Encore transcoding & flutter

[brenda]

Encore gurus and especially Bill Hunt -

I've almost finished my video project, and have exported to a DVD from Encore. Everything is fine except that four of the clips have some "flutter" problems (according to Joe) which I think is a product of the lower resolution.

We had vetted every single avi, and burned the entire project to a DVD (minus menus) using PE4, and there weren't any flutter problems. (Earlier in the PE editing process we had some flutter problems with parts of the motion video, which Joe fixed by tweaking the field properties in individual clips). I double checked, and we're using the exact same versions of the avis in the Encore project. But clearly Encore had to compress everything more in order to add the timelines, and 4 menus including a motion menu. (I thought about deleting the motion menu to save space, but the avi was only 115 mb. Is that enough to make a difference?)

I set the transcoding for all the clips to automatic. Most of them came out fine. The ones that have what Joe calls flutter are high contrast motion scenes - a hand writing on a blackboard and crows flying against a blue sky. Fortunately, they're pretty short clips (1 minute).

After studying the chapter on transcoding in Jeff Bellume's book, I think I need to un-transcode some of the clips and set the ones with the "flutter" problem to a higher bitrate and manually transcode them, then let Encore retranscode everything using the automatic setting on the rest. Of course that's easier said than done. What preset would you recommend that I use? Is there any way to tell what bitrate Encore used on a clip when it transcoded automatically, so that I could pick the next higher one up?

Would it be easier or better to use PE4 to export the more problematic clips to some DVD compliant format? If so, what format?

Once again, thank you all for your great advice and encouragement.

[Bill Hunt]

Brenda,

I could not have said it better - reverting those particular Assets and then upping their bit-rate should help Before you revert (unTranscode), make note of what bit-rate Encore selected. I'd bump these up incrementally. Being small, the additional overhead should not be much.

Let's talk about your Audio, before we look at removing your Motion Asset on your Menu. What Audio encoding scheme are you using? PCM/WAV is one of the two options, is very good, albeit uncompressed and larger. The other option is DD AC3, which is more compressed, still very, very good, and smaller on the DVD. If you are using PCM/WAV (normally a very good choice), try with AC3 Dolby Digital.

Right now, what does Encore show as the space used on the DVD? If you have any room, the higher bit-rates for a couple of short Assets should not be a problem. Also, check carefully that you have not accidently added anything to the ROM content (Disc Panel), just to be sure.

Also, incase you are not using them, pick up a 5-pack of DVD RW's. Use these for test burns to keep from creating "coasters." You can use each about 1,000 times. Now, to be clear, I do not recommend on using DVD RW's for delivery, only for testing. My 5-pack of old TDK's must be about 5 years old and each has been used over 100 times, with no problem. Oh, I did have a bad burn from Nero on one, but just did a reformat, and it's back in the mix, as good as new. Might only get 999 uses out of it, but that'll do me. Also, Encore will erase the DVD RW's for you (little checkbox on the Burn menu). Do not re-format, unless you get one messed up, as I did.

Let me know how it goes. I keep bugging Jeff to do an update, especially as CS4 has added more bells-n-whistles. Still 95% of his book has no change through two new versions.

Hunt

[brenda]

"I could not have said it better - reverting those particular Assets and then upping their bit-rate should help Before you revert (unTranscode), make note of what bit-rate Encore selected. I'd bump these up incrementally. Being small, the additional overhead should not be much."

I was just about to ask you how to find out what bitrate Encore selected to transcode the avis when I looked in Encore again and realized the "project" screen is much wider than the window, and there's a hidden column for bitrate that I hadn't seen before. It transcoded all of the avis at 5.4 or 5.5 mbps - except for the avi I used for the motion menu, which it transcoded at 8.2 mbps.

I haven't figured out how to incrementally bump up the bit rate. I used the automatic setting. I was thinking about redoing the problem clips using the VBR 2 pass preset, but at which bitrate?

As boring as the transcoding chapter was when I was skimming over it to get to the fun stuff on how to use Encore, this is probably the most important chapter. I agree that Bellune's book could go into more detail about it.

Bill said: "Let's talk about your Audio, before we look at removing your Motion Asset on your Menu. What Audio encoding scheme are you using? PCM/WAV is one of the two options, is very good, albeit uncompressed and larger. The other option is DD AC3, which is more compressed, still very, very good, and smaller on the DVD. If you are using PCM/WAV (normally a very good choice), try with AC3 Dolby Digital."

