Does Vegas 8 have Quicktime Sorenson codecs?

[Rob Mack]

Just looked again at what Quicktime formats Vegas can see and there are a whole set of Avid codecs I installed. So I’m not really sure who’s doing the blocking, but I suspect it’s the codec providers, not Sony.

But that raises another question, what do other vendors on the windows platform do to enable some of the more proprietary codecs? Do they pay a fee?

Rob

[Jeff Weinberger]

The Nvidia sites has had postings about recent Nvidia drivers that cause Quicktime Pro to close when the user tries to select custome export options. This is especially bad with 8600 series Nvidia cards.
But QT Pro has an option to “export Movie to Image Sequence”, and then you can choose from these formats:
“BMP, JP2, JPEG, Mac Paint, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, Quick Time Image, SGI, TGA, and TIFF”.

I’ve never tried to access the Vegas timeline using a frame server. Can anyone confirm that Vegas can render real frame sequences through QT Pro using that method?

[Jeff Weinberger]

I just took a look at the QT video export options from within Vegas, it looks like the video formats are there in the current version, but it appears that the Quicktime Pro plugin does not offer the option to export as a frame sequence. That option is currently there in the QT Pro export options of the QT Player. Frame export used to be a plugin option with older versions of QT. So you could probably obtain it from an older version of QT, though the new version of Vegas states that it requires Quicktime 7.

[Rob Mack]

I just did it before posting. You know, test first, then write…

Use the Debugmode frameserver. To get it working In Vegas8 you have to make a registry modification, and you can find instructions if you go search on the Sony Creative Software forum. From there, you can use the Quicktime player to export still frames.

You’d have to look at the output for yourself to decide if it meets your standards. All this is free, except for Quicktime Pro, so I strongly recomend that you try it for yourself.

But I think it’ll do what you want.

Rob

[Jeff Weinberger]

Rob,
I went to the Sony forum, saw your post there, found links to Debugmode frameserver. Initially I am not able to get an output, but will have to wait until I have some time to figure out how this process works. I didn’t know that rendering could be done through TmpegEnc, I have been compressing from it with rendered Uncompressed AVI files in the vicinity of 100 Gigs each.

[Rob Mack]

The biggest advanatge of the debugmode frameserver is that it outputs uncompressed data withou having to render a huge uncompressed file. And of course if you needed to render a file you could do that by other means.

QTPro doesn’t show the output of the frameserver for some reason, but you can take a leap of faith and just start the export. It appears to work.

VirtualDub would give you the same results for some of those output formats, and of course it’s free, and it would show you your progress.

It would very nice if Vegas could do this directly, but it can’t, and it’s not really a quicktime-based application so what you get fom quicktime is essentially extra sauce. (But then, sauce is the most important part of any meal…)

Rob

[Jeff Weinberger]

I was able to render frames with TMPEG Enc, but only up to 720 x 480. 95% of my projects are HD. I was able to get debugmode frameserver to work with Combustion 4, and could output Combustions’s RAM render as 1920 x 1080 PAR 1 and 1440 x 1080 PAR 1.333.
It would be much more convenient if Vegas offered an option to render real frames. I can appreciate how the current system could be easy to use for consumers, such as a grandmother who wants to take a snapshot from her camcorder and e-mail a JPG image to members of her sewing circle. Sony has a ‘Movie Studio’ version of Vegas that serves the casual consumer user. But the exact same system is used in the “Professional” version of the product. It means that the Vegas development team thinks that most Vegas users would not be able to comprehend real frame rendering, that users would be overwhelmed by and unable comprehend settings for frame size, pixel aspect ratio, and image formats. Sony deliberately wants to keep the product simplistic, even though it is being marketed as “Professional”.

[Rob Mack]

I can’t argue with you on that. Vegas, just like FCP and PPro, relies on consumers for the bulk of their sales. I’ve talked to development teams from other companies about certain “non-pro” practices they use in their software and gotten blank looks. Consumers editing DV still drive these products. Some systems cover some features better than others.

I didn’t try frameserving to tmpegenc because I assumed it was a tool for making SD encodes, so it’d have more restrictions on frame size. It sounds like you’re confirming that. Don’t give up just because you think this one method supports your opinion.

If you can stand back and look at Vegas’ design you’ll see two things. First, it was built originally as an audio application, and second, it evolved into a prosumer DV editor. The point about it being an audio editor is important, because Vegas resamples everything you put onto the timeline to fit the project properties. Vegas has no real tool for outputting image sequences, but it assumes that all stills brought INTO vegas are 1.0 PAR. So it just treats any still as if it had a 1:1 sample rate (which is what a pixel aspect ratio really is–a sample rate)

The truth is that most users really DON’T get non-square pixel aspect ratios, and Vegas really DOES handle it simplisticly. It’s unfortunate that users have to rely on free tools like VirtualDub to create still sequences since, as you say, grandmothers aren’t likely to figure this out. But I’m sure you’ll be able to.

As far as “Real” frame rendering goes, the frameserver method is about as real as you can get up to an 8bpp limit, and the preview window in Vegas is potentially more real than the prerendered frames you see in other programs, because it’s a straight frame off the timeline (The caveates here are many, though. You have to set up the preview window “just so”, and of course you’re getting an 8bpp image).

But you make a very good point that grandma’s aren’t going to be able to manage this.

Good luck,

Rob

[Jeff Weinberger]

I just used the debug frameserver to feed the Vegas time line into Premiere, and that worked quite well. Adobe Premiere has wonderful options for exporting frame sequences, and they have such an elegant design for choosing options. It would be nice if the Vegas design team could incorporate those options into a future build of Vegas. The existing system of grabbing from the Preview window could be left intact. There could be an option in the rendering choices to select a frame sequence. The options dialog box could even default to the basic settings that currently exist, and there could be an “Advanced Settings” box that could be clicked to reveal a settings screen that has the settings that Premiere offers.
My recent projects have involved shooting with a Sony XDCAM system, which is considered a professional format as it currently isn’t available in consumer camcorders. It would be great if Sony would facilitate the editing of XDCAM projects by including more professional features in “Vegas Professional”.

[Rob Mack]

Agreed. Vegas should have a “render as” option for image sequences. The Render Image Sequence script found in the Tools menu is user created and included in Vegas as an example of a script. It probably shouldn’t be, because there are better scripts out there to do the job. However, they all must rely on the Preview window (which can give you uncompressed full resolution output, and can be set up to do so as part of the script).

The only problem with using a script and the preview window is that Vegas will automatically correct for your project’s Pixel Aspect Ratio setting, so you can’t get uncorrected frames out of some project templates like SD and HDV templates. This is the only problem aside from the user errors you’re encountering, but it’s a show stopper for most applications where you’d want to export an image sequence.

The best way to deal with it is to frameserve to VirtualDub, which is free and actually works a bit better than Quicktime Pro for this. Frameserving to PPro is an interesting solution but kind of like pulling a plow with a station wagon–wrong tool for the job but it works if that’s all you’ve got.

I don’t use XDCam but I know that Vegas has been incorporating features for it for at least the last two versions, as well as the ability to use SDI, and most recently a 32-bit float mode and support for reading and writing 10-bit formats. It’s pretty obvious that Vegas has higher aspirations than DV and HDV, but these have vastly wider adoption and Sony, like Adobe, have to cater to those markets. Adobe is also struggling to have their product accepted as a professional tool.

Rob