HD add on pack questions

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 1:43 pm

I've installed the HD add on pack to MF6+. Burned my first AVCHD disk yesterday. 40 minutes of mpeg2 20mbs video took a little less than 9 hours, single pass, 100% quality.

Questions: is there any documentation of all the new features? What's the difference between the 2 HD options (standard and advanced)? Why can't I save the AVCHD files or create an iso image for an AVCHD disc?

Thanks

Post by **Ron P.** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 2:21 pm

Documentation for "new Features" can be found here:
http://www.ulead.com/dmf/features.htm. There's a Flash Tutorial, and a couple of PDF documents..

I'm not sure what you mean by "standard and advanced"? If you mean HD and Blu-Ray, the difference is HD lost, Blu-Ray won that battle..

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 2:39 pm

Under the new project area of MF6+, I have a bluray option, an AVCHD option, an HD DVD standard option, an HD DVD advanced option as well as DVD, VCD and SVCD.

Also, there doesn't seem to be any specific manuals for the HD add on pack

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 2:54 pm

Why can't I save the AVCHD files or create an iso image for an AVCHD disc?

You can save the the source videos as an avc/h264 file by using the export feature in MF6+.
You can also extract the file from the avchd disk you authored by using the DVD/-VR avchd import feature. When you import the video it will be put in a folder called capture that resides under your assigned "Working Folder". It will also have an extension of mpg.

If it took 9 hours to create a 40 minute video I doubt you can play it back properly on your computer system.
To playback AVC/H264 video 1440x1080i on my P4-HT 3.2Ghz I need to limit the bitrates to about 4-6MBS, will is low.

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 3:01 pm

Thanks for the help.

I'm playing it back on a PS3 - worked great.

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 3:14 pm

Just tried importing from the disc I made - works great - took about 10 minutes to do the import.

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 4:00 pm

That file will also play on the PS3. There is a difference though between the container format that's on the avchd disk.
The AVCHD disks are burnt in the UDF 2.6 format. XP will not read them, Vista reads them.
What's nice about the avchd format is under XP you can import the video back to your harddisk or under Vista copy the video from the STREAMS folder.
On the avchd disk the video & audio are elementary streams multi-plexed into a Transport Stream Container, which have an extension of M2TS.
When you import or create a local avc/h264 file the container format is different. The M2TS container is the most universal format to use the video in other authoring applications & editors.

Another nice feature of this new avchd format is once you have a collection of videos on the disk you can re-use them again in other projects to create another avchd disk. All the time these videos are already compliant and do not need to be re-encoded again.

So if you want to make a different avchd disk and include that same video you imported simply start a new avchd project, insert the compliant avc/h264 video into the project, make chapters, menus & burn it to another dvd.
In the burning process because the video is already avc/h264 compliant you will see that MF6+ starts the Multi-plexing very fast and burning a new dvd.
That compliant video does not need to be re-encoded.
This compliant setting in MF6+ is selectable under the "GEAR" Icon.
My projects always have the "Do Not Convert Compliant Mpeg xxxxx" and also the "XDisc". When these are checked ON and IF the video is compliant the MF6+ will not re-encode the video.

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 4:09 pm

I've been successfully using the "do not convert option" for my HD DVD projects. Nice to know about the other stuff too.

3 more questions:

What's the difference between HD standard and HD advanced on the new project area?

I assume that the 2 pass encode does nothing except shrink the required space on the DVD?

Why does the video-audio multiplexing take so long (40 minute video I did took 5-10 minutes - not exactly sure)?

Thanks again!

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 8:37 pm

What's the difference between HD standard and HD advanced on the new project area?

HD advanced has more menuing features like Pop-up menus.

I assume that the 2 pass encode does nothing except shrink the required space on the DVD?

I don't use 2 pass encode on compressed video formats. Yes, it may shrink the file, but your source video is also highly compressed, encoding Variable Bit Rate in this avc/h264 encoder is not like the mpeg encoder, the minimum bit rate is set at a low value so when using VBR for example 18MBS the videos will average about 12MBS. MF will estimate this on the timeline at 18MBS, so MF's estimate is high. The only way MF could know the actual value to to encode or analize the file. I suggest using 15MBS Constant Bit Rate for an excellent conversion from true HDV (25MBS Video) to avc/h264.

I've found that usually 2 pass encoding is good when your source videos are frame accurate like DV, HD-Cineform, uncompressed avi. Now really with compressed source video files like mpeg2 or even avchd video.

Why does the video-audio multiplexing take so long (40 minute video I did took 5-10 minutes - not exactly sure)?

5 to 10 minutes to do what? Burn the dvd? The original conversion of 40minutes taking 9 hours is your computer is slow. If you had a 2.4Ghz quad computer a 40 minute encode would still take about 2 hours using 15MBS CBR Dolby5.1@448kbs. That is a high quality avc/h264 video. If you used MF default avc/h264 settings to encoding on a 2.4Ghz quad would be less than 2 hours, actually pretty fast.

5-10 minutes to re-multiplex and burn on the dvd at the sametime is not bad time for a 40 minute video. Seeing as the video is already compliant.

If your computeer took 9 hours for 40 minutes single pass then a 2 pass encode will take much longer (double?). I would use single pass.

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 8:48 pm

When you create an HD-DVD, there is a point where it says something like 'Multiplexing audio and video' (I wasn't awake when the AVCHD job got to this point so I don't know if it did it or not, nor how long it took if it did). Since I am always using already compliant video, the multiplexing is the long part (then comes the writing disk image and a couple of other things). So the multiplexing becomes the bottleneck (not much of one, granted). I was just curious what it was doing or if there was something I could do to speed it up (eg, a different audio format).

Thanks again!

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 9:52 pm

If you take a 20 minute true HDV video file it's about 4Gig's in size.
When the program is Multi-Plexing an HD-DVD it's reconstructing the 2 elecmentary streams (video & audio) into EVO containers, which is the HD-DVD format.
The best process I know of is having the source video(s) on one physical harddisk and the destination of the HD-DVD folders or ISO file (destination target) on another physical harddsik
But your times aren't that bad if it's for a 40 minute video. That's about 8gig.
Actually I think that's not bad at all.

snelldl · Post by **snelldl** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 9:58 pm

Alrighty then. Well, now I can do any kind of hidef stuff I want. So I'm happy.

Thanks!