How to use a different DV Decoder in Vegas Pro 10?

[John Rofrano]

[Karly Melrose] “I frequently find references an option in preferences to tell Vegas to use/not use 3rd party codecs, but this option does NOT exist.”

You’re correct. “Ignore third party DV codecs” has been removed from the general preferences for some reason. It’s still in the “internal” preferences but Im not sure why Sony hid it so it might not even work anymore.

Why do you need to use a different DV codec? What preferences do you need to tweak?

~jr

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

[Karly Melrose]

Hi. Thank you for replying.

I want to use a codec that lets me work in a YV12 colour space with a 16 to 235 brightness range (instead of the RGB one that the Sony DV codec ‘converts’ the DV footage into and reducing contrast in the process). I have a codec that in theory lets me do this, but don’t know how to get Vegas to use it.

How can I find/adjust the ‘internal’ preferences.

PS I’m aware there are colour correction presets to deal with this, but I think these are a workaround, not a solution. I want to make the adjustment at source, on import, not as a post-production effect.

[Mike Kujbida]

I highly recommend reading the Color Spaces articles Glenn Chan has on his site as he gets into this issue.
https://www.glennchan.info/articles/articles.html

[John Rofrano]

[Karly Melrose] “I want to use a codec that lets me work in a YV12 colour space with a 16 to 235 brightness range (instead of the RGB one that the Sony DV codec ‘converts’ the DV footage into and reducing contrast in the process).”

As Mike said, read Glenn Chann’s excellent article and you’ll see that Vegas DV codec uses Studio RGB (i.e., decodes to and wants to see studio RGB levels) which is YUV not RGB. There is no reason not to use the Sony DV codec.

BTW, I believe that DV is YUV 4:1:1 color space and not YV12 which is 4:2:0 so what you want would actually cause a conversion and drop information making the final color information only 4:1:0.

~jr

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

[Karly Melrose]

Thank you Mike.

Sorry, I probably should have said that I have already read those articles, but I believe those solutions provide workarounds to compensated for the Sony DV codec not doing it ‘right’ in the first place, not a true fix.

From the above mentioned article:
“You may need to manually wrangle all your color space conversions in Vegas, depending on the situation. Vegas does not do this for you. (It should but it doesn’t.)”

I want to use the Cedocida codec for decoding, which lets me set up my workspace as I want it from the outset, rather than the Sony DV codec, which doesn’t.

Changing “internal” preferences to get Sony Vegas to use the DV decoder I want it to when I import my files looks like it might be the only way I can do this, but I don’t know where these are. Where do I find them and how can I change them?

Thank you for your help.

[Karly Melrose]

Sorry John, it must have took me about 30 mins to compose my last post as you seem to have posted in the meantime!

You may be right, though I may have got one or two things back-to-front myself when trying to explain. Point is though – my producer (the person paying me to edit something!) wants me to use the Cedocida codec for reasons that he’s researched quite heavily. SOME footage we’re using in the project is NOT DV encoded and uses a different colour space, and is correct. The DV footage is incorrect. The way to get it correct is to use the Cedocida codec (this works for my producer in Premiere, but not for my in Vegas… because Vegas is insisting (I presume) on using its own DV codec, which does things differently to other DV codecs. Or so I believe).

With that in mind, I’d still like to know how I can get Vegas to use the DV decoder of my choosing. Can this be done in the internal settings, and what do I have to do?

[Karly Melrose]

No worries guys – I’ve found the answer now.

For anyone else finding this thread looking for an answer to the question I asked and needs to access the internal settings, to access them simply hold down the shift key while clicking on ‘preferences’ in the ‘options’ menu. When it opens, an extra tab for “internal” will be present on the preferences box.

There’s a lot of options in there, but there’s a search function: I found “Ignore default DV codecs” and in the ‘Value’ column changed ‘TRUE’ to ‘FALSE’.

Vegas now uses the Cedocida DV codec I installed, which I can now configure via Virtual Dub (or the vegas ‘render as’ settings), which lets me set things like colour space settings to “[16 – 235] > [0 – 255]” or “[0 – 255] > [0 – 255]” at the decoding stage, rather than as an additional FX process using a colour corrector.