any experience with video converters?

Started by japanesebaby, December 06, 2005, 11:22:49

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japanesebaby

yes it would be nice if i had something to use here... actually i contacted my seller to find out what the trouble was & got a quick response saying that the cannot ship my new unit because they still haven't received my payment for it (the 300 model was a wee bit more expensive than the 110 as you know). turns out that my bank had scr*wed up the transfer so that it was greatly delayed...  :smt013 can't believe it...

i have to confess that i'm pretty much on thin ice here what comes to both the brightness and contrast issues since... well with the standalone recorders you just didn't "have to" pay attention to it  :wink:  so what i said about them was purely something based on what i simply assumed/wondered and not anything i could motivate any better.

about that 'blurred and dark robert' ("great! something that i always wanted to have, wow!!" :-D ): well even though i lost my old screenshots i just remembered that i do have some test clips made with a few standalones (i burned those to dvd, that's why they were not on my HD to be found). so it'll be interesting to make some comparisons with the ADVC300 results then, let' see (= NB: when the unit arrives...)

and then there's that firewire thing we talked about elsewhere... so far i've been informed that slight looping/chaining works pretty well with macs, even when dealing with DV... let's HOPE it's really so or it's back to  :smt120

;-)
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine

lostflower4

Hi, stranger. :-)  

I'm going to call this "What You Won't Find in the Manual". :wink:


All these extra settings to choose... What to do? Try to stick to as close to the default settings as possible, the tech support guy says. Why? Because there is slight generation loss even within the circuit board when processing and capturing video. I really didn't know this. I thought generation loss only came through using cables and that type of thing, but I guess I was wrong. :oops:

A few things here and there won't hurt, but apparently they add up. Noise reduction and the time base corrector (TBC) cannot be turned off. Even though you can uncheck both the 2D and 3D noise reduction settings, a little bit remains on.

I asked the guy if it was normal that I saw a loss of image sharpness when using the 2D filtering, and he told me yes. He said that you should only use 2D and 3D at the same time when you're working on a very old and grainy (basically horrible) looking video. So I asked him why this was the default setting, and he explained that the ADVC series is geared towards people restoring old, crappy videos. Those weren't his exact words, but you get the idea. I'd like to think that most of are Cure videos really aren't that bad. Sure some are pretty rough, but what he was describing sounded awful.

So I asked if I were to only choose one type of noise reduction, what should I choose? He assured me that 3D was the most efficient and best general-purpose one to use. It seems my eyes were telling me the truth on this!

Ok, so the white peak adjust feature isn't selected be default. Isn't it a good thing? He explained that the reason it's not selected is because of the generation loss factor. While he said it's likely not going to make anything noticeably worse (there's a mathematical loss, but not always visual ? although it can add up with multiple filters selected), sometimes you need it and sometimes you don't. Sometimes brightness/white levels will fall into the proper standard, and sometimes they won't. This is kind of a judgment call.

I think I remember you telling me about an older Cure video that looked washed out by the lights. Maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but the white peak adjust may come in handy there. For better and low gen recorded stuff, as well as professionally recorded material, it's probably not necessary.

Alright... What about this strange vertical and horizontal edge adjustment setting. What does it do? The support guy explained that it can eliminate unwanted video (lines, etc.) that may appear at the edge of your screen. I've never had this problem, except of course those stupid lines you see at the bottom of all VHS tapes. Do you know what I'm talking about? I used to never notice those when I was younger, but of course now I know too much to not drive myself crazy. :(

So I asked, "Can it remove those lines?" He said, "Maybe. It will attempt to mask them a little bit." "Will this hurt the rest of the picture at all?" He told me it would not. This sounded really wonderful, so and I just experimented with it a while ago. I tried the horizontal edge adjustment with all the settings (4 is the strongest), and compared a video with and without it turned on. The difference? None! Actually, I could almost swear it looked a little worse with the "adjustment" turned on. No removal of the lines, sorry to say. So I'm going to forget about that. It's not a huge deal to me, but I thought I had discovered a cool new trick. :roll:

Another curiosity of mine was that the volume level setting looks like it's not set to 100%. It looks like it's about 85% of peak level. I asked him if it was set below normal volume or if going higher pushed it above 100%. He explained that it's currently set at normal level and that there is a little room left raise it above the norm in case you have somemthing with extremely low volume. To me that means to just to leave it alone. If I want to play around with the audio, I'll do that later on!

