Re: Is HD-24p 1280x720 good enough? Indie Movies & Documentaries

Watch the Main Concept CODEC.. most of the presets there are intended for devices, like iPods, not something similar to Blu-Ray in quality. Perhaps you can set up a higher quality output (I've actually been messing around with this), but not without a much higher bitrate setting.

You really don't want to be editing MP4/AVC anymore than you can help it. While obviously that a problem to be solved with an MP4 camcorder, rendering out to MP4 should be considered a delivery format only, not a thing for re-editing. AVC is very CPU intensive, moreso than any other format at least currently in common use. As an example... 1080/60p video from my Sanyo VPC-FH1 (twice the usual amount of information) takes about 65-75% of my Q9550's CPU (eg, all four cores) just to play back in full resolution and full 60fps speed. It's much better with GPU-accelerate playback, but you need a player that does this.

Now, you can go faster, but the Q9550 is still a fairly respectable CPU. Now imagine the resources you're spending trying to edit that, particularly since Vegas, like most other NLEs, seems to use only the one CPU for rendering during edits, and no GPU acceleration. This is the problem with AVCHD and other MP4 editing today.

WMV (the latest version of which follows the open VC-1 standard) is hardly lossless. It's not quite as sophisticated as AVC, but it has a family resemblance... some of the same people were involved in both. WMV was designed to require fewer resources, particularly on playback, so yeah, on your relatively slow machine, it should play back better. Microsoft also set their original WMV/HD standard to use 720/30p video... easier to fit on a DVD, easier to play back on PCs and devices that couldn't handle AVC just yet.

Nothing wrong with WMV. If your main distribution target is PCs rather than DVD/BD players, you can technically create a WMV/HD DVD that'll play automatically on a Windows PC when inserted, complete with menus and everything. Quality is not Blu-Ray level, but hey, you're watching on a PC, so you're not looking for that, usually, anyway. Authoring is a bear.. this was never successful enough to spawn lots of authoring tools. Before BD, anyway, I used to hack these by hand... HTML and JavaScript, you see..

-Dave