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Is the velocity profile basically useless?
If you take a clip of say 3 mins and apply the VP to it, speeding it up by say 3x you get three copies of the footage inside those 3 mins.
This makes sense of course “philosophically”, but how does anybody make use of it, given that obviously one eventually wants to render the finished job and then you don’t want the three copies.
I have used the loop region render method, truncating the region after the first instance of the footage (i.e. 1/3 of the way through) but it seems to break if there is a discontinuity on the event as is regularly the case when one has downloaded the media in 4GB chunks. AFAIK Vegas has no means of joining these up. Yes, it could be done externally with various tools (maybe Handbrake?) but the gotcha is to do it losslessly.
What I find is that where there is a break in the event due to the 4GB file boundary, the VP method chucks in some footage from elsewhere. It is just a mess.
Speeding up the video using the other method (dragging the end of the event to compress it) works fine but again fails if there is the 4GB boundary. Grouping the two or more event pieces doesn’t solve this. It seems the only workaround here is to render and then import the rendered one-piece, but this cannot AFAICT be done losslessly. The best I have been able to do for intermediate renders is exporting at some silly bitrate like 100mbits/sec. I am already losing some quality when doing lens correction (a must for any “action cam” footage)…
I would appreciate any tips.
Sony FDR-1000V 1080P 50FPS 25mbits/sec, Vegas Pro 13, i7-970, 24GB, GTX750 Kalm 2GB. Rendering to 1080P 50FPS 25mbits/sec. AVC (H264).
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15 Replies
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Hi,
in the media properties switch off “loop”.Best regards
László Kovács
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[Peter Holt] “but it seems to break if there is a discontinuity on the event as is regularly the case when one has downloaded the media in 4GB chunks. AFAIK Vegas has no means of joining these up. “
Actually it does if you import your media correctly. You should never have 4GB chunks. You should be using View | Windows | Device Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+7) or View | Windows | XDCAM Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+5) to import from your camera cards (depending on your camera).
If you are just dragging video files from the subfolders of your camera card onto your hard drive then you are causing this problem by not importing them correctly.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
I have unchecked Loop in media properties and now the velocity profile generates one speeded up section followed by the remainder being a frozen frame. Is that as it should be?
I did ask on some other forum about joining up the breaks between events on the timeline and there is apparently no way in Vegas.
Or maybe I mis-understand. Are you saying Vegas offers a means of joining up 4GB video file chunks on the SD card, as it imports them? That would be pretty clever.
Regarding the 4GB chunks, they are recorded that way by the camera onto the card. The camera for some reason writes 4GB chunks if set to AVC mode (25mbits/sec) or a single huge file if set to XAVC mode (50mbits/sec). The former mode gives me 10hrs with a 128GB card and I need that. The latter mode gives me 5hrs which is usable to me in some cases but more to the point I cannot get the large-file data out of the camera over WIFI (have to remove it from the waterproof housing, etc).
Also note that 4GB chunks are not produced by a big file being split during file copy, due to file system limitations. Each 4GB chunk is a standalone and valid mp4 file. The SD card is formatted to EXFAT so there is no 4GB file size limit. The same camera can write a 100GB file to the same card.
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[Peter Holt] “I have unchecked Loop in media properties and now the velocity profile generates one speeded up section followed by the remainder being a frozen frame. Is that as it should be?”
Yes, if you turn off looping it just repeats the last frame.
[Peter Holt] “Or maybe I mis-understand. Are you saying Vegas offers a means of joining up 4GB video file chunks on the SD card, as it imports them? That would be pretty clever.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It doesn’t support all cameras but it supports all Sony cameras (as you would expect) and many others. Also, most cameras come with software to stitch these files back together. It’s probably on the CD that came with the camera.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
“You should be using View | Windows | Device Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+7) or View | Windows | XDCAM Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+5) to import from your camera cards (depending on your camera).”
Neither of those do anything with my camera, which is the FDR-1000V action cam. I tried it USB connected (the only way) and Pro 13 doesn’t see it.
Looking at the controls in the two forms which pop up for ctrl+alt+5/7 I think I see how this is supposed to work. The camera should appear as a media device, like the old 1394 (Firewire) camcorders (which used DV tapes) used to appear. With a Play and Stop etc control. They could be controlled from the PC. Then you start playback and the data streams to the PC. How the video is stored within the device is not relevant then.
But action cams don’t do this. The USB interface merely presents a block device which presents a Windows compatible file system which then appears within Windows as a logical drive (with a drive letter etc). You can browse that, and you can see a load of 4GB files (or as I mentioned earlier one huge file, if the camera is set to X-AVC). But there is no point in getting Vegas to read such a device directly; there is nothing gained over copying the media from the cam to the PC and then importing it to Vegas.