Not forgetting that not everyone in the world is not fortunate enough to be using a PC (sorry, bad joke!), I asked him what he would recommend for capturing with a Mac. You'd never guess! iMovie and Final Cut Pro. We got talking about it a little bit, and he told me that it actually captures in MOV. I know you mentioned this to me before, but he went on to explain that it is simply a standard DV file (just like an AVI for PC), but Mac simply prefers to call it something different. So no worries there. I just hope the programs will work for you! :D

And last of all, but not least... "Why does the damn software keep forgetting my settings???" He couldn't really explain this one to me because he said it shouldn't. He explained that it's designed to remember the settings so you can move it from place to place without having to reconfigure things. Ok, that's nice... But I guess it's just my luck, right?

I just accepted the fact that I'm going to have to keep a very watchful eye on my settings each time I use the unit. But guess what? Ever since I spoke to him, it's always remembered everything perfectly. I've turned it on and off 10-15 times since then and no problems at all. I can't believe it. :shock: Really can't explain this one, but I'm surely not going to complain...

In summary, the unit seems to be setty up pretty well out of the box. I find that a little brigthness or color saturation adjustment is beneficial from time to time (the American Galore VHS is a bit dark), but not much more than this. Oh, and just remember to turn that stupid 2D blurring crap off! :lol:

While I'm babbling on here, I should also mention that computer monitors tend to look darker than television screens because of they way they were designed. Basically, computer monitors were made to be viewed in bright daylight, and TV's were meant to be viewed in the dark. So what looks dark on your computer screen might look fine on your TV set. So be careful not to brighten up your picture too much or you might be in for an unplesant surprise. :?  I've found that I rarely need to touch his setting with what I've tried capturing so far. It still looks infinitely brighter than ATI. And that's plenty better than what I'm used to!

One other thing he really insisted on is monitoring your videos by connecting a TV to the output of the ADVC. That's the way to really tell how your results will look in the end. While I'm not going to disagree with this (it's what all the pros do),  I have a really good idea of how things look on the computer. I know how all The Cure's official DVD's look and such, so if I can match things up, I'm sure it will still be close. And besides, the default settings are really close to correct anyway. I think my TV kinda sucks too, so this may not be the best choice for me after all.

Well, all of this info seemed really important to me. I hope you find at least one thing here useful for your purposes. Or should I say "our purposes"? ;-)

japanesebaby

i guess this thread quickly needs some new boost...  ;-)
ok, where to start then... oh yes, there was this problem i had with Compressor (which should do the DV to MPEG-2 encoding for me) - i was already tearing my hear out with it but it was solved by updating that program one notch. because some time ago i updated my version of Final Cut Pro but since Compressor comes as a separate package that wasn't being touched then. and the result was that it failed to recognize any DV files that i imported from the newer version of FCP  :(  - pretty weird but it looks like it's running ok ow so that's good. i couldn't really find this mentioned anywhere in the manuals or so, i just had a hunch that it might help - hmm maybe i looked carelessly, but maybe it simply wasn't there. it could have saved some serious amount of time if it had been clearly mentioned. but anyway i have to be glad that it was solved in the end. and after all i only spent one day trying to figure it out so i guess that wasn't too bad in the end.

about the ADVC3000 then: the 3D/2D noise reduction. that 2D stuff is certainly overdoing it with most tapes like you said (a bit too much like a Video Destroyer 5000 sort of asset :wink: ) but there is actually one tape that i might end up using it, it's a pretty good tape otherwise, not even very generated, but it does have this hugest amount of picture noise that i've ever seen. it's like it was snowing all the time behind the actual image. i did some test clips on that one today and i'm still somewhat undecided whether it's better to get rid of a bigger part of that noise and have a slightly less sharp image or the other way round. both have their advantages i guess. but that is just an exception. in general the 3D does a very good work - so i am very happy that i settled with this model and not the one i had before.

but it still doesn't remember my settings! i still have to make them all over the again every time. hmm, maybe it's just a slow learner... so let's give it a little time then :roll: .

