

I often crank the vectors to at least 6x6 and often 10 or more for things that are really moving quickly. Also note that you can set horizontal and vertical search components separately. This can be useful for content like race cars that mainly move in the horizintal direction. In such content setting asymmetric values like 4 (vertical) x 10 (horizontal) isn't out of line and will prevent unnecessary vertical searches, thereby improving encoder efficiency.

Another useful quality related setting in this menu is making sure that the half-Pel search switch is checked. This allows the encoder to also find motions that only move 1/2 a pixel. Important for smaller details.

Of course while these changes will up quality a lot for a given bitrate they also extend encoding times a bit, but then nothing is free

That said using these settings I can often get away with a VBR setting of 4500 kbps. This is great for putting long video's on a 4.7g single layer DVD, but when burning dual layer 8.5g DVD's you can of course use the max your player can handle. Only experimentation can determine that value.

Dr. Mordrid

[fberger]

MPEG settings in VS9

Doc,

On a side note are all those MPEG encoder tweeks available in VS9? By default there's no "advanced" button.

Fred

[Dr Mordrid]

The Ulead products use common MPEG libraries located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ulead Systems\MPEG\, meaning that the critical parts of the encoder are (usually) shared between Ulead apps.

When a newer MainConcept MPEG or Ulead libarary version is installed it updates the other programs unless for some reason Ulead opts for it not to be done in which case the new libraries are installed just for the newest program.

Specifically: yes, VS9 is fully updated.

You can turn on its Advanced MPEG menu by putting the following entry;

[VIODRIVER]
Advance=1

in the copy of UVS.INI located here;

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Ulead Systems\Ulead Videostudio\9.0\

The Advanced menu will be presented on the Compression tab when you opt to create a Custom MPEG export profile from the Share module.

Dr. Mordrid