Maybe I am missing something but I see no feature within Vegas whereby media could be imported from a logical drive containing 4GB files (each of which is a fully standalone mp4 video) and have Vegas combine these into a single event with no splits. If there is, I am all ears because that would be very useful. The splits break a lot of stuff in Vegas – they break the velocity profile and they break the track compression method.
I also have a Canon Legria G40 (not a cheap camcorder) which has a USB port and Vegas doesn’t see that either. That also presents a logical drive to the computer, containing .mts files.
The other thing is that having the camera connected to the computer in order for this data import method to work is very inflexible. Often, I am travelling and I need to empty the camera’s SD card to something else, so I can do more recording.
Am I missing something?
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You didn’t miss anything. It looks like Vegas Pro doesn’t support this camera. But there is software on the Sony website for importing the video from this camera, you might want to install it and see if it fixes the 4GB problem.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
John – if you can find software which losslessly merges the 4GB AVC chunks, that would be very interesting. I have not found anything from Sony.
I am pretty sure Handbrake can do it but working out how exactly to configure it for lossless conversion is nontrivial. One can get pretty close of course by selecting a silly output bit rate.
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You might want to try Sony’s software specifically for that camera. I found them here: https://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-home.pl?mdl=FDRX1000V&template_id=1®ion_id=1&tab=download#/downloadTab
I’ve never had the problem you’re having though. You say you speed up the footage to 300% and shorten the clip to 1/3 the length so it ends at the same point the footage originally ended, then butt it up against the next clip, and there’s some sort of gap in the action? Is there a glitch in the action at real-time speed, or it’s creating a glitch only when you triple the speed? If so does it create it at double the speed, or just triple?
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[Peter Holt] “John – if you can find software which losslessly merges the 4GB AVC chunks, that would be very interesting. I have not found anything from Sony.”
It took me 10 seconds to find the software for your camera yesterday when I did a Google search:
This is what I did:
- Go to: https://www.sony.com/electronics/actioncam/fdr-x1000v-body-kit
- Select Support
- Click on: Drivers and Software
- On the left Navigation list look under Software & Apps and you’ll find: Action Cam Movie Creator
It says:
With this application, we provide the following functions: (for Windows and Mac)
- Easily & intuitively make impressive movies of your experience taken by Action Cam.
(Merge videos, GPS data overlay, slow/fast-forward editing, and trim/combine) - Get the latest notifications related to Action Cam and access Action Cam channels to get the latest information.
- Activate the Streaming feature to further utilize the Action Cam.
- Update the system software of Action Cam.
It sounds like this software can be used to import your videos at the length they were recorded. I could be wrong but it’s worth a try. This is what the GoPro Studio software does for their action cameras. Hopefully Sony’s software is similar.
[David Shirey] “You might want to try Sony’s software specifically for that camera. I found them here:”
*exactly* David.
I’m sure the software came on a CD and you have it lying around somewhere or maybe you threw it out with the box. Either way, your camera came with software to import the video. Use it for importing and use Vegas Pro for editing.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
OK… there is some detail involved here.
The problem with having a split in the event on the timeline (apologies if I am using the wrong terminology; I never did a Vegas course and probably should) is that it breaks the speed-up method which involves horizontal compression. Only the piece of the event whose end is being dragged gets compressed. One has to do all pieces individually. Or render and re-import.
Regarding the velocity profile, I think I can see how it can be used. Uncheck Loop for each event, apply the VP, and render just the bit you need.
Regards the Sony FDR-1000V software, there is indeed a program called Playmemories Home which runs on a PC (or a windows laptop, etc) which will import from a USB-connected camera and apparently generate a single mp4 file even if the camera recorded in 4GB chunks onto its SD card. This means two things: the camera has to be USB-connected (which means removing it from its waterproof housing – not always desirable, because it “wastes” a silica gel moisture absorbing pad) and you need to carry a windows computer. Apart from the foregoing, there is WIFI but the only target devices for that are android and IOS. Sony bizzarely blocked the WIFI from being usable with a normal computer. And with Android and IOS you have storage space issues…
I don’t think there is a USB driver for the FDR-1000V which would make it visible in Vegas, but even if there was it would not avoid the two issues above, *plus* the computer would need to be running Vegas, and if you are travelling you will be using a windows tablet or a laptop, so you need to license two Vegas installations…
Anyway I have multiple options here. Probably the best is to investigate using Handbrake to merge the 4GB chunks with the minimum loss.
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