So should PNG HD Image sequence be a problem or not.

[John Rofrano]

[Brad Leigh] “Anybody out there using 2 minute 1920×1080 PNG sequences with out problems. I’m kinda stuck until I get this work flow figured out.”

I don’t understand why this is an issue for you. I just exported a scene out of Carrara 8 Pro as a 1920×1080-24p PNG image sequence with an Alpha Channel and imported it into Vegas Pro 12.0 as a 23.976 image sequence, set my project up for 1920×1080 @ 23.976 and it plays back as smooth as silk.

~jr

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

[Brad Leigh]

John
Thank You. That was the type of answer I was looking for. It works for you, so I’ll see if I can tweek something and get it to work for me.
When I posted this before the response was something like, well vegas has to resize each PNG in the preview window and that causes the overhead.
If I know it is smooth using HD for others I can try to track down what my issue is. Others had said they were fine with PNG Seq, but I didn’t know the res. they were working. One commented that they were using standard def PNG. So I’ll poke around.
Thanks again
Brad

i7 2600 3.4 Ghz 8Gig Ram , Win 7 Pro, Vegas Pro 10

[John Rofrano]

[Brad Leigh] “When I posted this before the response was something like, well vegas has to resize each PNG in the preview window and that causes the overhead.”

If your project is 1920×1080 and your PNG sequence is 1920×1080 there will be no resizing so that shouldn’t be an issue.

[Brad Leigh] “If I know it is smooth using HD for others I can try to track down what my issue is. Others had said they were fine with PNG Seq, but I didn’t know the res. they were working. One commented that they were using standard def PNG. So I’ll poke around.”

One thing to check is frame rate. If your project is 29.97, export from Carrara as 30 but when you import the sequence tell Vegas the sequence is 29.97. This way Vegas doesn’t have to do any frame rate conversion during playback. Likewise if your project is 23.976, export from Carrara as 24 but when you import the sequence tell Vegas the sequence is 23.976. This should provide smooth playback.

~jr

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

[Brad Leigh]

John
Thank you for the tips. Ok I started over. New PNG sequence. Loaded into Vegas 10, same deal. So I opened up my new install of Vegas 12 pro. On the first import I let Vegas set project settings to match the PNG sequence I imported. 1920x 1080. 29.97, and checked clip properties 29.97. Turned off smart resample, turned it back on.Same thing. Tried a different drive.
I noticed GPU acell was on and I turned it off. Increased ram preview to 1024.
Better, but even with trying different preview settings, best I could get off PNG Seq. was 26 frames per sec. Checked CPU usage, in the 16% range. Then I imported a Quicktime Animation codec of the same clip into the same time line and it Played liked a champ. Rock solid 29.97 on my second monitor at full res, best in the preview settings. I’m stumped. At one point I played the same section over and over and it did go to 29.97, but I closed and reopened the session and it went back to 26 FPS or so.
Can you think of any settings I missed? Do I need to watch the Carrara settings on export. I’m not using Quicktime PNG Seq. I’m just using the straight PNG Seq export in Carrara.
i7 2600 3.4 GhZ 8 gig ram, SATA External Drive
Thanks Again
Brad

i7 2600 3.4 Ghz 8Gig Ram , Win 7 Pro, Vegas Pro 10

[John Rofrano]

[Brad Leigh] “Better, but even with trying different preview settings, best I could get off PNG Seq. was 26 frames per sec. “

OK, that explains why I’m getting full frame rates because I rendered at 24p which was easiler for Vegas to achieve. I was also using a render that had an alpha channel so the object was smaller than the screen. I just created a new render that is a full image with no alpha and 30fps and I’m seeing lower frame rates too around 16fps. 🙁

[Brad Leigh] “Checked CPU usage, in the 16% range.”

Mine was worse. CPU was at 12% (6 core, 12 threads) and GPU was at 24%. So Vegas wasn’t using hardly any of the power my workstation has to offer.

[Brad Leigh] “Then I imported a Quicktime Animation codec of the same clip into the same time line and it Played liked a champ. Rock solid 29.97 on my second monitor at full res, best in the preview settings.”

Same here.

[Brad Leigh] “Can you think of any settings I missed?”

No, my original test was at 24p and since it was an animated object with an alpha channel background it was probably easier to play back. When I went back and made a full frame animation at 30fps I saw the same problems you did.

My recommendation would be to drop your PNG sequence on the timeline and render to QuickTime Animation and use those instead. QuickTime Animation is lossless so the only downside is the wasted time making the second QuickTime render. I hope that DAZ gets Carrara fixed with respect to 64-bit QuickTime soon.

Sorry to have driven you a bit crazy. There is nothing wrong with your workflow.

~jr

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

[Brad Leigh]

John
Thank you for checking back in. I was starting to come to the same conclusion. I knew you had a more powerful machine, and some times I would get up to 23 frames on my system. Today I tried changing every setting I could, and never got much improvement. I even tried different PNG output settings from Carrara. ( turning alpha channel on decreased PNG frame image size by almost half?) Even rendered a PNG seq, from vegas and re imported it.
What I don’t get is so many people told me this is how they work. Is it harddrive throughput? (I don’t have a raid)
Anyway, I was starting to choke 32 bit Carrara, so maybe I’ll animate in 64bit, then see if the 32 bit will render to QT animation.
Thank You again for helping me figure this out.
Brad
Anybody out there having no problems with HD PNG Sequences? Steve I believe you said that was how you worked?

i7 2600 3.4 Ghz 8Gig Ram , Win 7 Pro, Vegas Pro 10

[Matt Crowley]

Check the size of the PNG images from Carrara. I just tried rendering a 24 frame 1920×1080 PNG sequence from Vegas and each frame is around 5MB (120MB for 1 sec of sequence, or about 960Mbps!). That’s photographic footage from not-too-sharp video, so it’s likely to be larger than animation, and probably a lot larger than simple animation with lots of solid colour or alpha… but even so it might just be the amount of data being read from disk and shunted around in memory.

[Steve Cheng]

Don’t know if this will help, since I don’t have Vegas, but here is my experience with Carrara PNG movies. I used Carrara 8 to render a 640×480 4 second animation with alpha, (format: QuickTime Movie with a compression setting of “PNG”) and the resulting file size was huge at 3 GB (I don’t know why).

I rendered the same animation as a “sequenced PNG”, then I used Quicktime 7 (Pro) to open the image sequence and saved it as a Quicktime PNG movie, it was only 8 MB in size and things flowed much smoother when editing.