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I decided to plunge to HD. Bought a canon hv30 after seeing some video taken under the Friday night high school football lights (a big interest of mine) and was very impressed. I have been reading all I can and feel I am on the upside now of the steep learning curve. At least not intimidated any more. My primary interest at present is to publish on the web, at least until HD media comes down in price.

Here are my issues so far:

This appears to be the ideal file to transcode to for small file size and nice results on most of these sites: h.264 mpeg4, 1280x720 and around 3000 kbps video and 128 kbps audio

http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug ... to+SmugMug

I created such a file using the third party software mpeg stream featured by smugmug in that article. The h.264 file is a manageable 63 megs where the original HD mpeg2 file was 117 megs. Both of these are examples of my test upload on two different sites.

Exposure room (free and a very nice site) shown here http://exposureroom.com/84d850ecce6a4c7 ... 48a563c1e/

And Smugmug trial (pay site) shown here: http://jamesmm.smugmug.com/gallery/6343 ... 2042_rsRqK


Mpeg stream is freeware that works good but is very slow. I would prefer to use VS but here are the problems.

It doesn support the creation of h.264 at 1280x720 unless I am somehow not seeing it.

Every time I try to put my newly created in Mpeg stream h.264 video in the timeline the program crashes immediately on both of my computers. So VS obviously doesn support this format at all, even though it is the preferred compression for stunning results publishing on the web in HD.

Also since HD had timecode imbedded, why can I split by scene when capturing like I can in DV? I understand it Mpeg but it seems the information is there to do it but VS won. When I shoot a football game I stop the camera between each play and used to make a nice folder with a separate file for each play of the game by splitting by scene on capture. I now can do this either and its inconvenient.

Is it time to scrap old faithful now? Is Corel missing the market here completely? Is there another file format that VS will create that is comparable in size and dimmensions to get these results? Anyone with more experience than me publishing HD on the web, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks,

Certainly on my VS 11.5 there is no custom high res mpeg-4 output option. I note that you can output to wmv HD, both 1080 and 720 though.

If I needed to do what you are trying to achieve, I might use the following workflow:

Use VS to edit your HDV footage and output to an HDV file with the same project properties (25mbps, 1440 x1080, probably 30p mode too) so that you minimise picture quality loss.

I would then use a freeware open source program called Megui to encode the HDV file to either x264 for the best quality and compression, or h264 if necessary for compatibility with the website. Although Megui is nothing like a one click program and takes a bit of learning, it's incredibly powerful and always seems to use the cpu to 100%. You can create output of any resolution you choose.

I wouldn't be too hard on VS - it can never be all things to all people, and Corel are probably wary of making it too confusing for users.

VS will not 'split by scene' for either HDV or AVCHD. The code for it was written in the old SD days, and it worked then only for capture and split with DV/AVI format. It did not work for mpeg-2 capture, and I assume that is why it does not work with HDV/AVCHD since both are mpeg.

However, if you Google, you will find a marvellous little freeware program called HDVSplit which both captures and splits by scene, so you are in luck since you have a HDV camera. I don't know of any program that will do the same with AVCHD (not that it could be 'captured and split' since you just transfer the AVCHD from the camera flash drive or hard drive to the computer as a file...) But there may be a split program for that format out there somewhere...

I appreciate your input and advice!

I use it to download clips from the camera and split them into independent files, whic I then drag into VS.