Hi Bill -

How you render your video to retain the best possible quality depends on what your source clips are and how you're going to view it.

Basically - stick to what you started with. If your source clips are AVCHD 1920x1080 @ 24MBps, render/produce your video to the same format & profile.

AVC H.264 is part of the MPEG-4, with improved compression at the same bitrates.

Are you streaming the produced files to your TV? playing them through a media player? burning to disc?

Cheers - Tony
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Tony -

Thanks for your reply. You asked: "Are you streaming the produced files to your TV? playing them through a media player? burning to disc?"

I've been trying to burn videos to disc. I can play single unedited video clips on the computer monitor. I can burn an MEPG-2 movie and play that on the TV or on the computer monitor but that's all I can do so far.

Below here, I've discussed the many things I can't do, even after going over the PD8 tutorials and FAQs. If it would be better for me to ask these as separate questions to the forum, just let me know.

I've discovered that AVCHD and MPEG-4 won't work for me. Windows Media Player won't play them and I don't have another media player. If you or someone else can suggest a player which will play MEPG-4 or AVCHD (short of a BD player, which I will buy, but not right now) I'll look into it. Ideally I'd like a software player like Windows Media Player, rather than buy a whole new box of hardware/software.

Saving projects, once I've done even a single editing maneuver, has not been possible. The project looks like it's been saved, I can see it in Windows Explorer, but it doesn't show up in PD8. In fact, when I try to "import media files" or "import media folders", even when the file or folder shows up in PD8, I get the error message "no items match your search" - and I can't bring the video file or folder into PD8 for further work.

That;s where I am right now. Any further suggestions are welcome, including the suggestion that I post each of the above problems to the forum. I guess these could be due to something unique about my computer system, but I'll bet they're due to something I haven't yet learned.

Bill

Bill Bill Hansen

OK William - maybe I confused you with the interchangeable terminology... "media player"

Some "media players" are bits of software you use on your PC. Others are bits of hardware you use to play videos, music & photos through your TV... and some of those bits of hardware can send the signal through Wi-Fi to your TV.

Examples of software:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows/products/windows-media-player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ - great for just about anything
http://mirillis.com/en/products/splash.html - superb for AVCHD & MPEG-4 (I use the pro version)

Examples of hardware:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=330
http://www.sony.com.au/productcategory/hv-media-player
http://go.iomega.com/en/products/multimedia-drive/screenplay/screenplay-mx/?partner=4750#overviewItem_tab

Cheers - Tony

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Thanks again Tony - I did know the difference between hardware media players and software which allows the computer or the TV to playmedia files. I had that in the original version of my note, but took it out for the sake of brevity. (I'm not good at brevity, as you can see from *this* note!)

I'll definitely look into Mirillis later today.

I'll post the question about saving projects in another thread.

Bill Bill Hansen

I have an extension to this question. I am making a video of high quality pictures. I will be projecting it on a large screen about 5 ft by 10ft long. I obviously want to maintain the very best quality I can. Should I use AVCHD or MEPG4? Is there any difference in final resolution if I burn a disk or produce a file on my computer and play it from my hard drive vs. a disk? Thanks.

Even before you make your slide show, be very careful about the resolution and sharpening of your original images, unless they're subjects which dont require a lot of fine detail. Charts and graphs, and some landscapes, will do well almost no matter how you handle the originals, but photos of pets and other animals, for example, will show up every bit of grain or digital noise at a large display size. Also, it's very easy to oversharpen images if they're to be displayed at a very large size. Sharpening which is perfect for a display of 1000 pixels transversely will be way too much for a display of 3600 pixels, and so forth.

Others will give better informed replies to the video part, but my undetstanding is that either MEPG4 (not MEPG-2!) or AVC H.264 will provide maximal video quality. There's even a neat way to project the resulting MP4 or M2TS files, which Dafydd Bevan has pointed out.
Bill Hansen