Need Advice on Exporting Project

[AnicentEditor]

Hello, everyone

I recently completed a music video in Adobe Premiere Pro (7.0) and need advice on what is the best codec and any additional steps to take when exporting the finished project, so that when I go to compress it with Divix I won't loose any visual quality.

First some background:

-The source footage is DVD (VOBs) via the Avisynth/DGIndex method
-The footage is a live-action movie using Progressive 24 FPS (Force Film in DGIndex)
-The target platform is internet/PC/Mac distribution (not NTSC screens)

My questions are....

What is the best codec (HuffYUV; Lagarith) to export this kind of project with?

What modes are recommended (RGB; Y12)?

I understand Y12 is the native DVD colorspace, but Premiere uses RGB... So it is better to export the project in RGB -- Uncompressed or Normal? -- And then go back to YU2 (by default) when I compress it in Divx in VirtualDubMod?

Basically, how can I avoid, or at least limit colorspace changes and retain the overall quality of the final project to be as close to the original DVD source material (aside from using various post-processing filters as well)?

[AnicentEditor]

P.S.

One last question...

The footage in question is also 2.35:1 anamorphic format (16x9).

To have it display in the proper ratio on PC monitors would I just rezie it using:

LanczosResize(720,360)

Or are there other values that would render it closer to its original dimensions?

[Kariudo]

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... xport.html
or
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... xport.html

I would actually just go ahead an export uncompressed...exporting with huffy/lags always gives me a few bad frames (using premiere pro 1.5)

You can probably keep your vid in RGB (if you need to do a conversion or two go ahead and do it later...it won't really do anything to the quality unless you convert to YUY2)

to make you vid even more compessable, do another quick little avs script.
crop off any little black borders you find using crop(int left, int top, -int right, -int bottom)
then resize using LanczosResize(int height, int width)

depending on the footage, you may want to apply a smoother (helps to increase compressability w/minor loss of detail)
more on the above here (includes a bit about resizing...then codecs)

in my opinion, xvid gives you better quality than divx (allowing you to make the file smaller when holding quality constant divx vs xvid)
even better is H.264...but H.264 isn't as widespread as divx or xvid (yet)
and don't forget to compress your audio (hopefully you didn't edit with an mp3 file) this can reduce your final filesize by 20-30MB or more

[AnicentEditor]

Kariudo:

Thank you, for the reply.

I experimented exporting the project using different codecs (Huffy; Lag) before I posted my question and you are right when you say to just leave it as an uncompressed RGB file and do any colorconversions in VirtualDub.

Also, thank you for the tips on cropping. I will take those into consideration as well.

[AnicentEditor]

UPDATE:

I exported using uncompressed RGB and encoded with Xvid. I cropped the image and everything went fine.

The video looks good (nice, clean and crisp)... Except for the title of the film which I cut in at the end of the video.

The title is originally a deep crimson (red), but the final image has a lot of ghosting and the red is bleeding out of the contours of the title letters.

Is this evidence of a colorchange... And if so, how do I go about correcting it?

Understand, this is NOT a homemade graphic. This is the actual title used in the original film from the original (24 FPS) film source. Also, all other colors in the film/video are normal. There is no ghosting or bleeding of any other reds except for the title.

All help would be greatly appreciated because the video is done except for this one "minor" thing and I would like to fix it (if possible), so I know what to do if I encouter it again in another project.

[Kariudo]

could you post a screenshot of it?
[in case you don't know how to]
(use the prt sc button, then open up ms paint and press ctrl + v)
upload to www.imageshack.us
copy the direct link
put it in img tags [img]and%20close%20with[/img]
so it would end up like this:
[img]url%20to%20direct%20link[/img]

[AnicentEditor]

The above image ("Blade Runner") is from a screen caputre in VirtubalDubMod.

Upon further investigation, it appears to be more of a blocking and aliasing problem than the colors bleeding.

In contrast, here is another title screen (below) that shows no signs of blocking/aliasing:



........

The perplexing thing is it is JUST the main title (the red one) and the rest of the video is perfectly fine (no blocking; no aliasing problems).

Why would the white title not show any signs (or as much) as the red one?

As I said, it isn't that big of a deal... But if it is indicitive of more severe problems then I would like to know how to address it in this project, so if it happens again I can fix it in others.

[Scintilla]

Why would the white title not show any signs (or as much) as the red one?

Because in the YV12 colorspace, luma gets sampled four times as often as each chroma channel.

Edges between areas of flat black and flat red will always look bad in YV12; there's really not much you can do about it. (And all the distro codecs -- MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DivX, XviD, x264, etc. -- use the YV12 colorspace.)

[AnicentEditor]

Scintilla

Thank you for your reply.

I am glad that it isn't something more seve, but of course, I am also disappointed there is no real fix for it.

Anyway, thank you both, Scintilla, and Kariudo for your prompt and informative replies.

.....

For the record, I am not new to editing and have been doing it since the early '90s using 1/2" VHS and 3/4" Beta and professional editing decks. I am new to NLE and digital formats and I just want to say this site and the How-To Guides have been nothing short of a God-send as almost everything about Anime videos applies to live-action videos as well.

Thanks again for your help,