I haven't learned how to use any audio editing software yet. (I guess I'm about to!) Using PE4 I took a 15 second avi and dropped in Ron's "Charge It" as soundtrack (so the video and music would loop together, and to turn down the volume on Charge It), then linked both the audio and video from the avi as the motion background and the audio. The motion background isn't that important. To save space I could just use a still image from the avi instead of an avi. I don't think anybody would even miss it except me. That might actually be even better because Charge It may loop without as long a break if there is no accompanying video. I just haven't figured out how to turn a motion menu into a nonmotion menu without having to disconnect and reconnect everything.

What audio editing software do you recommend for reducing the volume in Charge It? (Otherwise, it's too loud for the audio on the rest of the video.)

"Right now, what does Encore show as the space used on the DVD? If you have any room, the higher bit-rates for a couple of short Assets should not be a problem. Also, check carefully that you have not accidently added anything to the ROM content (Disc Panel), just to be sure."

There is no Rom content. Encore shows only 33.99 mgs free on the disk. Maybe using a tiff instead of the avi for the motion background would give me enough wiggle room to improve the important stuff.

Thanks for the tip on rewriteable DVDs. I've been giving mine a real workout these past few weeks troubleshooting all the various glitches.

Thanks for all your help,

Brenda

[brenda]

I think I've figured out the answers to many of my questions. I downloaded Audacity and reduced the volume on the music for the main menu (I think) and saved it in the same format (WAV) and imported it into my Encore project. I then saved the motion menu as a photoshop file, and, in the properties panel I replaced the audio with the new WAV file and the video with "nothing." This gave me 66 mg of elbow room and I'm now re-transcoding those five problem clips with a higher bit rate - but still using the automatic transcoding function.

I'll let you know what happens.

Brenda

[Bill Hunt]

Brenda,

It sounds like you're on the right track. With Encore (and any authoring program), there are two ways to address the Transcoding:

1.) Transcode to DVD compliant MPEG-2 outside of Encore, say in PrPro, and Import that Asset into Encore. If it IS DVD compliant, it will come in with a "Do Not Trnscode" tag in the Project Panel. The same is true for any Audio Asset. For instance, I almost always do DD 5.1 SS Audio, so I Export from PrPro as AC3. Encore does not have to Transcode this.

2.) With all Assets, you can tell Encore how to do the Transcoding, on an Asset by Asset basis in the Project Panel. Of course you have to specify parameters that are 100% DVD compliant. In the Project Panel Rt-click on the Asset that you wish to handle separately. You'll get a Transcode Settings dialog and can choose there. In the Preferences>Audio dialog, you can select Dolby Digital, or PCM WAV. Do not set to MainConcept MPEG, as this is only allowed as a secondary Audio source for NTSC (and is falling out of use for PAL, where it WAS optional). If you select MPEG Audio, your Audio will likely not play at all on an NTSC set-top player. Use one of the first two. PCM WAV is uncompressed, so larger. Though Audio does not take up as much room as Video, one can still save a little space on a full DVD by going with Dolby Digital AC3.

As for all of the ins and outs on bit-budgeting, one should start with the book, "DVD Demystified," by Taylor/Johnson/Crawford, Mc Graw Hill, ISBN 0-07-142396-6, and then go from there with bit-rate calculators. Unfortunately, "DVD Demystified" is about 1000 pages and covers every possible aspect of DVD's. However, it lists the complete DVD specs., and that is what the Assets MUST conform to. That is why I rely heavily on Encore's Automatic Transcode settings, except in a case just like your's.

Note that if you do bump up the bit-rate for your two "problem" Assets, Encore will possibly have to take a little off of the others, to fit. If they do not contain a lot of motion, you'll probably never know. Freeing up a little headroom on your disc will go a long way to allowing a higher bit-rate for those two files, and you've already done that.

Please let us know how the Project turns out and what setting you found to work with the problem files.

Hunt

[Edit] I forgot to add that Encore Help has a pretty good abstract on bit-budgeting. It glosses over a bit, and simplifies it greatly, but is a very good starting point, without having to read "DVD Demystified." Still, a lot of great info, plus the history of CD/DVD, that's interesting, especialy all of the in-fighting over the decades...