Vegas 7, XDCAM HD – want to improve the frame rate and PAL/NTSC monitoring?

[Mark Stuart]

if you mean a SD project (PAL 720×576 Widescreen) that doesnt give a solid 25 frame rate with HDCAM HD 35mbs VBR footage. 16 fps on preview/full with straight cuts and no fx

with firewire output – 11 fps and give unusual interlace effects on monitor.

Regards
Mark

[Mark Stuart]

As far as Real Time goes. Since my first NLE system (FAST video machine with DPR) in 1995, then Premiere/Matrox then Canopus/Edius – for the last 12 years I have always monitored full frame rate, full resolution SD video out to an external monitor. I consider it a basic requirement to see at all times exactly what the finished output will look like on a properly calibrated PAL monitor. My aging 3ghz single CPU intel PC with Edius/Canopus hardware does 4 layers picture in picture or you can stack up to 3 colour correction and other filters, audio filters plus perfect quality slowmotion and transitions all in RT to PAL monitor or down FW to a deck. A more up to date spec PC and RAID will do more layers and filters or with the newer Canopus hardware will give this kind of RT with HD whilst outputing component HD externally at the same time. If a decklink or AJA card gave any acceleration to Vegas then fine, but as far as I can gather these cards only give more input/output options.

Vegas 7 on the same PC with SD PAL DV widescreen can handle straight cuts and an output to FW with the full/preview frame rate most of the time – with the occaisional dropped frames. A simple dissolve drops the frame rate to 18 fps, add a colour correction and the frame rate drops to 15 fps. It is totally inefficient for any commercial video operation to be rendering such basic tasks. Whilst a faster system will improve, its not going to come any where near the performance of a combined hardware/software solution.

When it comes to HD with vegas, it just gets worse and even with the latest spec and fastest PC currently available – I suspect dropped frames and long renders will still come into play.

Whilst Vegas in its 7th carnation has decent functionality, its RT performance and lack of hardware acceleration options are saddly lacking. Am I missing something here? Is it the learning curve of moving to another NLE or the cost of changing why Vegas still has a loyal following of seamingly pro users?

Regards
Mark

[Randall Raymond]

[msvideo] “Whilst Vegas in its 7th carnation has decent functionality, its RT performance and lack of hardware acceleration options are saddly lacking. Am I missing something here? Is it the learning curve of moving to another NLE or the cost of changing why Vegas still has a loyal following of seamingly pro users?

Regards
Mark”

I think it’s both. Only FCP and Vegas can edit natively with HDV – but when you do that with FCP – you can’t monitor it at all! You have to encode to a proxy in FCP. Vegas is superior in that regard – even given the hit in framerate.

Have you tried editing with the proxy files from the xdcamhd? Or you could use a program like Gearshift to flip HDV footage to DV for editing and flip back for output.

[Rob Mack]

I can’t really tell you much about XDCAM HD but I can make a few points about 1394 monitoring from Vegas.

Vegas outputs DV25 without audio when monitoring via 1394. Anything coming out that port must be re-encoded as DV25. So that’s CPU hit number 1.

CPU hit number 2 may come from setting the preview to half, assuming that Vegas takes that “half” output and rescales it back to full before doing the DV25 encode. It would do this for DV but might do it differently for XDCAM HD so you might play with the half and full settings to see what changes. If using V7 you might find that Full and Rescale work out better than Half. Also, in V7 setting preview to just play on one screen will have less overhead than playing in the preview window and also over 1394.

Windows secondary monitor should give you good framerate but I wouldn’t call a secondary monitor “color critical”. However, this is just the Vegas frame buffer so it should be just as good as the preview window.

Which leaves you with the AJA and BMD cards, which might require a new computer just to get the proper slots. I have no idea how well these work but if they are just being fed the Vegas display buffer then they ought to do as well as a “Windows Secondary Monitor” and be color critical too.

Just my 2 cents. Maybe it’ll help frame the question better.

Rob Mack