about the Compressor's MPEG-2 encoding abilities. well i haven't done any larger files just yet, but with the smaller ones that i have produced i have to say it looks fine. keeping the audio uncompressed will probably force me to drop the bitrate somewhat but i'm pretty confident that it'll do a good job for me anyway.  
i did a clip from werchter '90 and made some comparison with the version i made last fall with the panasonic standalone dvd recorder. i used the same vhs player on both occasions so i think these can be compared pretty accurately - although i have to remember that the new clip is done with somewhat better bit rates of course: first of all, the standalone version has some pretty severe pixelisation going on all the time, all over the picture. and only now i really noticed how problematic especially the dark areas were/are there. first of all the dark areas aren't really dark: black isn't really black but something oddly greyish and unfortunately with some pretty notable macro-blocks. and all this just couldn't be adjusted as we know. also the contrast seem to have been set very high on the standalone's built-in settings. because it washes out the bringtest areas way too much - which is very bad if you consider that we are trying to deal with a live show footage! and it enhances this irritating 'facelessness'  that is often there especially on some older tapes because of the brightness of the stage lighting (well i do admit that robert is somewhat pale figure what comes to his complexion but i also know that he does have eyes and a mouth so i'd appreciate if i could pinpoint where they were  8) ). even in general i'd say that the wrongly adjusted contrast settings on that standalone do make the image rather irritating to watch for any longer period - even though the faces weren't destroyed it is rather tiring for your eyes really.
and then there's the huge problem with the picture noise of course which adds up to everything above very seriously. and i suspect that the MPEG encoding abilities of that recorder weren't really that top quality since the picture is notably more blurry all the time.
then again, my ADCV transferred/computer encoded version maybe does have some slight problems when and if the camera is very shaky and moves too fast, then i get a feeling that the capturing couldn't quite follow it the best possible way - maybe i'm just paranoid and trying to find something horribly flawed in it(?) but i guess i'll have to see what i can do for that. it might be a RAM related issue(?) - like i've said before i have 512 MB which should be well enough if you look at the requirements in general (specs!)m but it wouldn't hurt me to have that doubled and might have some effect on this one here, maybe.

ok, i guess i'll be back with some news when i get something of a larger scale produced.
see you...  

(P.S. i saw you posted about the dvd authoring programs - well i know you'll just love it of course but i think i'd recommend that you get a mac  ;-) ok, before you shoot me: i admit i've had some pretty annoying trouble with the FCP as we know, and even though it is now running very well i simply still find it a bit too heavy program "for my purposes"  :smt109 - i could very well do with something more simple since i'm not exactly trying to edit a hollywood feature film here :roll:
but about the DVD Studio Pro i can only good things: well of course i don't have experience of any other programs as professional as that one, so i'm probably not the best person to pass any judgements. but anyway: it is really a pleasure to deal with. very easy to use, very flexible, offering very good menu editing possibilities. and i really love it that nothing's too "ready-made" in this "choose from these or get lost - yes we know these are crappy templates but it's the best you'll ever get!" sort of attitude that many other programs unfortunately come packed with. with DVD Studio Pro you can really do some designing of your own if you want to, and then on the other hand if you prefer to keep it more simple it also seems to be possible to make perfectly decent menus without spending a whole day with them. but i just spend a ridiculous amount of time just toying with the different sort of effects one can put in there on the menus and all the templates that they have in general - so you can probably expect to see some pretty weirdo-menued dvds in the future   ;-)
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine

japanesebaby

i forgot to add a short comment on what you said about computer screens vs. TVs. yes you are right, adjusting the brightness takes a bit of a practise since TV seems to brighten up everything compared to what you see on the computer screen. i have a slight problem with my TV too since it isn't quite top quality thing and i'm not sure it can be trusted completely.  i've been suggested a few times before on a couple of video/computer forums that getting a monitor plugged in with the converter would be an essential piece of hardware here - but still it's unfortunately something that i just don't have at the moment.  :(

also, what i'm trying to decide now is whether to shoot with lower bit rates and keep the audio uncompressed or do it the other way round - or get both (high bit rates & uncompressed audio) but split the show in two then(?) none of these seems to be very satisfying, and i guess it depends on the quality of the source material too but still...  :smt017  i mean i'm not entirely at home with the variations of CBR/VBR just yet.
and unfortunately i cannot go for dual layer discs since my dvd burner doesn't support those.
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine

lostflower4

Yes, this topic has been rather dead lately. :?  But maybe it's for the best as we both seem to have made great progress. It seems that some of those standalone models you used were pretty bad. So I guess neither of us fans of a yellow, blocky, faceless Robert? :oops:

