Why don't most of the transitions work properly

curtain wrote on 6/13/2011, 2:39 PM

When I use transitions - nearly all of them - they don't play properly when put on DVD. They all show speckly effects when put on dvd but the rest of the movie plays fine - no speckly bits at all. When I watch them on the PC the transitions are fine.

When I had the old version of Magix Movie Edit Pro (12) the transitions worked fine but then I got a modern pc with Intel I7 processor and 8GB RAM with 1GB graphics card and Version 12 didn't write DVDs properly (common problem when I searched on internet with more than 3GB RAM where the only solution was to upgrade to latest version). The new version writes dvds fine so the only problem is the transitions. I have plenty of room on hard drive so that's not an issue.

Appreciate any help

Michael

14/6/2011

Thanks for replying so quickly

No, it does exactly the same thing when the dvd is played on the computer - only bad quality when playing transitions - is fine with rest of movie. I have tried several transitions and all do the same thing - small squares like a mosaic as if I've told it to do low quality but only on transitions.

This is what happens when using the Shutter 1 transition - problem being the mosaic effect!

And this is using the sunblinds transition where if you look at the top you can see mosaic problem again:

Comments

john-auvil wrote on 6/14/2011, 9:14 AM

I haven't noticed that the transitions do not work.

But... let me make sure I understand. When you burn a DVD, you play this DVD back on the DVD player connected to a television, the transitions are flawed. If you play this same DVD on the computer, it is fine?

If that is the case, then it sounds like the DVD player is the issue. I haven't noticed any issues with "speckly bits" in my final production with Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus.

Does the playback of this DVD have the same result on other DVD players?

john-auvil wrote on 6/14/2011, 2:38 PM

I am not sure what to say on that, all my transitions come out fine.

Is there a way you can give more information about your project? Information such as, what resolution is the video footage... Are all the videos of the same resolution and ratio (4:3 or 16:9)?

Do you have still images in the project, if so, what is the resolution and ratio of that content?

I might be doing things differently then most. From my camera I either am capturing in at 1440x1080 or 1920x1080 (16:9). my still frame shots are even larger (3008x2000). Once I have arranged my project, added my transitions, I save my project then burn or export.

Burning a DVD, I choose 16:9 menu, as my project was 16:9. I alter the menu structure, names and so forth to fit the needs of my project then I burn a DVD. This alters the format of course to be full size for the screen of a widescreen TV but acceptable for DVD.

None of the transitions I used caused any pixilation.

blubb444 wrote on 6/14/2011, 3:24 PM

What are the quality settings of your DVD? The effects you are describing could come from the use of constant bitrate (cbr) rather than variable bitrate (vbr), especially a low cbr could easily result in visible macroblocking and other compression artefacts (the transitions you're using can lead to strong changes from one frame to another which require higher bitrate at those parts than in the rest of the movie if you want good quality). So when you burn a DVD, it's best to choose 12 or 13 for encoder quality, vbr with a maximum of 9500 kbit/s, average of 6000-8000 (depending on the length of your movie) and minimum of 3000. There should be no visible compression artefacts that way. If your movie is very long (let's say over 1:40h) then you should consider using a double-layered DVD, or if not possible, split your movie.

blubb444 wrote on 6/19/2011, 5:11 AM

OK, so your encoder settings were already right (you don't need to use 15 for the encoder quality, there's almost no difference between 12 and 15, it just takes MUCH longer to encode) and there should also be no need to change the other settings you mentioned (they look fine to me). With your settings it's strange that you're having these issues, so we must guess a bit more:

Have you changed any other settings in the encoder? Have you chosen the right field order (DV should be bottom field first). It's also important to know whether your DV material is PAL or NTSC standard, this must comply with your project and encoder settings (different resolution and framerate, but normally the software will ask you if you want to adapt your project settings to your imported material once you pull it onto the timeline)

Do the problems also occur when you export your project as a file to the PC with different codecs? (For example try MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DV-AVI etc.)

And could you maybe upload a screenshot of the exported video so we can exactly see what artefacts there are?

blubb444 wrote on 6/21/2011, 4:59 AM

Sorry for replying a bit late but for some reason I didn't get any message about your new posting...

