Help/suggestions with bitrate.

[Barney1]

Graham,

My final project is down to about 2 hours. I made a copy of the final project and cut it down to about 3 minutes that way I can test with single layer dvds. Yes my dvd player plays dual layers fine. What I have been doing as well is just creating a dvd folder and playing it on my PC using WIN DVD. Whats nice about win DVD is I can play the original .avi file along with the many and I stress many samples of DVD (VIDEO_TS).
I have the bitrate to about 7500 and that seems about the best I can do without getting the advance button to work. You can still see some artifacts vs he original .avi. I did notice that the two-pass conversion helps a little, that why I think that the advance option may even help more. Still waiting to here from somebody that has got it to work on Vista.

[Ron P.]

I tried getting the Advance button on my Vista machine. Sadly following Terry's directions, it seems it's not possible..

[Barney1]

videoman,

I got the button to show up, but it does some funky things. For example I had a test project that was originally 164.94 MB before I changed the .ini file. Once I changed the .ini file it went down to 154.97 MB. Then when I went in and changed Terry¡¦s settings (which is supposed to get larger) the project went down to 94.32 MB. So some funky things are going on with Vista. Anyway if you¡¦re interested to try on yours I found the .ini here: C:\Progam Data\Ulead Systems\Ulead Video Studio\11\uvs.ini.

[Ron P.]

Thanks Barney, I'll have to try that. I thought that was the file I changed, probably not. I'm not that familiar with it yet, and I gave to my wife. Since all she does is email, play games, and other minor stuff..

[Barney1]

Well, it seems that the best I can do is the following settings: a bitrate @7000; quality set at 90%; AC3 audio @384 kbps; two pass and lower field first. What I have been doing to save DL discs is to just render to a DVD folder and then watch the video using Corel¡¦s WinDVD9. I have been watching the same grueling 2 hour movie several times at different settings to make sure all is well and have noticed that video kind of freezes up or better described as going into slow-motion at two specific spots in the video. This happens for only about 5 seconds each time. When I show the information in WinDVD9 each time the VBR real time mbps jump to about 13 or 13000 kbps. It says that my max kbps is 7000, which is correct since that is how I set it during render. So here are my questions.

1. Should I just remove those portions from the project or drop it down to say 6000? I¡¦m just concerned that I will lose some quality.

2. Will bumping the quality from 90% to 100% make a difference?

3. Is the fact that the VBR jumping so high the cause of the freezing/jumpy video?

4. I did noticed that when I up¡¦d the bitrate to 8000 I had more occurrences in the video that had issues as above. So is 8000 too high?

5. My project preferences are set to AVI, which is the source video. Should I be setting that to mpeg and then rendering as mpeg? Will this make a difference?

6. Would I see the same problem above if I create an ISO file as well and watch that?

I know this is a lot of questions, but this site has been a great help thus far and if I can just get around this issue I should be ready to create the final disc for the 15 people that have been patiently waiting. Thanks again!

[Devil]

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=26715

[Barney1]

Devil, I appreciate the link. I did read that when searching for answers on my issues. Unfortunately I still need to seek some answers to my questions. Hopefully someone out there can advise. In the mean time I¡¦m going to keep experimenting. Thanks again!

[Barney1]

Well, it seems that the best I can do is the following settings: a bitrate @7000; quality set at 90%; AC3 audio @384 kbps; two pass and lower field first. What I have been doing to save DL discs is to just render to a DVD folder and then watch the video using Corel¡¦s WinDVD9. I have been watching the same grueling 2 hour movie several times at different settings to make sure all is well and have noticed that video kind of freezes up or better described as going into slow-motion at two specific spots in the video. This happens for only about 5 seconds each time. When I show the information in WinDVD9 each time the VBR real time mbps jump to about 13 or 13000 kbps. It says that my max kbps is 7000, which is correct since that is how I set it during render. So here are my questions.

1. Should I just remove those portions from the project or drop it down to say 6000? I¡¦m just concerned that I will lose some quality.

2. Will bumping the quality from 90% to 100% make a difference?

3. Is the fact that the VBR jumping so high the cause of the freezing/jumpy video?

4. I did noticed that when I up¡¦d the bitrate to 8000 I had more occurrences in the video that had issues as above. So is 8000 too high?

5. My project preferences are set to AVI, which is the source video. Should I be setting that to mpeg and then rendering as mpeg? Will this make a difference?

6. Would I see the same problem above if I create an ISO file as well and watch that?

I know this is a lot of questions, but this site has been a great help thus far and if I can just get around this issue I should be ready to create the final disc for the 15 people that have been patiently waiting. Thanks again!

