Create Video File Formats

[kommong2]

I have 50 inch 1080p TV and a media player that can play almost any format. I have VideoStudio X3 and a decent core2 PC running XP. I have a few 1 hour each video files that I captured from my sony SD camcorder few years back using Firewire. These video files are like 25GB each and not high def.

Now I have edited some of these video files but I am not sure what is the best format to use when creating video file to watch it on my HDTV. I don't need to burn disks or re-edit the files once I am done editing one time.

I have tried custom MPEG2 with 8000 bit rate and 100% quality and it looks okay but grainy on my HDTV. I tried avchd/Blu-ray and they look much smoother on HDTV however they are a bit soft and dull in colors and not as sharp as custom mpeg2.

There are so many formats like DVD mpeg2/AVCHD/HDV/Blu-ray with mpeg2 or h.264 and videostudio help did not do a good job explaining them So I would hope experts here would guide me what best quality format should I pick for these SD videos so that they look nice on my HDTV. Would picking aspect ration to 16:9 make any difference for these sd video?

I am sure when I buy an HD camcorder I would have better options to keep picture quality great.


Thanks a lot,

-SM

[Ken Berry]

Playing any SD video on such a large screen HDTV is inevitably going to look a bit (or a lot) grainy unless your player has an upscaling facility which makes them look a bit closer to Blu-Ray quality. If your player can play DV/AVI, I would leave them in their original format as it is high quality (about the highest possible in SD video), though they are -- as you realise -- rather large, which can make long-term storage a bit difficult. (Mind you, with hard disk drives tumbling in price, this is less of a problem than it was before). Incidentally, if your video is in fact DV/AVI -- which I suspect it must be since you mention capture via Firewire -- it will be about 13 GB per hour of video, and not 26 GB as you say. Still large, though...

Other than that, however, I would have been suggesting SD mpeg-2 at the highest quality settings you have already tried. But I can only repeat my comment above about a player with upscaling... Otherwise you will be stuck with the grainy appearance of home-made video on a very large TV screen. Using two-pass in your conversion might slightly improve quality, though you would probably still expect some graininess. And if your original video was 4:3, you will get no joy from converting it to 16:9 -- except the possibility of further quality loss from the reconversion of lossy mpeg-2 implicit in that process.

Converting SD to one of the high def formats (my preference, personal only would be HDV as it is as relatively easy to edit and use as DV SD video) will also bring you no joy, as you have found. As they say, you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. There is also the slightly tricky thing that DV video uses Lower Field First while both HDV and AVCHD use Upper Field First, so you could expect artifacts like jaggies on straight lines to start appearing from such a conversion, especially in fast panning shots.

Converting to other HD formats (including WMV, DivX/XVid and .mov) will have the same "silk purse" effect though probably without the jaggies since they by and large can use progessive scan (equivalent to Frame Based field order). They will also be much smaller than HDV though probably around the same size as AVCHD. Or you could convert using any of those formats in SD version. However, on my own 46" HDTV, I tend to see very noticeable pixellation, particularly in dark/black scenes or colours in such video (or in my case DivX since I tend not to use either .mov or WMV...)

[kommong2]

Thanks Ken for detailed reply. You were right about the size of 1 hour SD video is about 13 GB. I understand I wouldn't be able to achieve much with these videos in SD format but I have to edit these. For test I edited and created 2 minute sample video in various formats to play it on my HDTV. Here are my finding:

One format I created 'same as first clip' avi file of about 385k looks good on pc but I can't play it on my media player maybe because I need to change audio from digital to analog that I'll have to check. This is without compression right ? Don't know whats the differences between format 'same as first clip' or 'same as project settings'.

Mpeg file with 100% quality variable rate 2 pass does look sharp but grainy of course. Size was 120k about 1/3 of avi. I may keep some sd video in this format for easy play on my media player.

HDV-720p was 257k in size but there was much more pix-elation on edges of images. So didn't like much.

Blu-ray_h264_1920 was 239k in size and looked much smoother and soft on HDTV.

Blu-ray_Mpeg2_1920 was 323k in size and looked much smoother and soft on HDTV. I do like this format for some of my sd videos to play on hdtv.

Now my question is

1) if I pick Blu-ray then should I pick 1920*1080 or 1440*1080 ?
2) should I pick Blu-ray mpeg2 or h264 ? Is AVCHD any better than blu-ray ?
3)Is there anyway to pick aspect 4:3 for these blu-ray formats ?

If there is any link for Corel help on all these rendering options I would appreciate it.

Thanks again for your answers.

-SM

[Ken Berry]

Re (1) It does not really matter, and I would always go for 1920 x 1080. The 1440 frame size comes from the fact that that is the HDV international standard frame size, and some early AVCHD camcorders also used it. But with HDV, it is called an 'anamorphic' frame size which in fact is displayed as 1920 x 1080. Notionally, since you are starting off with SD video, 1440 would appear to offer less "magnification" of the original video, and so potentially less distortion when made into HD video. But as I say, I would still go for 1920, given that in HD terms, 1440 is anamorphic and displays as 1920 anyway.

Re (2) You have things slightly askew in your question. AVCHD *is* Blu-Ray, or at least one version of it: the HD mpeg-4 version. The other is of course the mpeg-2 HD you have been experimenting with. In practice, I have found them to look absolutely equal, as long as you have used the highest quality settings in your AVCHD. But a Blu-Ray disc can have either AVCHD or HD mpeg-2 on it. From a practical point of view, though, while mpeg-2 of course produces larger files, it is much easier to produce/edit/play on less powerful computers than is AVCHD, which is incredibly demanding on computers system resources.

Re (3), I simply don't know though logic suggests to me that there isn't any way of doing this. After all, Blu-Ray is the very latest technology, designed to work with HD camcorders that only use 16:9. But as I say, I just don't know.

Don't know whats the differences between format 'same as first clip' or 'same as project settings'.

If your first clip is, say, a DV/AVI and you want to produce a new DV/AVI clip after editing, then 'same as first clip' would be appropriate. But if, say, you wanted to convert your DV into DVD-compatible mpeg-2, then that clearly would not be what you would choose. By default, VS project properties are usually set to SD DVD at 8000 kbps (high quality). So if your video is less than one hour long (and uses the same Field Order that the default project properties use) then you would use 'same as project settings'. Otherwise, if you wanted to vary things, you would choose 'Custom'.