To make a snapshot of your movie: Download and install the VLC player (if you haven't already), put your DVD into your computer's drive, open VLC, go to "Media -> Open Disc", choose "DVD" and the right drive letter and press OK, the DVD should now begin to play. Go to the position where the artefects are and pause the video there. Now go to "Video -> Snapshot". Now, a screenshot of your video should be saved under "My Pictures". You can simply upload that here by clicking on the "image" symbol in the top column of the message box here.

terrypin wrote on 6/21/2011, 2:03 PM

Sorry to butt in but could someone please tell me how to read these posts in the normal way? At present I see a group of messages from the original poster, then a group of treplies at the bottom! What setting am i missing to make this into a readable thread please?

And why is everyone called Offline?!

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

blubb444 wrote on 6/21/2011, 4:47 PM

Oh, the strange arrangement of the posts in this forum is not your fault - it does that automatically if you edit your initial post. You could also reply to your own question instead of editing it but that's your choice, I'm fine with both.

The message form seems to be bugged anyway, it won't let me use my arrow keys to move the cursor back and forth, I always have to use the mouse which is very annoying. And when I copy/paste something in it (fx a link), it always jumps down to the end of the page, don't ask me why it does that...

But back to topic:

These artefacts are very strange indeed and I've never seen such a thing before. It looks like the final file itself doesn't suffer from compression loss because if that were the case then the macroblocks would be all the same size and parallel to the actual "movie borders" and not to the transitions!

My theory(!) is that the program already applies a compression or wrong decompression algorithm before the transition is being computed, which definitely shouldn't be the case. Again, I have no idea why it does that, especially if everything looks properly in the preview or when you export the file to your PC.

So the interesting question would be: Are there the same artefacts if you export the movie as MPEG-2 video to your PC? To test, use the "Standard DVD PAL" preset in the MPEG export dialogue.

If you're getting a good result with that then you could simply reload the exported file in a new project and burn that on a DVD (use "Smart Rendering" in the export settings to avoid recompression - should go very fast that way without additional quality loss)

If this fails too, then you could try to apply the same bugged transitions on different source material which is not DV-AVI, export that as MPEG-2 and see if there are still problems.

That way we can find out where the problem lies - wrong DV-AVI decoding, wrong MPEG-2 encoding in general or just wrong MPEG-2 encoding when burning a DVD.

blubb444 wrote on 6/22/2011, 9:03 AM

OK, so the MPEG file export is fine, that means that the MPEG encoding only fails when burning to DVD, strange...

In order to make your DVD now, you need to start a whole new project and import the MPEG file you exported earlier into that new project. Unfortunately you'll have to create your DVD menu and chapter divisions from scratch. Once you've done that, go to the DVD burning menu, choose "Burn -> DVD -> Encoder Settings -> Advanced" (the names might be a bit different since I'm on the German version, it's that window where you have all those I-Frame, B-Frame etc. options). Here check the box which says "Samrt Render" (or similar) and also the box below and then continue to burn your DVD. You should now notice that the "encoding" goes very fast (actually it's just copying and re-muxing files to a .vob container) and hopefully this time the DVD will play fine.

Still unusual that you're having these problems, I made DVDs from DV-AVI material too before and never had trouble with that but then again I didn't use that many transitions, only simple cross fading. Is your program up to date? You might need to disable your anti-virus and firewall so that it can find and install any possible updates. If all else fails you could also try to reset the program.

john-auvil wrote on 6/27/2011, 9:05 AM

Sorry to butt in but could someone please tell me how to read these posts in the normal way? At present I see a group of messages from the original poster, then a group of treplies at the bottom! What setting am i missing to make this into a readable thread please?

And why is everyone called Offline?!

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hello Terry,

This Magix.info works in a few different ways. In this thread when the user 'Curtain' replies, he is actually adding additional information to his original post. So, some structure is lost in knowing what reply is meant for what post, but after a little reading and perseverance, it does find a flow.

Some users will reply with a new answer, in that way, the newest post is always first (under the original post), which sometimes can be confusing itself. I hit the "Quote" link that was for your post so it links your post in a reply. This way the post shows what you asked, and the answer to that...

Offline just means the user is not logged into the Magix.info site at the time, it is not there name, but there online/offline status. Their name or nick name will be on top of each post.
I hope that clears up some things..