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Official Vegas Pro 8 Announcement — Better PI File Processsing?
The Sony Vegas forum at Sony was on caffeine today with 159 posts and counting related to one subject: the release of Vegas Pro 8.
Because of the end of speculation and the arrival of the official Sony page on it (link is at very end of this posting).
Vegas Pro 8’s one particular new feature may help with files made with PI and imported into Pro 8.
While no expert on this under-the-hood stuff (Note: Alan and/or other PI staff comments welcomed), it comes down to this paragraph in the official release:
______________________________________32-bit Floating Point Video Processing
“Surpass traditional 10-bit standards with 32-bit floating point video processing. Take advantage of greater color range for more vivid colors, reduced gradient banding and posterization for smoother color transitions, linear light capability for optically correct compositing, and many other precision enhancements.”
______________________________________The keyword is “processing” — and not output. Meaning that your project settings will determine the end result as rendered files, but while in the kitchen, you’ll get spicier work done 🙂
For a more on higher-bit processing, see last paragraph and link.
There may also be other new features/improvements in Vegas Pro 8 that will help with PI files, but it’s better to wait until the actual unveiling and release of the program this September, when more updated and detailed info will become available.
But in the meantime for those interested, (drum roll, please) here is the…
OFFICIAL Sony Vegas Pro 8 Release Page
___________________________________A Bit More on Higher Bit
For more in-depth understanding of higher bit process, see the article on Creative Cow about a competitor’s 32-bit float color processing (Adobe Premiere), and why it matters in overall editing.
A bit techie but supports what I see as a boon to PI + Vegas users since Vegas has now incorporated a similar engine.
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3 Replies
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Well, since pI3 is just 8-bit per channel right now, this won’t really help much. If the rendered output of pIllusion has banding, Vegas won’t get rid of that.
Alan.
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“Well, since pI3 is just 8-bit per channel right now, this won’t really help much.”
— Makes sense, but from what I’ve seen in test 8-vs.-32 renders (with absolutely no color or other tweasks) off of a basic DV shot, there was some subtle but definite improvement. PI files may or may not get that lift.
My is guess is that the higher the PI file output rez, the better the chances of some improvement. Yet until when/if I upgrade to V-8 to test this for myself, it’s all just “Well, I hope that…” speculation.
“If the rendered output of pIllusion has banding, Vegas won’t get rid of that.”
— How to avoid and/or minimize banding — or which kinds of particles would be more prone to it? And, which type of exports — seems like .png may be less banding prone?
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Any mostly-transparent particles, especially large ones, will cause banding when blended together. Regular motion blur makes this worse.
Some low-visibility emitters/particles just have banding and there’s no way to avoid it in an 8-bit per channel engine.
The only reason PNG might show more banding (and I’m not sure that it does) is that it’s lossless — using some lossy compression (like jpg, or lossy AVI codecs) may break up the banding somewhat due to the compression.
I think there are things you can do in post to images that show banding, but I’m no expert on that.
Alan.
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