Sparktank

Darth Mallwalker said:

mod16

This forum needs a "like" button.

I strongly support AVC/h264.

It's commonly enough supported on stand-alone machines.

My DVD/BD player can support h264 inside an AVI/MKV/MP4.

The audio is a different story. The restrictions largely vary from device to device.

Stand-alones don't always support the most diverse options as a computer.
On computers/laptops you can install codecs; stand-alone hardware is limited only to what the manufacturer installed.

There are multi-media playback "boxes" that support a wider range of formats and codecs than the typical BVD/BD player.

The Blu-Ray disc format would not be a very common medium for the final output. The disc burners can be bought at a reasonable, single price. But the media discs themselves are costly on their own. It's too easy to buy cheap media; cheap in quality and standards, expensive in price.

AVCHD can be a reasonable compromise to offer HD formats on a DVD-5/DVD-9 disc for DVD/BD machines that support AVCHD (mine does).

There are several AVCHD authoring software out there that is free, but limited in support. They work well, but take a long time to convert. One BD to AVCHD takes about 24-32 hours. On a slow machine.
Depending on what settings you use, time will vary.
It it's recommended to use the slower settings as the results will significantly improve. I've tested with one movie with two different settings and noticed vast differences in the visual quality.

As for resolutions like 576p, I'm from the NTSC world. 480p is ideal for me.
Frame-rates other than 23.976/29.97 would have to be played only on the computer/laptop.

H264 doesn't have any other advantage over MPEG2, it only compresses to smaller sizes without compromising quality.

You can get a 2hour movie in h264 with optimal, albeit slow settings, at 1.4gb-2gb (in SD resolution with SD audio, preferably AAC inside an MKV/MP4) and it will look near-identical to the original DVD version.

However, please take extra measures in learning all the settings before doing anything. Some settings will waste time, others will lack care when compressing.

For watching on the computer/laptop/media devices, I'd go for the h264/aac inside an MKV/MP4.

AAC compresses more efficiently, allows variable bitrate and can support 5.1.

For archival/disc formats, the most common formats that most people would download are: DVD and AVCHD-ready disc.

ImgBurn can burn the AVCHD to disc, some of the AVCHD 1-suite programs offer it as an optional download/install.

With AVCHD, you can have 480p? I'm not sure on the 480p, but I don't see why not. But then I don't see why should you. lol.

Common AVCHD formats are 720p. You can use 1008p, but then you lose quality because you have a bigger screen to distribute the bitrate.

A common mistake most people do online is to take a pure 1080p Blu-ray and convert it to an MKV file with 1080p screen resolution but the file size equals less than 4gb.
This only gives horrible, visual discrepancies. You get runs in the darker areas of the screen. You get data artifacts and glitches. And so many visual errors.

General rule of thumb for HD resolutions:

720p = DVD-5 file size range (4.2-4.7gb)
1080p = DVD-9/DVD-DL file size range ( 7.9gb)

For 1080p, it's best to use 7~GB as a minimum.
For a really good visual presentation in 1080p, your file size can get up to 14gb, depending on runtime of the film.

And it's best to keep SD material as SD resolutions (480/576). Upscaling is not well favored as higher resolutions only benefit from data that is originally available in higher resolutions.

If you take 1080p and downscale it to 480p, you lose all that extra data that is not needed when downscaling. If you want to upscale that back to 1080p, you'll suffer from data loss and the codecs will have to "guess"/calculate the missing data, interpret the output without producing as much errors as possible.

It's the same principle as compressing anything. A picture, an audio file, or archive any data with WinRAR, WinZip, 7zip. There's lossless compression and lossy compression.

Most video formats are lossy. Lossless video compression is rather large in file size. Extremely large. Over 30gb for a 2 hour SD film.

h264 has a lossless compression option, but it's large. It's a function that has to be "called" in order to get lossless compression. Otherwise it's lossy.
MPEG2 is lossy as well. 

Extra care needs to be taken for upscaling anything.

For "extra care", it's best to get to know how to use AviSynth and VirtualDub with all the scripts and filters to get it right.

I have a decently large Blu-Ray collection and am in the middle of archiving it all to DVD/AVCHD and "portable" media such as MKV with h264/aac so I don't have to touch the Blu-Ray discs as much as possible.
And this is about the least of the information I keep in mind when transferring.