That 2D noise reduction is really a mystery to me. I'm surprised it's on by default, but the weak setting isn't too bad. But when you use medium and strong it's just like a big BLUR. :shock: So yes, you can hide a lot of things that way. I also know what you mean in regards to the snow effect. The Mountain View audience video I was capturing had this problem pretty bad. I settled for leaving the 2D on at the weak setting. It blurred out the snow just a little bit and didn't hurt the picture quality much, which wasn't perfect to begin with. The stronger settings blurred the snow more but also the picture too much. And the snow was still there, just blurrier. I really didn't want to destroy the image quality any further, so I figured whatever little bit the weak setting did would be good enough (for my purposes). But for a nice clean video, I always triple check to make sure that setting is off! :!:

The 3D noise is always useful for me. All analog video, even laserdisc (yes, it is actually analog) has at least a little bit of noise. This wasn't something I always noticed much, but once I did, there's really no going back. I always use the weak setting for that. Although I haven't tested it with this unit, doing more extreme settings can often cause problems, like the blurring of the picture in fast motion scenes. I think it's impossible to get rid of all noise, but the weak setting really does a lot. I compared my Live in Japan transfer with my old ATI version, and the picture on that was just out of control noisy. Back then I didn't even realize it, but it just looks horrible to me now. The Canopus transfer is much cleaner and just looks much better overall.

I'm positive that the amount of RAM you have isn't going to affect the quality of your capture. Either it's going to get it right or it's not. That's how this type of unit is designed. The ADVC itself, as I've mentioned before, is doing over 90% of the work. And considering the data rate of DV video is 25 Mbps and FireWire is rated at 400 Mbps, it's clear that nothing is really being pushed to the max here. If it wasn't keeping up somehow, it would be dropping frames and automatically shut down.

But the actual question of if the unit isn't keeping up with the shaky footage, I'm really not sure. Again, this would be the fault of the ADVC itself and not your computer. Maybe you are just imagining things, or it could simply be a flaw of the lossy nature of DV. I'd really hate to think this. Of course just watching the original tape would be a clue, but sometimes people do start getting paranoid about seeing flaws. I think it's really easy for the mind to be tricked, especially when you've been through a lot of previous frustration as we both have. :x

Variable bitrate (VBR) is just a method to manage file size when encoding. For me, it would be ideal to encode everything with at least 7 Mbps, but when you're talking 2-3 hour videos, it's not that simple. I have a personal rule that to never go below 5 Mbps, but I still prefer to keep it higher. I don't know how the FCP compressor works, but I would think it should offer VBR. And better yet, it should offer 2-pass VBR or more. The extra passes help make the bitrate variations more finely tuned for quality and keep the final target size correct. Anymore I use 3-pass VBR for my files. It takes a little while, so I just start it when I go to bed.

So VBR kind of helps you "cheat". For example, I did my new Japan transfer (87 minutes) using this. I left the audio as uncompressed PCM and used an average bitrate of 5.5 Mbps. I set the minimum bitrate at 2.5 Mbps and the max at 7.5. The multiple passes analyzed which parts need more bitrate and which require less, depending on the scene complexity and so forth. I watched it with my DVD software that displays the bitrate information, and the bitrate generally stayed around 4.5 - 5.5 Mbps, and sometimes spiked up around 7-8 for zooms and scene changes. During really dark or still parts, it would occasionally drop down in the 3 range. However, it never went down to the minimum of 2, which I found reassuring because that seems way too low anyway. :lol:

For something like my Nocturne transfer (60 minutes), I used a constant bitrate (CBR) of 8.1 Mbps and left the audio uncompressed. CBR encodes a lot faster, and the need for VBR just really isn't there because you're already so high up to begin with.

