AVCHD 1080P (panasonic) quality bad in Preview Window

[icreadence]

I have VSP X4 Ultimate and a Panasonic TM900K. I have been recording mostly in 1080p for the best quality, but I have notice when compared to VLC or another editor, the preview window's quality is very poor. On my 1080P monitor it looks no better than a DVD. This, in of itself, is not a big issue, but it does make it hard to use VSP X4 to do fine video corrections.
The one that is is when I play down-converted videos from VSP X4 (To 7Kbps DVD) the quality is visibly worse than with my other editor. I have been testing on my playstation (just playing the mpeg 2 files via my media server) (the PS3 is set not to up-convert). When I try to do the same thing on my computer using VLC I do not see much of a difference, but VLC is doing a lot to render on the PC (de-interlacing and all).

Has any one else seen this?
Thanks

[Roger]

I do AVCHD from a Panasonic P&S (FZ-47) exclusively using VSP X4 and indeed the preview window is almost worthless. The good news is that the edited video is perfect.

Somewhere in your control panel, it has a place to fill out your PC specs. Fill that out and maybe the issue is PC related?

[teknisyan]

Depending on your PC configuration, you may want to check the smart proxy settings via SETTINGS > PREFERENCES > PERFORMANCE.

[icreadence]

Depending on your PC configuration, you may want to check the smart proxy settings via SETTINGS > PREFERENCES > PERFORMANCE.

Updated the PC specs (took me a while to figure out you were talking about the BB control panel ). The only issue I may have is with the video card, but I turned off video card rendering (decoding/encoding) as that is much slower than my processor.
Not sure what smart proxy would do for me. The video is smooth, no bandwidth issues. Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't the proxy just create a lower res video for editing?
The preview is not the big issue it is the DVD results.

Thanks

[lata]

Hi

What are the full video properties of your clips.?
Right click the clip in the timeline and select properties, what are they.?

If you are intending to convert to standard DVD then you may be best to record to 25/29 fps
If you are recording in 50/60 fps then you are gonna lose a lot of frames in the conversion.
Besides the frame size reducing from 1980 to 720.

You should keep the original interlacing, if upper field then use that for the DVD, it may however be Frame Based

Use Make Movie Templates manager to create a Mpeg2 DVD template, keep as much of the original properties as you can, not much will match anyway. hopefully frame rate and frame order.

Yes smart proxy should improve timeline editing, but has no effect on the final render.

[icreadence]

Hi
What are the full video properties of your clips.?
Right click the clip in the timeline and select properties, what are they.?
If you are intending to convert to standard DVD then you may be best to record to 25/29 fps
If you are recording in 50/60 fps then you are gonna lose a lot of frames in the conversion.
Besides the frame size reducing from 1980 to 720.
You should keep the original interlacing, if upper field then use that for the DVD, it may however be Frame Based
Use Make Movie Templates manager to create a Mpeg2 DVD template, keep as much of the original properties as you can, not much will match anyway. hopefully frame rate and frame order.
Yes smart proxy should improve timeline editing, but has no effect on the final render.

The clips are 1080P 59.94 fps AVCHD (h264, MPEG-4). Since I am going from progressive, to interlace I will loose half the lines from each frame to each field. It should not matter which one I take as each frame contains the data for either field.
I understand the down conversion will cause a loss in fidelity, but I have use another video editing product with much better results.
Timeline editing is smooth and fast.

[lata]

Hi

Try using Frame Based rather than interlased when creating the DVD Mpeg2 file.

[icreadence]

Hi

Try using Frame Based rather than interlased when creating the DVD Mpeg2 file.

Is this a setting for the decoder? or the encoder? If it just how to interpret the source data, then I think this should help, but otherwise the DVD has to be interlaced (I think) to be compliant.
thanks for the info, will give it a try

[Ken Berry]

... but otherwise the DVD has to be interlaced (I think) to be compliant.

Not necessarily. You can make a DVD of a slideshow, and a slideshow -- being images -- is the quintessential case for Frame Based. Many of us here will already have made slideshow DVDs using Frame Based, and they play perfectly well in a variety of stand-along DVD players.

[icreadence]

... but otherwise the DVD has to be interlaced (I think) to be compliant.

Not necessarily. You can make a DVD of a slideshow, and a slideshow -- being images -- is the quintessential case for Frame Based. Many of us here will already have made slideshow DVDs using Frame Based, and they play perfectly well in a variety of stand-along DVD players.

Thanks Ken, Does that mean that that if I select under "Frame type:"
A: frame-based. That it interprets the source as frame based
B: frame-based. That it build the mpg file as 30 fps frames (rather than 2 60 fps fields/frame (i.e. interlaced))

or in other words does this setting help the encoder with interpreting the source or building the resulting file?

I know it has some critical bearing on interpreting the source as DV1 must be lower field first or you get bad results.


PS: and most importantly, The Frame-based setting resulted in a much better mpg2 rendering (At least on my computer. I have yet to try this on the TV). and it is the same size (approximatly) to the lower and upper field setting experiments I made).
Update: Same results on TV, Frame is much better, but I would not have guessed the cause. The difference looks like from a lower resolution source (loss of detail) and poorly encoded or low bit rate encoding (blocky).
THANKS