follow-up to Vegasvs FCP (wondering about QUALITY)

[Frank Black]

So it is the monitor.

[Jonathan Thomas]

You are right John. But the problem is, all Apple laptop and desktops look much better than anything on the market. I have three associates 2 with laptops and one with that 27in iMac. So I can’t compare anything else that Apple have but whats out on the market.

As of matter of fact, that what sold me on my next puechase on buying a Mac to run Vegas. Even my website looks much better on a Mac than a PC.

Remember the first rule of video and web. Check out how your work looks on other computers and web browsers. And I did…it looks much better on a Mac. What got my attention was my associate editing on a Mac PowerBook Laptop and video and photos looks incredible. Then I starting to research why.

Now I understand why Mac cost more than the regular PC.

[Dave Jenkins]

[John Rofrano] “PS. Does your company make HDCAM tapes with closed captioning? ;-)”

Hi John, It sounds like you have had a hard time. We can master to HDCAM with our AJA Lhe card. What format are you sending to the post houses? Avid DNxHD is not a common file format for FCP. You can install the AVID Codecs but it’s not the best route, it won’t playback with the Lhe card unless you render so an FCP friendly Codec.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
MacPro Two 2.8GHz Quad Core – AJA Kona LHe
FCS 3 OS X 10.6 QT 10

[Sebastien Gravel]

Monitors need to be color balanced. I would say, out of the box, apple monitors are fairly well balanced, but they still benefit from a spyder or eye-one calibration.

Once that is done, your Dell or whatever brand monitor should look just as good as an apple one. That is if they are of a decent quality to begin with.

[Jonathan Thomas]

Also, I notice Apple H.264 looks much cleaner even on the web. Just go to Apple website and look and the video samples of there features.

That tell you right there!!!

[John Rofrano]

[Frank Black] “John, what do you mean by “HD Cam tapes for Vegas?””

We are submitting a show for broadcast and the station will only take submissions on HDCAM tape so we need to print our project from Vegas Pro onto and HDCAM tape. One way to do that is to buy a $35,000 HDCAM deck and a $1,000 AJA card and print to tape directly from Vegas. Unfortunately, our budget doesn’t include $36,000 to make a tape. This means that you have to send it to a post production house that can make the tape for you and we haven’t found one that isn’t Mac based. Unfortunately, the primary codec for FCP is ProRes422 and Apple does not make ProRes422 codec for the Windows version of Quicktime. This leaves PC users very little choices.

What makes matters worse is that we need closed captioning and while Vegas can now create a closed captioning file, very few post houses know what to do with it. 🙁

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Jenkins] “You can install the AVID Codecs but it’s not the best route, it won’t playback with the Lhe card unless you render so an FCP friendly Codec.”

This is good to know. If we can’t get this tape made we may be contacting you. The post house we’re dealing with now is at least willing to experiment with us so I’m hoping we can find common ground.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Erik Lindahl]

I just skimmed through this thread and my objections have probably been answereded but..

In fact, Vegas can produce higher quality files because Vegas will accept the native format from your camera and in some cases (like MPEG2) if you don’t change anything, it will output the exact same video frame pixels-for-pixel with NO LOSS in quality while FCP can’t even work with your native camera files, it will re-render them just to edit them and re-render them again to the output format. Every render has the potential of loosing quality so you tell me which is higher quality… no rendering with Vegas (or one render for non-MPEG2), or two renders with FCP?

This is highly incorrect. It’s true that FCP will re-wrap most camera native codecs to QuickTime files, but that doesn’t mean it has to re-encode the codec. Get your facts straight. Re-wrapping and re-encoding are two very different things (and in a lot of cases the later is preferred anyhow). The hole “working native” debacle is interesting. I do see the point in it and I’ve seen a lot of demos from Adobe showcasing CS5 and well from what I’ve seen, h264 editing is just not solid there unless you have CUDA hardware. Fine, you want to do a very very simple in / out edit, it works, cool tech-demo. But in reality, the lag, the loss of detail during playback and so forth when working with these files are just more head-ache than you actually need. Rendering will also be slower on any system (except perhaps a CUDA-accelerated one) as rendering to a h264-codec will take far longer time than a modern editing codec like ProRes. But yes, sure, it’s nice to have that option.

As for FCP output looking cleaner… that’s just nonsense. What does “look cleaner” mean? You can get any “look” you want with any editing application. Most applications use the same plug-ins so I don’t know what “look cleaner” even means.

I agree that a statement like this is a bit stupid, but two applications WILL rendering things differently and one might appear “cleaner”. I’m pretty sure of that. Different applications will also handle things like RGB to YUV conversion differently as well as pixel down-sampling (4:4:4 to 4:2:2 for example). Claiming “in my experience, FCP produces a clearer results than Vegas” is just as right or wrong as me claiming “Episode Encoder produces cleaner 4:4:4 to 4:2:2 conversions than FCP” (which imo it does).