AviSynth/VirtualDub is what really takes up all the thinking.

For DVD authoring, Cinema Craft Encoder has about the same praise as Pro Coder, but both are commercially expensive.
HCEnc is a freeware encoder that offers excellent visual quality comparable to the other two commercial products.
QEnc has been used and is preferred for some. Good for doing special features and menus in lower bitrates.
Other commercial software like TMPEG do decent, but are not nearly as praised as CCE/Pro Coder and HCEnc.

I would avoid using  VSO CoinvertXtoDVD. Most end-users will say it does "excellent" work. But I find it's limited in the scaler it uses. For downscaling, I prefer to use Spline variants.

if the audio/video is out of synch, in Sony Vegas, look near the top in the toolbar for an option for "Ignore Event Grouping". This will allow you to adjust your audio without having the video to move with it.

you can also increase the height of your audio track and zoom in. It's easier to re-align your audio/video if you find a scene where there's a sudden impact sound. like a box hitting the ground, a door closing, a footstep.

It's mush easier to synch up if there's a strong visual cue to go with the audio cue. especially, a part where the scene has no music or much background noise. even dialog can be useful if you pay attention to the lip movements. Vowels are dead giveaways.

Frame by frame stepping will make it much easier to find out which frame should have the audio synched up as your reference point.

Davnes007 said:

You can use masking to cut away anything you don't want.

Masking is also useful, especially when dealing with Chroma Keyer settings.

This will also help with video-over-video layering.

jonathan7 said:

Firstly, if I wanted to fo example add some explosions to a scene, say the two rockets fired at Obi-Wan in the opening of RotS how would I go about doing that?

There are a number of programs that can add special effects. Most of them are paid programs. And most of those paid programs offer paid packages to install into your editing program.

There should be some free programs with free FX packages to install, but might not be as great as paid content.

Next if I wanted to manually take out frames, and edit them in photo-shop, is that possible and how do you then place them back in the movie?

With Sony Vegas, you can select the frames you want and export them as picture formats (PNG or BMP is preferred as they are lossless picture formats, JPG is a lossy format and visible picture quality degradation will be noticeable). You can Adobe Photoshop or other picture editing programs to do with as you please. Just remember to save them again in a lossless format: PNG, BMP, TIF/TIFF, GIF, etc.

Importing them back into the movie is actually tricky. As you're only importing still images, there is no frame rate assigned to each still image. By default, most video editing programs set the images to display for a number of seconds, usually 5 or 10 seconds before switching to the next element in the timeline.

You will have to set this manually. I can't remember, exactly, how Vegas handles images to simulate video frame rates... There is a method, that I'm sure. You'll have to right-click on each image and set the image properties.

I've done this a long time ago, video and picture editing.

Generally I take a different approach and export all my edited pictures to an AVI file. You really have to learn your picture editing software for this option, however. And it's not entirely easy, as most products don't really provide much information on complete video support. The best and safest method is to export your edited pictures (if it's in sequence), as a video in AVI format with Uncompressed encoding standards. This will take up a lot of space, but it is worth it for video editing. You'll also have to get the program to set the animation to the movie standard frame rate (23.976 "FILM"). This will ensure that importing your edited pictures will be implemented flawlessly and virtually unnoticed.

A very helpful hint: Always pay attention to the "Chroma/Transparent" settings and the Masking tools if you're going to be adding just a single element of a picture. Say you want to just add a simple picture of a cheesy "POW!" bubble, like in the old Batman TV series. For that type of effect, make sure the image for the POW! has a transparent background.

For pictures, PNG/GIF formats support Transparent backgrounds, but you have to make sure to enable that setting upon export.

For videos, the setting is found in "Chroma" settings. This is when you edit frame-by-frame to allow for a transparent part of the screen to overlap a second layer of video.

It's always good to work with multiple layers of video, as you would with multiple layers of audio. Layers can be adjusted to very finite details to mask the transitions and edits near flawlessly.

Lastly; with regards music tracks, is it possible to change music but keep existing effects in place? So for example if I wanted to change the standard droid tune to the Imperial March when Anakin sacks the Jedi Temple, how would I do that?

This is quite a difficult one to answer. But, yes, there is a method. However, it's not 100% guaranteed it will work.

Before you even think about this, you must make sure the audio you're editing (either from DVD or Blu-Ray), must be in 5.1 surround sound.