And you raised an interesting question, whether to keep the audio uncompressed or not. It's really a judgment call. For official transfers, the sound is usually perfect so I figure it might be best just to leave it "pure". I've also made a rule that about 95 minutes is my upper limit for keeping things on one disc and leaving the audio uncompressed. If you have a pretty average video with pretty average sound, you can lower your standards a bit. I've also kind of given up on making dual layer discs on a large scale. Since I last mentioned it I did run into a compatibility issue with someone I sent them to. His machine can still read studio-made dual layer discs, but not burned ones. And they're not exactly cheap either. Overall, still not really ideal for trading. So I've decided to make DL format for myself but also author the longer stuff to a 2 disc set, as I did with the Berlin video. Before I go any further, I'd highly recommend getting this:

http://ftp.imaginary-lemurs.com/BitrateCalc.zip


This is a really handy tool for calculating exact bitrates. You should simply be able to extract that to a folder and run the main HTML file. It's in Java, so I'm pretty sure it's "Apple friendly". ;) I use this all the time for my conversions. So let's say you have a very good VHS of a standard 2 1/2 Cure concert. Even with a 224 kbps audio bitrate, it's saying that the video bitrate can only be about 3.8 Mbps. That's not very good. You certainly don't want to go down further with your audio either, not that it would make much difference. And it certainly would be good to go up from here. So... I would make the argument that you split this one to two discs. Now change the type of DVD in the bitrate calculator to DVD10. The DVD10 format is actually just a two-sided regular DVD, but it's an easy reference here for two separate discs. DVD9 is dual layer, and no, it really doesn't have quite the capacity of two regular discs. It falls about a gig short of that. But if I'm going to split to two discs, I still follow the DVD9 standard because it allows me to make a dual layer discs too. Let me scratch what I just said a minute ago and recommend that you also try using DVD9 as a guideline because it allows a little margin of error. If you followed DVD10 exactly, while it would give you accurate info, you might end up having to split the show in the middle of a song or something. Following the DVD9 gives you that extra breathing room. And the quality isn't going to suffer, because now we've got an allowance of more than we need. Ok, so let's see what it says when we change to DVD9.

Leaving the audio as it is would allow you bump the bitrate up to almost 7.2 Mbps. But you could also switch the audio to uncompressed and have it at about 5.8 Mbps, which is still quite good. Now let's see what DVD10 says. That would allow you to crank it up to almost 6.6 Mbps. So when you consider that might not be able to split the video perfectly in half, you could safely say that your ideal target bitrate is somewhere in between 5.8 and 6.6. I would simply guess that about 6.3 would be perfect, while keeping the audio uncompressed. Now you could get into some calculations to figure this out exactly, but I don't know how motivated you are. I probably would end up doing this. :oops:

Now let's say you have some sort of TV show that's good but really not perfect. I'll say it's exactly 2 hours. According to the bitrate calculator, maybe you might just want to compromise and use a video bitrate of 4.8 Mbps and do the audio at something like 256 kbps to fit all on one disc. There's just really lot of things to take into consideration. It's just too bad dual layer isn't more standardized and inexpensive, or these decisions would be a lot easier. And the Blu-Ray that's coming out now that holds about 25 gig per disc. If they weren't so damn expensive, we could just max out the bitrate for everything and still be able to cram quite a few hours onto one of those things. It would be nice!

I don't know how DVD Studio works, but my authoring program actually leaves me to convert the audio format when building the DVD folder. I always leave my audio uncompressed when making my MPEG-2. It just outputs it as a separate wav file. This makes it easy to edit or touch up before actually putting it on disc. And I'm glad that it's a good program. I've tried quite a few for PC, and some of them are pretty scary. I admit they don't make sense to me. And others, well... Are geared at 7-year olds or retards, much like you said. I think I've found  happy-medium.

Oh, and that edge adjustment feature. The tech guy there clearly didn't know what he was talking about. It just tries to sharpen the profile of people or objects, as it says in the manual. This really just makes parts of the image sharper, which from what I see just makes things look a whole lot worse. In other words, it shows more flaws, such grain and noise. I'd stay away from it... :roll:

Well, I'm very curious as to how your work comes out! :D

japanesebaby

QuoteWell, I'm very curious as to how your work comes out!

i was thinking the other day "isn't it about time to dig this baby up and put it back on the top of the world?"  ;-)  since the conversation has been going on every now and then so i was thinking why not put it back here, to be viewed (besides, our viewer ratings are going down if something isn't done! )

ok, a LOT progress since the last time, so it's rather impossible to comment everything. but a warning: i think it's going to be a rather looong account.