Anybody???

[Devil]

quite frankly, your keenness to have high quality may be your downfall. The "15 people who are waiting" may not have players that can cope with 7384 kbit/s on DL. I would distribute 2 h on a SL DVD. IMHO, the risks with DL do not justify the tiny quality difference that 99.9% of your target aufience won't notice, anyway.

[Ken Berry]

I tend to agree with Devil. It also seems to me that if your video contains mostly action/rapid movement, then you might be better off using a constant bitrate of -- say -- 6000 or 7000 kbps max. That way you should be able to avoid the type of spikes that you seem to be experiencing now. Certainly any bitrate above 10,000 takes it outside the range which is part of the international DVD standard (and in fact 10,000 kbps is the maximum that standard will allow *including* the audio...)

Re the quality slider: A number of users change the quality setting upwards. In effect, it does a not dissimilar thing to dual pass encode. It is supposed, however, to represent a balance between an acceptable level of final quality and an acceptable length of time to achieve that quality. The default 70% setting is supposed to represent an ideal balance between time and quality. I personally happen to be one user who, apart from experimenting with the slider, leave it always at the default setting, and I am invariably well pleased with the final product. It is just perhaps that my tired eyes cannot see any visible improvement in the final quality when I set the slider higher, though other users swear you can.

While your computer is well able to handle this process, I should also note -- in the spirit of Devil's comment to the effect that the perfect can be the enemy of the good -- that quite a few users who push that slider to 100% or even 90%, have reported that this in itself causes their computers to seize up a little or produce slightly jerky video at the end.

As for converting it to mpeg-2, it depends exactly how you intend to display your final video. If it is going on a DVD, then eventually it will have to be converted anyway. That is what I thought we were talking about anyway since we are talking about bitrates. If you are only talking about rendering a new DV/AVI of the project, then you don't fiddle with anything -- you leave the basic settings as they are. DV is DV is DV... and needs no fiddling. It is only at the conversion step that you need to take into account bitrate, CBR vs. VBR, two pass encoding etc.

And re your question about an ISO file, my own personal preference is not to use the ISO route but the DVD folder (Video_TS) route instead. That makes it easier to play the final folder back in a software DVD player like WinDVD or PowerDVD and make sure it looks OK and not waste DVDs on failures. The only slight downside is that VS cannot burn a DVD folder to an actual DVD. You need a third party program like Nero to do that. VS *can* burn an ISO using a utility which comes in the package. But it is far more difficult to play an ISO back in a software DVD player. You have to first mount it in a virtual drive (which itself requires another program like PowerISO or WinISO, to do).

[Barney1]

Videoman, Devil,

OK this is driving me nuts!!! I have my max kbps set to 7000, but when I play the DVD in Coral¡¦s WINDVD9 it can jump as high as 13000. When that happens the video/sound kind of locks up/freezes for few seconds and then its fine. Same thing happens when I play it on multiple DVD players as well. I have a PS3 and it play fine. The problem is I¡¦m making copies for multiple people. The kbps is back to normal. I thought that max is set to keep it from going that high. I have the two-pass conversion turned on as well. Im thinking about starting a new topic on this or should I just keep this one?

[Ken Berry]

Why would you start a new thread? Someone like me is likely to come along and say "please don't double post" and lock it!!

Did you take any notice of my last post suggesting that you use a constant bitrate of 7000 kbps? Your video is presumably mostly action shots and IMHO action videos are quite often much better using Constant Bitrate...

[Barney1]

Ken,

OK, I wont double post. I can¡¦t afford to have this one locked. Anyway I think I did try that and when playing in WINDV9 or PS3 which both show the current bit rate it still jumped. Could something be wrong with my software?

[Ken Berry]

Sounds very strange since constant bitrate is just that -- always the same... Jumping to 13,000 kbps is also getting into high definition country. The absolute maximum under the international standard for standard definition DVDs is 10,000 kbps including audio... And many (all?) will have trouble when presented with video much over 8000 kbps. Don't know about software players, though.

[Barney1]

Ken,

When I said software, I meant VS. Anyway I am trying it again as we speak using constant bit rate of 7000 and 70% on the slider. Just so that we are on the same page, this is what I have been doing each time I produce a DVD. I have two projects one volume 1 and one volume 2. I bring in volume 1 and then share/create disc set my bitrate and slider then Add/Edit Chapters (only 4), then burn to a DVD folder only; not disc. After that is done I exit VS and don¡¦t save the project incase I need to do this again. I then burn the DVD using 1 click DVD. Then view it either on PS3 or Corel¡¦s windvd9.