1920×1080 render from PMW EX1

[John Bollenbacher]

Fraser,

First off, it’s usually helpful to tell people a little bit about your setup, ie. working off a laptop/desktop/OS/internal drives/firewire drives, etc.

But that’s not always necessary; I went ahead and shot some 1080p footage on my EX-1 to give this a shot.

I’m assuming that you went through the sony clip browser and exported the .mp4’s as .mxf since Vegas still hasn’t offered native support for the EX-1.

Once you’ve done that there are a number of things that can cause jittery playback.

First might be slow drives you’re playing back from. Internal drives or USB drives are not ideal (although I didn’t have problems with a short clip on my laptop’s internal drive just now), firewire or faster drives are usually better, especially for .mxf footage.

OK – so assuming that you are working from fast enough drives, the other thing to check is the format of your project. Vegas pro 8.0 has all flavors of HD so you should be able to find a 1920X1080 format that works for you. If you are in a mismatched format for your footage that would be the most likely culprit for your jittery playback. The easiest thing to do is to go File>Properties (or type Alt+Enter), and then right next to the box that says “Template:” there are 3 icons. The one all the way to the right looks like a folder, it is actually a “Match Media Settings” tool. It will load the media settings from any footage you select; so click on it, navigate to your .mxf files, select it, and click “open” and then “apply” back at the main properties page.

Now your project should match your media, and shouldn’t have jittery playback EXCEPT if your preview quality is too high. At first my preview quality was set to “Best(Full)” and that 1080p footage wasn’t playing at all. Once I reset it to “Preview(auto)” it played back really smoothly. Not bad for HD coming off an internal laptop drive.

The only other thing that I can think of that might make the playback look jittery is if you are previewing this progressive footage on an external interlaced monitor, since they don’t match.

Good luck.

[Fraser Howard]

John,
Thank you for your reply. Here’s what I now know. Something about my system is preventing smooth playback of the 1920×1080 Quicktime .mov because if I import that “jittery” .mov file back to the timeline and render it as a 1280×720 .mov it plays back perfectly from the Quicktime player. I believe this proves that the fault is with the machine or the Quicktime Player and not with the 1920x .mov file.

My Vegas 8.0b workstation is:
Dell E6400 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz, 2 Mb cache, 4Gb DDR2 SDRAM @ 667 MHz
Dual 320Gb eSATA 7200 rpm internal RAID 0 HDD
ATI Radeon Sapphire HD 3870 512 Dual Graphics adapter
Dual Dell E228FP 22″ monitors

If you can suggest which of these components is/are suspect, please advise.

Thanks again for the help. Much appreciated!

Fraser Howard

[John Bollenbacher]

Fraser,

It seems like there is something else going on here, and I don’t suspect your machine. How did these EX-1 files become .mov’s? They start out as .mp4’s on the SxS card, and I’m pretty sure the preferred workflow is to convert those .mp4’s to .mxf files to then edit in Sony Vegas.

Since Vegas is a PC app, it’s really happiest with .avi files (or .mxf files – but those are still more processor intensive). It will play just about anything, but with different amounts of processing, and I bet that an HD .mov might be a little much for it to swallow? If you render it I bet it plays smoothly, since it is creating a converted copy to read, in a format it likes.

If I were you, and I still had the EX-1 and cards, I would use sony’s free clip browser software to export the clips you are using as .mxf’s and try those in Vegas.

[Fraser Howard]

John,

The files were exported from the SxS card to the internal hard drive with Sony Clip Browser, using the mxf-for-nle option which, as you said, converts the EX1 mp4 files to mxf format. The mxf files were imported into Vegas and placed on the timeline then rendered as Quicktime 7 (*.mov) @ 1920×1080.

The jittery playback occurs when playing the .mov file in the Quicktime Player (ver. 7.5) – not from the Vegas timeline – which plays the 1920×1080 mxf file perfectly even in Preview (Full) mode. I also have rendered the same mxf files to Main concept H.264 with the same poor result @ 1920×1080 but perfect playback @ 1280×720, also in the Quicktime Player.

I absolutely agree re. mov on the PC however avi (uncompressed) produces file sizes in the gigabytes for a few second of footage. The whole purpose of the mov exercise on my part is to comply with the arcane file format requirements of iStockphoto who insist on mov file formatting for uploads to their site! No wonder it takes weeks for them to process your uploads. A 1920×1080 20 sec clip is approx. 200 Mb!

Fraser Howard

[John Bollenbacher]

aha. now I understand. Sorry about the confusion.

There are a number of things you can check.

When I rendered 30 seconds or so of 1080p footage to quicktime, using the default settings, it came to about 7GBs. I think it’s because it is completely uncompressed by default, and to play back uncompressed HD you usually need a very fast raid array.

I’ll mess around with different compression codecs to see which one looks and works the best – You post your findings too, cause I’d be interested to see which one works.

[John Bollenbacher]

So far MotionJpeg A has been the best quality to size ratio. Much smaller, but looks good.

I edit a lot on FCP and a really good codec is the dvcproHD codec, but not seeing that here… so I’ll try a few more.

[John Bollenbacher]

Cinepak codec looks pretty good (not as good as the Motionjpeg), but is about half the size and plays very smooth.

[Fraser Howard]

John,

Apparently, when rendering mov files, Photo-JPEG is the codec of choice for progressive video at any resolution. Since none of the 1920×1080 mov codecs will playback solid on my current system, even in a half-size window, I’ll never really know the difference.

The crazy thing is, I took some great advice from Edward Troxel and checked out the MainConcept MPEG-2 Blu-ray codec in Vegas. It plays back like a champ in Windows Media Player in any size window that I can fit on my 1680×1050 screen. You can practically “feel” the difference. It’s so sharp and has such superior contrast range that it’s, by far, the best video render I’ve done yet (except for the green “scan” line at the top of the frame – what’s up with that?). Best of all, the 20 sec. MPEG_HD source (mxf) file is 89Mb, the Blu-ray m2v render is 63 Mb and the mov / Photo-JPEG render is 371.6 Mb!

Of this I’m certain: I don’t need a system upgrade – just patience while we wait for Blu-ray to take over!

Fraser Howard / Toronto

[John Bollenbacher]

Fraser,

I guess the question is how are you finally going to show this material. You could burn a DVD (mpeg2). I assumed that you had to have it in a quicktime format, and that’s why you were rendering to it. Unfortunately, QT is losing the race in the small files size/quality ratio. Although H.264 codec for QT might have given us the best quality for small size; but don’t see it here as an option in Vegas yet.

[Fraser Howard]

John,

I’m only doing the mov renders for uploads to iStock. Their clients can adapt the files any way they want – I’m not involved. Otherwise all the usual options work fine on my machine: wmv, H.264, avi etc.

That said, if I was an iStock client, I would much prefer to receive the original mp4/35 Mps, HQ, EX1 files. The client can download the free clip browser from Sony for the operating system of their choice and convert the original files any way they need them. But iStock is dealing with huge volume and a broad range of source footage so obviously they want to have a common denominator file format – hence mov – for now.

Fraser Howard / Toronto