and in case you have forgotten  ;-)  and for possible new readers of this topic, maybe a word about the set-up used here. because it's been quite a while since this topic was active and well it's kind of LONG thread already in order to dig out the background info:

vcr -> Canopus advc300 video converter (a great little box that converts analogue signal to digital; comes with Picture Contoller software that is operable from the computer in order to adjust the image) -> mac ibook G4

capturing application:
Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD  
- for capturing and video editing; could be used for audio editing too but if i want to make some of that then i prefer to take the audio files to some other application that i'm already familiar with, just to save some time since i work faster with those.
DVD Studio Pro 3
- dvd authoring application

additional applications:
Compressor 1.0 (mpeg-2 compressor)
A.Pack (audio compressor)

so, about a few things that we've recently discussed elsewhere: and the topic was "the fancy talk of muxing and demuxing " - in other words, whether to keep the video and audio files separate during the process or work sith a single stream. i guess different applications have different preferences for this and some have more options than others, some come with some built-in strategy. i don't know if it makes anyhow interesting reading but this is how it works for me:

when capturing with Final Cut Pro you actually have an option to choose whether your capture appears as one single .avi stream or in separate video/audio stream. i always do the capturing in separate files. one benefit which i found out some time ago is that this might actually be a good choice because of my set-up. you see i'm kind of forced to use external hard disc since my internal drive is way too limited to handle any sudden 20+ GB avi files (oh yes you need a LOT of space when capturing!). and then, my laptop has only one firewire port so i cannot plug both the canopus converter AND the external to my computer but i have to "daisy-chain" them (converter is plugged into the external which is plugged into my computer). i was a bit warned about doing this by some video editing people. it might work just fine without problems (in  theory you should be able to daisy-chain several dozens of firewire devices, at least so they say) but sometimes it appears to be a tricky setup and if that happens it might also be hard to solve. it's one of those strange crazy things that just sometimes might appear out of nowhere and then you just don't seem to get rid of them (remember that reformatting thing you were doing back then - see WAY back in this thread...). anyway, i haven't really had much problems but occasionally it has happened that frames have suddenly been dropped and i have to start again with the capturing. and it's fun when it happens on the last minute of some 2.5 hour show  :( . but it's maybe an understandable possibility that some problems might occur since a lot of data is actually going back and forth there, using the same FW to be feeded to my computer first and using the same route at the same time while it's been sent back to the external. i cannot really say i'd really had any major problems, the fram-dropping has occured maybe 4 or 5 times in all which isn't much at all but anyway the possibility has been there and it has bothered me a bit.
but so i found out that if i set the scratch discs (the locations where to captured .avi is stored and saved when it comes in) for video and audio streams in separate drives this risk actually notably diminishes, there's just less strain in the set-up. and so i can very well set the audio scratch disc on my internal drive (since the files aren't generally much more than 1 GB or a bit more) while only the video is sent back to the external. so far this seems to work very well.

so for me it's actually worth it, capturing in separate files. otherwise it wouldn't really matter at that point though whether i capture in one stream or two, because i can always set the capture in single stream and then simply export the audio from it if i change my mind and want to have a separate audio stream for editing.

(a side note about the audio: but just how often do we have a nice stereo stream when working with vhs tapes? unfortunately not everyone out there making the tapes had the latest model of some fancy stereo vcr at their disposal - well it's quite understandable if you consider some older tapes from the 80s. a pity, though.)

then, once we are in Compressor for the mpeg-2 conversion there's actually no option anymore whether you produce your mpeg in single stream or two separate streams. it'll always happen in separate streams. DVD Studio Pro (the authoring program at the end of the production "assembly line") doesn't accept single stream mpeg. if you have a single stream mpeg file you have to demux it first or you cannot import it to the program.

so, you can maybe already guess from this that i always encode the audio and video separately, yes i do.

but here comes another aspect that actually really makes me like the current  applications in my current set-up:
Compressor is an application that works completely separately between Final Cut Pro (FCP) and DVD Studio Pro. it's not really tied to either of those. i mean, you can always use it also completely separately too: so you don't even have to import files to FCP first in order to make use of it and you don't have to export them to DVD Studio pro either (so it doesn't "tag" the files it produces into some kind of project files like some other applications do so that you cannot use then with any other applications but the ones officially linked to the production chain (for instance iMovie and iDVD (which are the easy-to-use everyday counterparts of FCP and DVD SP) do this. you cannot for instance import a complete iMovie project into FCP just like that, it craves for several tricks, because the built-in link in the project file points only to iDVD).

