Thanks John, understood.

I follow a similar approach to you, video first then audio, and I too usually don't then have to edit the video.

But the project I'm just finishing, a 17 day holiday, ended up much longer than I'd anticipated; 1h 47m instead of maybe 1h 15m. So heavy (and tricky) pruning is now in progress!

I hadn't been keeping a careful enough track. I made an MP4 for each day, and then just imported all of them to make the final 1920 x 1080 MP4 for playing on my TV via the WDTV unit.

BTW, when you make any 'intermediate' files like that, do you use MP4? It's a real pain that MEP doesn't/can't apply smart rendering. That final conversion took about 3 hours, even though the individual MP4s were all in a 'finished' state. Maybe I'll switch to MPEG to get the benfefit of smart rendering.

On reflection I'm also thinking that 1920 x 1080 was OTT, given that maybe a quarter of my objects are 640 x 480 AVI movie clips (from my old camera). The photos and other material (like GE tours) are all high res, but I wonder if it's worth it. Especially as I found this morning, on coming to make a DVD disc of the video to send to my son, that as the (pruned) MP4 will be about 6.6 GB, I will presumably now have to let MEP adjust the bitrate and sacrifice quality to get it on one 4.7 Gb disc.

Edit: Well, I've now made a DVD (1h29m) and I can't say I can see much/any difference in the final TV showing!

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

For such a long movie of my holidays I split it up into more manageable segments relating to the area I am in and the relative amount of video etc taken, each as an individual movie approx 20 - 30 mins long, and chaptered, so they do not bore the viewer .

I then combine them into one project so there are 3 - 4 seperate movies with chapters.  The main menu selects which section I want to watch and the sub menus the Play and Chapters options for that movie.

Cheers

John

Thanks John. Do you work with MP4 throughout? And what bit rate do you use for 1920 x1080 and 1280 x 720 respectively to balance file size and quality please? I've never focused on these settings much before, as I'd assumed bit rate would be set automatically by MEP17 to match the chosen resolution.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

I'm with you Terry. With "all tracks" set in Intelligent mouse mode, say, I would expect all (complete) objects on all tracks to the right of the cut to move. However the ripple effect seems only to be implemented for the insertion of objects from the media pool. A flaw maybe, but a good new feature for the next version.

Cheers

Peter

Thanks Peter. But as for a new feature, I' d still like a few of the bugs fixed first!

Can you give me any feedback about my bit rate queries please?

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Fair comment I guess Terry but I guess things have changed a little in that some of the bugs previously got fixed in the German release before the English delayed release.

I have not done much experimenting with MP4 / H264 bitrates in regard to minimums that would give acceptable quality as I have been concentrating at the other end of the scale - trying to get my 1080 / 50p images out of MEP in the same quality as they went in. This has caused me to bump up to 36Mbps to get rid of residual artifacts with this format which is at the extreme end of the scale.

I guess for 1080i 25fps I would use about 18Mbps and 720p about 14 - 16Mbps for best quality. MPEG4 is about a third more efficient than MPEG2 and uses a few more tricks to keep acceptable quality at very low data rates so given that you have some low res material in there you could probably try dropping the BR a lot and maybe use a long GOP of 30 or more ( I see the I Pad export preset has a GOP 120 frames long - wow! ). Also 2 pass VBR should come into its own as data rate gets squeezed.

The presets are taylored for different qualities (eg Archive HD, etc.) and devices but I have seen one which is for 1920x1080 which has a BR of 6Mbps and a Simple Profile which seems inexplicable, so do not assume they will all suit.

I was not aware that MEP17 will not smart render MPEG4 H264 but the problem I guess will always be matching the export parameters accurately enough with the original material to let this take place - not having the luxury of the "From File" button in the MPEG2 encoder.

BTW you can use quite low BR without losing quality on Hi Res photos (without pans and zooms) because the pixel information over many frames does not change until the next photo, saving a lot of Bits in the compression.

I think MPEG4 is the best way to go and actually decided to reencode some old movies I had saved in DV-AVI back in MEP2004. I up-res'ed them and cropped them to 16x9 and found the encode created a much smoother less blocky image than the old MPEG2 encode gave me back then. 

Peter

Many thanks Peter, much appreciate those detailed recommendations.

Some of those numbers made my eyes water - out of my league! The default that I see for my current project (set to 1280 x 720) is like this.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/MEP17-BR-1.jpg

That 4Mbps seems very modest compared to your numbers, but it seems to give good results on my 'HD ready' Panasonic TX-32LXD52 32" LCD. I experimentally increased it to 8Mbps but it took so much longer and I couldn't see any difference.

GOP and many of the other fields are outside my know-how level! And that worries me because I recently found that the original defaults had somehow got altered, and I remained blissfully unaware for some time. Only when I started to get poor output did I investigate more closely. Do you find the defaults reliable?

BTW, I'd estimate that maybe only 1% of my photos don't have pan/zoom, so I can't make significant economies there.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

I am not surprised you are getting quite good results with those settings if you are mainly using stills. With a long GOP of 30+ there is only one complete (albeit compressed) frame every 33frames and all the others are just predictive data about differences from that frame and the next ones. Even with pans and zooms the differences from frame to frame are very predictable for the compression, with a low resultant data bandwith required. Contrast this to a handheld, shakey, video wide shot of a tree with all its leaves moving in the wind and imagine how much information is required for changes of each pixel from frame to frame.

There is a fairly straight forward explanation of all this in the MPEG glossary near the end of the PDF manual.

Doesn't the "restore default" button, at the bottom in your Encoder settings screen shot, restore the original settings? If not "Reset Program defaults" should. Also, whilst your changes are retained when you reopen the first export window, you should see that the preset dropdown list at the top has changed to "User defined". If you reselect the appropriate preset from that list it should open the advanced window with the default settings. You can save your changes if you make any, as a preset, by clicking the save button adjacent to the preset dropdown and renaming from "User defined" 

Have a play.

Thanks Peter, very helpful. I'll do some experimenting and read that glossary.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

Missed your question re mp4 - did not get notification either!!!

All my projects source material is AVCHD 1920*1080i and stills - hi res jpg or png files.  

For streaming to my TV I export AVCHD (mts) at the standard settings for 1920*1080 Pal.  

For BD I use H264 at standard settings and for DVD I up the quality and bit rates to maximum.

John.  

Yes John - that notification of a response is very unreliable and can come through weeks late if at all. I did mention it to Ralf a while back but I think it is outside his sphere of influence or focus.

Peter