…I am constantly shocked at how little Mac editors actually know about the inner workings of video and codecs which is probably why they have no technical answers to backup their senseless claims…

I’m a bit shocked you make such a definite claim. One could perhaps say “in general editors have little in-sight to how codecs and formats work” rather than FCP-editors. But given the vast size of FCP-users out there, yes, you’re likely to find more non-technical users. But this is just like saying “a lot of writers have little in-sight how Word or other formats work”. You often have different people for different jobs and yes, I’d love to see a higher level of technical understanding in my field, but I’d say you’ll find just as many “idiots” using FCP, AVID or Vegas.

To back up my “claim” above about Episode “beating” FCP in a the area of pixel down-sampling. Yes, it probably has some kind of chroma filtering going on in the background making it appear cleaner for the eye where in fact I think FCP might be more “clean” in terms of not messing around with the pixles (Apple has always avoided chroma softening in their codecs for better an worse).

And speaking of codecs and loss of quality you normally want to go to a higher codec as anything you do that affects your footage (color correction / titles / transitions) will introduce a generation loss. I’d be quite shocked to see an edit NOT being affected like this in one way or another, hence we go to ProRes or a similar format. Does Vegas have anything similar to this out of the box? He’s FCP (or AVID) has a huge “up” compared to a lot of other systems as they’ve got a fully developed editing codec.

So yeah.. I’m going to grab my morning cup of coffee now.

TO THE POSTER: What ever system you choose I’ll likely be a happy camper. A huge “what system you choose” however is the fact that FCP only runs on MacOSX, hence you’ll have to work in that OS. I find it a far more appealing working-environment than Windows and if you buy a Mac you can still run Windwos on the same system 100% natively. I think this is an important thing to consider if you have to use tools outside of the editor of your choice.

————————
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[David Shirey]

[Jonathan Thomas] “all Apple laptop and desktops look much better than anything on the market”

Well like John just said, you really need to be comparing Apples to Apples (hah!) You can find plenty of non-Apple monitors that look every bit as good as Apple ones, you just haven’t yet because most people don’t shell out for the nicer monitors if they don’t have the need. Look into some decent quality IPS monitors. There are no such thing as mac monitors or pc monitors. They all work with any type of computer and so do most of the video cards. With the Apple brand monitors you’re paying some extra money for a good quality screen, and some more extra money for a name brand.

[Lance Bachelder]

Frank – I’ve used them both for a decade and delivered feature films and Emmy winning broadcast shows off of both NLE’s. The bigger issue is what are you doing with the system? Is this a hobby or vocation? Do you already have an up-to-date PC or Mac?

My take as someone who uses and LIKES BOTH is if you are planning to do pro work just get a Mac and FCP Studio. The truth is it just plain works, there’s tons of PRO 3rd party plug-ins etc. Tons and tons of training resources from beginner to expert and you’ll be using an industry standard tool.

Before everyone freaks out on me – let me just say I’m currently posting my latest feature film using Vegas 9 and Win764 (tried 10 but too buggy). It’s very fast, has great audio tools (much better than FCP) but it does have issues. It crashes far more than FCP and Vegas 10 is completely unusable in it’s current state as a pro tool due to radical instability. This was not the case in previous versions of Vegas.

As far as codecs go – just because you can throw a bunch of clips with various codecs on the timelime doesn’t mean you should! This is a bad idea in any NLE unless you have a specific reason for doing so! For instance using Apple ProRES HD codec in FCP works fantastic, works off of any hard drive and on Macbooks, iMacs and MacPro’s and is broadcast quality! So using an Apple codec with FCP is a good thing and is what you should be doing anyways. Same with Vegas – it loves the various XDCAM codecs from Sony – they work great and in real-time most of the time.

The other benefit of going Apple is the suite of software you get with FCP. Motion, DVD Studio Pro and Soundtrack Pro are good and Apple Color is a GREAT tool and really fun to use.

Here’s the confusing part. I can do things faster in Vegas such as editing, dialog editing and clean-up, mixing and color correction way faster than any FCP editor on the planet! But I can be more precise, be more pro, output easier and more accurately (meanign I can pass broadcast QC process) with FCP than I can with Vegas.

Another HUGE benefit of going FCP is Apple hardware – meaning reagardless of the model you buy you are getting a fully qualified system that will be stable and will work with FCP. Unless you can afford a nice pro workstation like those from HP or Dell, Windows hardware can really be a crapshoot – it can be great or can be a nightmare!

It comes back to what are you going to be doing… playing? Or working? Too cut and dried for some folks but it’s the truth – FCP is an accepted studio quality NLE – Vegas is not… yet.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California