anyway, i'm straying a bit here now. what i was saying was that Compressor is good because it's a separate application. but you don't even have to use the Compressor at all if you don't choose to. you can also import from FCP straight to DVD Studio Pro after editing, then do the authoring and only then encode to mpeg at the very end. DVD Studio pro also offers a separate mpeg-2 encoder.
i prefer to use Compressor simply because it has much more options available. and i also simply like to work with assets that are already encoded when i do authoring. but what also makes Compressor great is that if you notice that you maybe forgot something when you were making the capture adjustments for Canopus with Picture Controller. maybe you forgot the noise reduction (although that never happens, just an imaginary example! ;) or maybe the picture came out a bit too dark after all. then you still have a possibility to correct this in Compressor. it has a wide range of great filters available. you won't have this option if you go straight to DVD Studio pro and encode there. it's Quicktime encoder isn't quite as advanced, although it does produce great quality though.

i'd say that Compressor is actually pretty sophisticated mpeg compressor. although i do have the older version of the program though (1.0), the new one's a bit different than described here, so i've been told.
but for instance, there's actually no built-in option for compressed audio - i find "it's attitude" actually quite lovely "for our purposes": because it always starts with the mind that no no, you simply don't compress the audio, it's either PCM or then you just don't try to fit this much stuff on one disc. so it's a lossless fan, you see...
however, if you want to argue with it and compress the audio after all you actually take the audio file into a separate application that comes with the DVD Studio pro and which is called A.Pack. there you can do your "evil" destructive audio compression separately while you only let the Compressor handle the video file.

(by the way, this is where that little application BitrateCalc comes in very handy - because it's easy to lose the grasp of the estimated file sizes of the final products when you go back and forth between several applications.)

well, you could say that i'm kind of forced to keep the audio and video files separate most of the process because the applications require it. but i agree with what you've said earlier, that it's actually the best option anyway. it's always better to keep the audio separate until the very end and only parse the audio and video together when you are burning the final product. in that way one can always easily do some editing if one wants.

which is where we come to this:

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

mpeg streamclip is an excellent little freeware tool i recently found. i'm sure there are others like that  which are just as good, but i'd surely recommend that to someone looking for a good application. and i can say that not everything has worked so smoothly with my current other applications, but this one's been designed to work with FCP, DVD SP (and also Toast) so this has been really good for me so far.
and waht also really good as you can see when you click the column on the left and you'll also find a counterpart for windows:

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-win.html

this is very good for those of us who occasionally work with both systems - saves a LOT of time!  :D

so what good does this tool especially offer for me?
let's say you want to re-author something that's already been authored as a dvd (so it's in .vob files) and you didn't do the authoring yourself so you don't have the original mpeg streams anymore. i cannot import .vob or single stream mpeg-2 into DVd Studio pro so i need something that demuxes it back to two separate streams. and for some strange reasons i've had some problems with this. i've been using a program called ffmpegx for such things (and also different kinds of conversions between other video formats). but most of the 2-stream mpeg files it produces me are not good, and the DVD Studio Pro often rejects the video file. the other option would be to go back and re-encode the mpeg back to .avi and then make a new 2-stream mpeg from it - but that's just madness for several reasons: takes forever and you very well lose a lot in quality. the second reason is the "evil" one so it's just not an option at all most of the time. the only situation that i'd need to re-encode is if i want to take something back into FCP (which doesn't handle any kind of mpeg, just .avi or .dv). for instance i cannot do any kind of simple editing like trimming in DVD Studio Pro. but luckily mpeg streamclip also provides some basic editing possibilities (very basic but anyway, those are the ones you also most often need).
so mpeg streamclip does it all nicely for me, and it's a very good addition to my set-up.
and if i may repeat my little advertising speech:

- repeat: NO dreaded re-encoding takes place!  :D
- works very smoothly with FCP and DVD SP.
- it's both mac and pc compatible.

