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SVP 13 Workflow Question
I’m having one of those love/hate evenings with SVP 13.
I’m editing a series of twelve 1 hour presentations, 4 cameras with a mix of Panasonic GH2 and HMC40(.mts), iPad(.mov), Zoom Q2HD (.mov AVC) and GoPro (converted to Cineform-AVI), some PNG slides, some NewBlueFX Titler Pro4 lower-thirds and title events.
Timeline editing has been quite smooth. (This is the love Vegas part)It has been my practice in the past to “split and MUTE” different events to achieve the end result desired sequence, assuming a muted event did not affect the rendering load. This is my accustomed workflow and I have not in the past then gone back to delete any of the MUTED video events (or audio events for that matter) — and it has usually served me well. More on this later.
The last thing I do before preparing to render, is set my color correction (NewBlueFX ColorFast), apply Neat Video NR on a couple of the cameras and launch a render as Sony AVC Internet HD 30p via Vegasaur. (These will also be slated for a DVD format, but that can come later.)
Well, on this particular project, rendering took over 18 hours. And I ended up with visible rendering video ‘glitches’ that resulted in a useless MP4 file. Stuff like the the PNG slide at some times flashing on a transition, or one of the camera views flipping upside-down for a frame or two. You know, those unexplained glitches.
This is the hate part!So, now we start the “how can I make this render faster and better?” quest.
I know that Vegas keeps all project media files open during the render.
But can anyone tell me if a MUTED event (or Track for that matter) affects Rendering time? or glitches?
I suppose some would say “Well test it yourself by deleting all the muted stuff” and I’ll probably have to do so.
But sometimes it would be nice to just sit and do a little editing, do a render, have it all look nice — instead of the seemingly constant battle of having to tweak this or choosing that, or try this 10 different ways to see what is bogging down, throwing up, blowing up, etc.
And then we have the conundrum of the effect of the Sony/Neat/NewBlueFX/Hardware/Video Card/Video driver/Windows/GPU on/GPU off/Lunar cycle — interdependancies/interactions/cross-pollinization…Any other workflow recommendations?
Like — you should apply Neat Video NR and render to a new track instead of applying it at the time of final render, especially if you are color balancing as well?I wouldn’t mind the long render times (well within reason) if I knew when it was done there was a high likelihood of a good video file — even if I knew I would have to use a third party encoder. (ie handbrake as many have recommended). What output format is high quality and less prone to the ‘glitches’?
Oh, well — back to the drawing board…
Regards,
–DougDell Precision T5500
2x Intel Xeon DP E5620 @ 2400MHz; Memory: 22528MB; Chipset:Intel 5520;
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
HDD: Crucial_SSD1 (256GB);WD(1000GB);WD(2000GB)
OS: Windows 7 Pro SP1 (64-bit) -
5 Replies
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I think your workflow is backward.
Trim the bad stuff, and color correct in a separate VEG file.
Render all source media to XDCAM422 or EX.
Edit the converted media in a new VEG file.
smart render to XDCAM and upload to YT, or render to Sony AVC.
Working with a bunch of non optimized media sources will slow you down, and be much more unstable doing it.
Your system config could use some improvements.
Add more RAM and get it up to 32GB a processor or at least 16GB a processor. Verify your RAM is optimal for your chipset, and that there is a dimm for each of the 6 memory channels. Use “winsat mem” to gauge improvements after changes.
Lose the 560 card and replace it with a 7970-ghz, 290x or 390x. The 560 is around 1200 GFLOPs, while the 7970 is around 4300 GFLOPs. Even the R9-270x at 2600 GFLOPs would be a better performing card than the 560. The AMD cards are also more stable in Vegas over Nvidia.
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Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, based on previous threads here, I knew one recommendation would be to ditch the NVIDIA in favor of a AMD R9-290x or better. And I have one on order.
I appreciate your thoughts on the workflow. I am well on my way on this project with my current method, editing ‘complete’ on more than half of the talks, but no rendering. So, I’ll experiment with getting the separate camera tracks to a MXF with NR and color correction applied and then move on to a final render stage of the multiple tracks.
And oh yeah, I think I’ve discovered one serious bottleneck in the one file previous mentioned above. I have a wide static shot of the stage where the screen with the projected slides is quite overexposed. I’m doing a Picture-in-picture with PNG of the presenter’s slides mapped to the stage screen. Trying to create a MXF intermediary of those 2 tracks is taking forever to render — 6 hours overnight and nowhere close to being finished. The media for that camera is .mov(QT). We’ll rethink the approach to that shot angle.
BTW, what version of Quicktime is recommended these days? I have 7.7.6 (1680.95.31).
–Doug
Dell Precision T5500
2x Intel Xeon DP E5620 @ 2400MHz; Memory: 22528MB; Chipset:Intel 5520;
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
HDD: Crucial_SSD1 (256GB);WD(1000GB);WD(2000GB)
OS: Windows 7 Pro SP1 (64-bit) -
That is the version of Quicktime I am running.
The PiP should not take that long. The 290x may help with this, its hard to say. A screen shot of the timeline might prod other to chime in with suggestions. Are you doing the PiP with Pan/Crop and shrinking the image, or Track motion? Do you have a drop shadow enabled for PiP window? Are there any other FX applied to the clips you are compositing(PiP)?
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I was using NewBlueFX ‘ImageMapper’ to do the PiP because the physical screen was not rectangular due to perspective. With ImageMapper, I could stretch each corner to match the physical screen. I also had the PNG at slightly less than 100% opaque. (Transparency compositing takes a lot of processing)
But your comment about track motion gave me the idea to try that to rotate in 3D the PNGs of the replacement slides. I also applied a mask to the wide camera shot for the projection screen and put the replacement PNG on the track below. Not only did the render to MXF intermediary take far less time, the results look better.
Thanks for the suggestion, albeit indirect!And all of the MXF files I’ve made so far have no ‘glitches’.
We are back to being pretty pleased with the whole scene.And the new AMD R9 290x card arrived today. Now, where was that thread on the Cow about properly swapping an NVIDIA card for an AMD?
–Doug
Dell Precision T5500 (0CRH6C)
2x Intel Xeon DP E5620 @ 2400MHz; Memory: 22528MB; Chipset:Intel 5520;
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
HDD: Crucial_SSD1 (256GB);WD(1000GB);WD(2000GB)
OS: Windows 7 Pro SP1 (64-bit) -
I wrote a how to awhile back on removing the NV drivers back to the windows default before pulling the card. Rebooting several times in the process, after running windows updates and CCleaner reg clean. Then installing the card followed by AMD drivers. installing the AMD APP SDK is something I have my system to make sure all OpenCL components are installed for the device.
I would google high resolution Powerpoint slides, as this will allow you to export high res slides that are also 16×9. The you can loose any plugins to process this for you.
Avoid 3rd party plugin as much as possible when there is a Sony plugin that will do the job. Some 3rd party plugins are not GPU accelerated either, so maybe causing the CPU only operation for those rendered frames.
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