Let me repeat that, it must be in 5.1 surround sound.

If it is, you can proceed to split that audio into 6 separate mono wav files (.wav extension). Each channel (Left, Right, Center, LFE/Sub, Side Right, Side Left) will be separated and stored into its very own WAV file.

The main dialog/SFX are stored in the Center channel, most often. Unless, of course, the movie scenes call for the dialog to appear in any of the other surround sound channels. For instance, two main characters on screen talking to each other while being on the extreme ends of the screen. Person 1 will be entirely in the Left Channel while the Center channel is void of dialog. Person 2 will be entirely in the Right channel while the center channel is void of any dialog. The same applies to other dialog/SFX that might appear in the other surround sound channels.

Music is typically stored in the front speakers (L,R) and the surround sound speakers at a lower volume (SR, SL). Sometimes you'll find echoes of dialog in these side/back channels. Or sometimes full on dialog or sound effects, if the movie scene calls for it. Sometimes there will be music in the center channel as well, if the director so wishes it for whatever reason.

If you do find music in the center channel, there's not too much you can do to get rid of it. Unless you do a lot of fancy editing in audio editing software (more info later).

There are several programs that separate multichannel audio files for you...

DVD Audio Ripper/DVD Audio Extraction can do this for you. You'll have to set the parameters to rip the audio into individual mono files. Most often these are paid/trial programs. Might be lucky enough to find a free version or even a shareware version.

Not my typical approach, however.

I much prefer to use a freeware command-line tool: eac3to.

It can rip the DVD/BD audio into six separate mono WAV files without any quality loss. bit-for-bit copies. and it will do it properly as well.

But it should be noted that eac3to requires quite a bit of googling and other work to get it setup perfectly for DVD audio needs. It requires other product DLLs in order to rip AC3 audio. Or even Blu-Ray audio.

And it also requires a fair amount of diligence if you want to learn how to use it. But, it's very useful when you do learn it, as it can do much more than just ripping DVD/BD audio.

If you find the center channel has some music playing faintly in the background, you can mask this by playing your own music layered over the center channel. You can also lower the volume for the music when there is no dialog/sfx. Or if you have the same music found in the center channel, with an audio editor (like Goldwave or Audacity), you can use an advanced method of Noise Reduction by using the exact same time frame of the source music. Basically you run an audio fingerprint of the source music against the Center channel and it will do its best to reduce matching frequencies. This might cus some dialog/sfx loss if any of the dialog/sfx happen to share the same frequency band the same time the music is playing. There's also compressing and other filters you can use to try reduce the music levels found in the center channel. Much of this requires trial and error, as every movie, every scene, and every audio sequence is made differently, so there is no absolute formula to working around music in the Center channel.

It would be preferable to work with Blu-Ray audio, as it usually will be of higher bitrate and also in a lossless format.

Lossless audio formats on Blu-Rays are DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD, and LPCM audio. These formats you can convert to WAV and edit them without losing any quality. Unless of course you do any editing that reduces quality (like muting, etc).

Sometimes you'll see some Blu-Ray audio have an AC3 track only, for reasons unknown. AC3 is the same format as DVD audio (so is DTS, but DTS on a DVD is entirely lossy, whereas DTS on a Blu-Ray can either be lossy or lossless). AC3 on a DVD has a standard bitrate of either 192/224/384/448. Maximum of 448. Blu-Ray AC3 has a maximum of 640; 192/224/384/448/640.

The higher the bitrate, the better quality. Especially if it's a lossless format.

There's a lot to learn and take into consideration if you want to do some video editing. Especially some audio editing.

Here's some examples of the things you can do with extensive audio/video/picture editing with Sony Vegas Pro...

Extracting individual frames to picture formats and using a photo editor and then reconstructing again into video format...

http://youtu.be/ZQDxGuOabjM

Using 2 layers of video to create a video-over-a-video sequence with some transparent parts of the video (using Chroma Keyer and frame-by-frame editing to set points to create a template to make a section of the screen invisible)

http://youtu.be/IA4B6D0VQOw

Working with only the center channel for dialog/main sfx to add different music.

http://vimeo.com/20286765

Working with only the center channel for dialog/main sfx to add different music, using 2 layers of video to create a video-over-a-video sequence with some transparent parts of the video. No picture editing with a photo editor.

http://vimeo.com/18777518