(that lovely program even resqued me one dvd which i thought was beyond repair and all hope: it was already authored into a proper dvd but couldn't be burned on a disc since there was some weird errors in the disc built-up. i was already getting ready to accept the fact that i'll lose the original design (that dvd actually had very good looks with nice menus so i was a bit annoyed) and i should be happy if i can just resque the .vob files alone.)

ok, enough of advertising (besides the streamclip team isn't even paying me for doing this - yet!  :wink: )

but a final note about applications and the need for re-authoring:
i think you just need to have something good running that enables you to re-author dvds when needed, and as easily as it possibly can be done. since it always takes a lot of time anyway, so you don't want any extra obstacles there.
well, it's just nice to have a possibility to do some extra work on it if one wants to. it simply adds to the enjoyment so hugely. for instance there are even dvds traded at the moment which don't have any kind of tracks at all. of course you can say that  one has to be glad that some version even exists and stop whining. but since we do have the technology and applications easily available to make it better, then why not? because you have a 2+ hour cure show on single track? now that's just pain to operate with, i think most everyone would agree.

:!:  but: it all boils down to the capturing and mpeg encoding. no fancy menus or great layouts will save you if either (or both, god forbid!) of those two very done sloppily.  if the resulting mpeg is poorly encoded, maybe because the bitrates were too low (for example, you stubbornly try to fit an entire dream tour show on one dvd - beware!) or just with a crappy encoder (most standalone dvd recorders, unfortunately) - then nothing much can be done afterwards as we know. digitalizing something unfortunately doesn't always mean the quality remained - it's sad but many vhs sources look million times better than the sloppily digitalized version produced out of it.
i think there's food for thought in that.


(ok, i wonder if this is enough for today? hmm, maybe...  :roll:  :wink: )

(the quote tags seem to work again for me, by the way  :-) )
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine

bluewater

I have some experience only on the PC and budget analogue tv-card - side. Majority of these tv/capture cards use the same kind of capture devices manufactured by conexant or philips. There?s not a big difference in technical quality. The quality is an issue of the software used there, and with some tweaking of the settings the picture can be very good. But the software bundled with these cheap cards is absolutely horrible and unusable even when watching normal tv. (and when looking at the recorded quality you?re left quite speechless). If one wants to spend only about 20 euros on a card the results can still be very good and better than on the worse standalone - dvd recorders, but the software... I?ve tried ChrisTV which is the easiest to use and gives decent quality. But it?s not free. DScaler is the best program to these cards and gives very good picture on both capture - and tuner side. Also Dscaler is absolutely free. (But not the easiest to use though.)

-bluewater

edit: oh no... dscaler doesn?t support recording... so, no other way than Christv for these old cards as far as i know. If i get christv set up again i?ll take some snapshots, but just for reference as the devices recommended by lf4 and japanesebaby are probably superior and for cure-encoding they are the only way to go.

edit: here is for reference 2 images, about as bad as it gets, this is a total crap analogue tv/capture card that costs about 20 euros (pinnacle pctv rave) and bad cable-tv signal combined. Program is DScaler, and you cannot even record it :) But still it?s watchable, whereas the original program bundled with the card is compeletely unusable.

http://img110.imageshack.us/my.php?image=still9fy.png
http://img79.imageshack.us/my.php?image=joke5wm.png

edit: another 2 images from another budget carbage card, unknown brand, costing about 15 euros. The picture is much better than on pinnacle model. Dscaler or any other program doesn?t recognize the card, but once doing some gory things both programs eat the captured video. The results are surprisingly good for an almost free card, but still, i wouldn?t recommend this one to anyone either despite the good picture (compatibility problems).

http://img513.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dog7cj.png

Recorded on ChrisTV to very low-bitrate Xvid on my own settings (5 minutes to about 25 megs) . So this is as bad as it gets (slightly above average emule stuff):

http://img119.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ndvd0016nw.png

And last, I use very fast Ati display adapters that might have a positive effect on the picture quality. I used in the first two images

Ati Radeon 9600 pro + ati 5.11 wdm drivers, 2300+ sempron, 256mb ddr

on the last two

Ati Radeon x800XL + ati 6.4 wdm drivers, a64 3500+, 1024mb ddr

as these budget capture cards take a lot processing power to look decent.
Life's too short to listen to lossy music