Messages posted by Hemant Kamat

Hi Dafydd,

Yes, I have applied the stabilizer to the whole video and am quite satisfied with the resulting preview in the edit tab (preview quality set to high.) But producing the file to MPEG2 degrades the picture quality as mentioned in my original post. Is this normal with PD?

Is there any other "temporary" format I can produce to with the same quality as the preview, and then convert to MPEG2?

Thanks for your help.

I'm trying to stabilize a DVD 720x576 50i recording of a social occasion. I have imported the MPEG2 files into PD11 and applied the Video Stabilize filter, including the fix rotational camera shake option. The output, when previewed at high quality, is almost as clear as the original with very minimal blurring. However, when I produce the project to MPEG2 (HQ DVD,) the resulting video is "soft." For example, facial features of people that were sharp in the output preview are now blurry. Is there a better way to obtain the same quality output as the preview?

Re-installed PD11 trial. Works now. Thanks.

My laptop has switchable graphics. I enabled

1) H/W decoding + Intel Effect Acceleration with the Intel HD 3000 GPU selected and
2) H/W decoding + OpenCL with the AMD Radeon 7470M GPU,

but the option to "Fix Rotational Camera Shake" remains disabled in both cases.

Hi Karl, Appreciate your assistance, but PD11 does not allow me to check that option. Please take a look at the attached screenshot. Thanks.

This option is shown in the Video Stabilizer settings, but cannot be selected. How do I enable it? Thanks.

Quote: On a related note, a few clips where I have used transitions (fades, tumbling blocks) are exhibiting a ghosting effect - a shadow of the blocks/last frame from the previous clip gets overlaid on the new scene for a few seconds. This is happening only at a few places in the video - other clips with similar transitions get rendered without any issues. Oh, and it is always the same scenes that have the problem if I render another output file. Any suggestions on fixing this?

No comments on this issue? I tried disabling hardware rendering, un-checking & deleting the shadow files, disabling the preview during production, to no avail.

Thanks for the reply, Carl.

I suspect the problem was linked to the shadow files - I had around 16GB in total for a project of roughly the same size.

After deleting the shadow files manually, the above error has not occurred (although I get an occasional 'PDR10.exe has stopped working' crash every now and then.)

Anybody else experiencing this?

Happens quite frequently when I use the undo option.

I'm using the Video Crop tool to zoom to the side and back in a clip. However, the resulting video overshoots the edge of the clip, displaying a black border for some seconds after zooming in. The crop path extends beyond the keyframe in a U turn shape. Is it possible to modify this path to remove the U-turn? I want the video to stop the zoom at the keyframe, and then reverse back without extending beyond the keyframe.

Thanks.

Quote: When you video-crop, and the faces are clearer, are you still in the editing phase? If so, you are still viewing the HD files. Try the crop, then burn the file in SD, I think you'll find a loss of resolution again.

Thanks, Barry.

No, I rendered a smaller clip to compare the quality with the original. The MPEG-2 encoder seems to be the culprit - it cannot maintain details on smaller objects. I'm contemplating using the cropping tool to zoom in and pan slowly from side to side.

On a related note, a few clips where I have used transitions (fades, tumbling blocks) are exhibiting a ghosting effect - a shadow of the blocks/last frame from the previous clip gets overlaid on the new scene for a few seconds. This is happening only at a few places in the video - other clips with similar transitions get rendered without any issues. Oh, and it is always the same scenes that have the problem if I render another output file. Any suggestions on fixing this?

I'm trying to make a standard HQ DVD from some AVCHD 1920x1080i files.

The video is a recording of a stage performance by a group of children shot from the audience.

The resulting output file shows considerable loss of detail when compared to the original (zoomed out to 1:2.25 - 720x480 in VLC.)
The facial features of the children are barely visible in the output, and the childrens' faces look blurred.

However, if I use the Video Crop tool to zoom in on a couple of the children, the resulting output file is comparable to the original (viewed at 1:1 - 1920x1080 in VLC.) The facial features are almost as detailed as the original.

So, what is going wrong in the first case? Is the MPEG-2 encoder excessively compressing the video? Is there any way to increase the quality of the output video using a custom HQ DVD profile setting?

Thanks for your help.

Frameserving does not work with PD, but I was able to save the VirtualDub output in to an intermediate "lossless" format, and re-import into PD.

I hope the developers introduce this feature soon - cropping borders by specifying the number of pixels to cut from the edges.

Quote: You've got me with "frame serve"

VD offers the ability to directly stream its video/audio to a standalone video encoder so you don't need to create a temporary video file. This is called frameserving. More info here:

http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_frameserver.html

To the video encoder, it looks like any other .avi file, but in reality, the .avi is just a shortcut to the video stream from VD.

Quote: There may be little or no difference.

Yes, the difference is marginal. The video in question is of a stage performance by a group of children, recorded while sitting in the audience at 1920x1080 resolution. The sides of the stage and bobbing heads of other members of the audience are visible, which I wish to cut out by cropping to 1280x720 (this is the target resolution.)

If I use VirtualDub to crop the video as described earlier, the resulting video shows almost the same level of details (eg. on a 1280x720 screen, the facial features on the children's faces are almost as detailed as when watching the original video zoomed in to 1:1)

But using the Video Crop tool in PD10, a slight zoom gets introduced, and the resulting video looks marginally blurry on the 1280x720 screen. The facial features do not look as sharp as in the above case.

Would it be possible to frame-serve the cropped video from VirtualDub into PD10?

Thanks again for your help.

Quote: I can't remember seeing one that will do that.

Take VirtualDub or Avidemux, for example. The Crop filter allows me to manually set the offset (from the edges) in pixels to cut out. So, if I set the following values (left: 320, top: 180, right: 320, bottom: 180) and set the output video resolution to 1280x720, no zooming is introduced. I would have done it this way, except that I will have to save and re-import the clips in PD10... again quality loss.

Hi Tony

Thanks for the reply.

Your suggestion will introduce some zooming/scaling, which I wish to avoid as it would unnecessarily degrade the quality of the output.

Can the size of the crop window be set manually? Or is there any other way to crop out the borders (top, left, bottom, right) as seen in most free/shareware video editors?

I have recorded several clips in 1920x1080 resolution. I need to crop the videos to 1280x720 to remove the borders, and I was wondering whether it can be done without any loss in quality; i.e. to ensure that the 1280x720 part does not contain any upscaling or zoom.

Alternately, can I manually set the size of the cropping rectangle in the Crop Video tool to 1280x720 instead of dragging the handles with the mouse?

Thanks for your help.