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    Paula Vid

    I don't usually complain (and aw.com rarely gives reason anyway) but...

    the quality of today's paula vid update is unusually poor. Is there any possibility of recoding?

    I also preferred the DivX AVIs, I think MPEG-1 is a large step backwards. I understand that there would be royalty payments involved with MPEG-4 encoding but high video quality is something I would think is worth paying extra for.

    Just my $0.02.

    #2
    oh and something else...I know this might not be very social but how about a high bandwidth high quality membership (with extra $ of course)?

    I know dialup is still around (I can't imagine how frustrating that must be) and so 150MB+ Videos for everybody aren't viable but it's such an incredible waste with such great video material being compressed so strongly. You could still limit max. bandwidth per user to say 200KB/s and make some people very happy.

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      #3
      Poor VidDude has enough on his plate so I'll try to spare him some time....

      All the video compression standards work by only storing the changes between frames. Unfortunately, the Paula vids are shot outside with a lot of trees and bushes in the shot. I normally love bushes but the wind blowing the leaves means that there lots of differences between frames so the vid encoder has it's work cut out.

      The upshot is that if you want better resolution in the movies, the file size will skyrocket.

      Nice one.

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        #4
        SuperBear has it right. I tried my hardest to get better res, but even upping it to something reasonably high (doubling the filesize) didn't really improve things much at all.

        Sorry Dude. I wish I had the skills to tell it to "blur the trees but keep the girl in focus" but it's not really possible.

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          #5
          Ok, two questions.

          1) Would it be possible to put up a higher quality video aswell as the low quality ones. I understand the technical difficulties (storage, bandwidth, etc) and if one of those is a limiting factor then fine.

          2) This got me thinking about stuff. I'm a big fan of Paula but was disappointed with the quality of her vids. So I thought if it were possible to get a good copy of her vids sent out on a cd or something. Then I started thinking maybe you could put collections of vids of girls onto DVD and sell them. Now again there might be limiting factors in this (censorship, supply/demand, etc) but what do people think of this as an idea?

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by riken
            Ok, two questions.
            1) Would it be possible to put up a higher quality video aswell as the low quality ones. I understand the technical difficulties (storage, bandwidth, etc) and if one of those is a limiting factor then fine.
            We tried this for the first time with the Jamie and Luke videos, and to date have gotten absolutely no feedback either way. This makes me think it's not worth the extra hassle.

            Originally posted by riken
            2) This got me thinking about stuff. I'm a big fan of Paula but was disappointed with the quality of her vids. So I thought if it were possible to get a good copy of her vids sent out on a cd or something. Then I started thinking maybe you could put collections of vids of girls onto DVD and sell them. Now again there might be limiting factors in this (censorship, supply/demand, etc) but what do people think of this as an idea?
            The problem with producing DVD's is that any duplication house does a minimum run of 2000, and I have to pay for them, wether I want them or not. There is no way in hell we'd sell 2000 DVD's of any title (none of our GG titles have come close, and they'd be more popular and are markerted more agressively). This means it's not worth it, unless we made this compile DVD quite expensive, which again means less buyers.


            As the internet matures, more people will have broadband, and we'll be able to provide better quality videos (we already are, compared to last year, in fact).

            abby

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              #7
              Abby convinced me to put up better quality Paula vids. The filesize is somewhat larger, and the images are still not crystal clear, but they are an improvement.

              As an aside, this isn't strictly MPEG's fault. Any codec has the same hassles with high detail images. That's why the stills are often so large on sets like Hannah's tree dancing, for example.

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                #8
                Great! I adored Paula's pics so it's good to see her a little bit better on video. Any more videos of Paula coming up? Would love to see her beautiful body from a little more up close. And looking forward to the redux shoot!
                Maarten

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                  #9
                  The last Paula vid goes up tomorrow. But she actually just this week made another video for us, which I haven't reviewed yet, so that'll be good to see!

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                    #10
                    Just some quick questions to VidDude...

                    Do you use TMPGenc's 2-pass VBR encoding on the video's? What settings for Bitrate do you use? I tend to set max bitrate as 1.5xAverage, and minimum as 0.5xAverage...

                    Also, what setting do you set 'Motion Search Precision' too??? Apparently there is little difference between 'High Quality' and 'Highest Quality', apart from the latter taking much longer...

                    I still question your frame size... 320x240 is the norm, as MPEG-1 was designed as having a max size of 352x240 (TV standard).. Lowering this would give you less artifacts, as each frame would be compressed less for the same data rate.

                    bigDave.

                    p.s. I have just noticed that the early Paula vids were set to 29.7FPS. This has been corrected on the new vids. The interpolation from your source couldn't have been helping your artifacts....

                    Comment


                      #11
                      29.7? You sure? That's a bit weird.

                      Still, I am getting advice from all quarters on these damn things. It's not making things any easier, you know. I try one guy's suggestion, I try another's, I try yours, I make a judgement call, whatever whatever whatever.

                      When it comes down to it, all this variation is a BAD THING, because our members expect consistency, not me jumping at every suggestion. Not to mention I have many things on my mind, what with trying to learn how to use Premiere Pro, which didn't come with any transition instructions for earlier versions.

                      As for all the settings, I don't know off the top of my head, and I can't check from home. I'll be back at work on Tuesday, and I can tell you then.

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                        #12
                        VidDude,

                        Sorry to get your back up again. I was trying to help, not hinder. You have admitted yourself that you find the technical side of video confusing. You see, I can't edit to save my life, so I concentrated on the technical side, many a moon ago. I can understand your frustration of lots of people giving advice left right and centre.

                        I totally agree with you that people don't want variation. We want well shot, well edited high quality video of beautiful women. That's what we signed up for, that and Abby's photo's, which already fit the bill.

                        What the majority of people don't care about is the path that you take to achieve this - The end result is all. They don't care which camera it's shot on, how it's edited, how it's compressed etc... I'm sure all they care about is a video that looks nice. Compression artifacts will never acheive an aesthetic status, they just degrade everything else that you have spent so long acheiving. These are especially annoying when you have spent a dozen or so minutes downloading a video (god knows how long it takes Dial-Up users) to download a video that has horrible blocks all over the place, blur's in all the wrong places etc... especially if this can be resolved...

                        And that was where I was trying to help. I deal with that side of online video day in and day out. I wasn't trying to increase your workload, rather trying to reduce it, so that the settings you were using would give the optimum output for the majority of the time. It's obvious though that you don't want this help. So, Best of Luck..

                        bigDave

                        p.s. What's happened to the demise of AVI - how comes the new Jamie & Suzanna video suddenly appears as an AVI???

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Abby,

                          There are a few companies who will dupicate or replicate DVD's in smaller batches than 2000....

                          Arcson's minimum batch is 500, and they too are based in Melbourne.
                          www.acson.com.au

                          MediaMovers, based in Alexandria, NSW, also do short runs...
                          www.mediamovers.com.au

                          Producing further may be more hastle than it's worth. However, a quarterly compendium of all that seasons clips would be nice - the quality on a TV is so much better!

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Originally posted by bigdave
                            It's obvious though that you don't want this help. So, Best of Luck..
                            Sorry. I sound like a real grump. I don't mean to, it just that sometimes things get on my goat, and one of them is that I've been trying to figure out what to do with these videos for the last six months and it's still not right.

                            I do appreciate your help, you've been a huge mine of information, but sometimes I will overrule suggestions even if they seem like such good sense to someone such as yourself. The 352x288 dimensions have been that way since day one, and I don't ever plan on changing that unless there is a hugely good reason. The thing is, if I did go with 320x240, what people would then be getting is a file three times the weight, but smaller in dimensions - they'd go completely postal! And I'd hear the worst of it... Hope you understand.

                            Originally posted by bigdave
                            p.s. What's happened to the demise of AVI - how comes the new Jamie & Suzanna video suddenly appears as an AVI???
                            Doggone. You're right! I must've not uploaded the mpegs of them like I thought I had. I'll sort that out when I get in this week.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              BigDave, we tried a bunch of Aussie places, but most of them don't do Adult stuff. Those that do charge much more than their counterparts in the US.

                              Of course, it's a crime to duplicate material that would be rated X by our Office of Film and Literature Classification anyway, that would put us and them in hot water. Then we have to send bulk DVD's over to the US to be shipped out to customers - expensive (again, a crime to sell stuff either from Australia, or to Australians).

                              abby

                              Comment


                                #16
                                VidDude,

                                No probs mate. Last thing I want to do is upset a fellow Videoman.

                                I have had a good look through the MPEG-1 standards, and actually cannot find any theoretical reason for you to change the frame size. So sorry for confusing you. You still have the 4x3 aspect ratio, and both dimensions are multiples of 16... It is more common to use a SIF size of 30 (16x30 = 240), but as far as I can now tell, this is a bi-product of the White Book VCD format.... and not as gospel requirement.

                                As for viewing video at small sizes, all your video looks great when played big. Perhaps you could add this suggestion to your download pages... And as I have said before (and now you have tried), upping the data rate on a smaller files works wonders!

                                But there again, if you were to pay a couple of dollars royalties and try MPEG-4...

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  I'll be getting Discreet's Cleaner XL next week sometime. Let us see what happens with that.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Cleaner. Now there's a bit of software I am familiar with. A lovely piece of compression software... I use it all the time. You will especially love the 'watch folders'... Just dump the uncompressed video in one folder, and then cleaner does it's thing, outputting the video to another folder - automatically. Also useful is the live preview of the video compressing....

                                    Your life is probably going to get a lot easier..... very soon.....

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      So I got Cleaner XL today. Been playing with it, seeing what it can do. Will take a little bit of time to come to grips with its interface, as it is not entirely intuitive and does a couple of things I find surprising and awkward.

                                      However, here is what I've discovered so far:

                                      1) Its MPEG encoder gives chunky sharp ugly results
                                      2) Mpeg4 requires a special decoder or player to playback
                                      3) Mpeg4 is uglier than DivX and saves no more space than Mpeg1, but with worse resulting image quality

                                      Not a good start.

                                      I think I'll try Quicktime next and see how that looks.

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        VidDude,

                                        What can I say???? Give me an email, and I'll try and help.....

                                        If you do try QuickTime in the meantime - try the sorenson codec - it's slower to encode, but gives the best results. Cinepac is not as good, but is far quicker to encode....

                                        Comment

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