Aaron Star
Forum Replies Created
-
That card is not a USB device, its a PCIe card. Couple things to try but they may or may not be helpful. I have no experience with that manufacturer.
- Do you have the card installed in the correct PCie slot that does not compete/share bandwidth with the GPU, USB3, or other high bandwidth width devices? Is the slot the device is plugged into the same operating speed as the card?
- Does the card come with its own configuration software and capture application? Blackmagic’s marketing makes their cards sound like they will play well in windows, but in fact pretty much work best with their software. Magewell may have a similar thing going. Capturing with Magewell software, and then bringing that footage into Vegas may be the way to go.
- Does the video interface appear as a video selectable device in apps like Skype? This will confirm that windows is seeing the driver.
- With my Blackmagic device there are 2 separate places to configure the video hardware. One is the control panel application, where you need to specify the video format correctly as the device does not auto recognize the video format. The other place is inside the BM capture application, and the video formats need to match in both places. I am offering this because the Magewell device may need to be set to exactly the video format you are feeding it.
If you need to return the device, consider an Osprey card, as their drivers are very robust and work well with Vegas Vidcap. Blackmagic is good too, but the Osprey drivers do a better job of auto negotiating signals on an input.
Sony Vidcap only does uncompressed capture, where as a capture program like the one Blackmagic supplies will compress captured media on the fly.
Good luck.
-
Maybe ask this in the Premier forum?
-
Not really a cinematography question but here are some thoughts.
I would setup a gigabit network in the church with a network drop to each room and camera location you want to feed.
Look into Axis Communications network PTZ cameras and control interfacing. The control surface equipment will handle multiple cameras and allow to switching in a rudimentary way.
Then put a smartTV in each display location that will show the camera network camera feed or switching console feed via h.264 or MJPEG.
Sony also has network PTZ cameras and controls.
Blackmagic designs may also have a solution if you want to setup more of a TV style switching system. But basically network streaming out to the display panels or projection.
Edit: As Mark suggests below, you could easily add an encoder out to a streaming service for those that can not make it into the service. You may want to setup a service fee for this, as less people in attendance means the plate is not as full, and now the church has additional overhead.I do not recommend streaming internally as the 10 sec delay would be annoying if the main room can be heard from the satellite room. Even a 1/2 sec delay will drive most to not accept the system due to the perceived echo. Clearly the HDMI signal over a straight cable to the display will give you the lowest latency. That is why I recommended the Blackmagic ATEM setup, as it provides low latency feeds internally, as well as a streaming feed out to the world. Feeds over MJPEG sound old school, but there is inherent delay in compressing to h.264 and then sending that out over the network.
The Axis cameras are pretty much the same that Mark recommends, but they have cameras that range up to 4K, and are network interfaced with video signals out.
-
You can ebay a card and cable, and Windows will auto load the driver more than likely. The new cards are only like $25 on newegg, and I would go with Startech or SIGG as manufacturers:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Description=firewire%20card%20PCIe&Submit=ENE
If you have the option make sure the Firewire chip is Texas Instruments based, or TI based vs some other type. Avid and other apps generally mandated TI chips for compatibility. That was of course a long time ago when processing DV video was actually formidable for the PC.
-
That’s a tough one to troubleshoot. I would open the project in VP13 and Save As to an new file, then Mute or delete tracks one by one until the project exports successfully. Once you can determine the offending track, you can look at the details. Vegas and especially the export functions are not tested like “MS Word”, the export function is probably tested by one guy in a cube somewhere. While the test matrix with all the different software versions, codecs, and plugins is huge.
-
That footage is probably RED or Alexa footage, but you should be able to get close by crop marks on your preview monitor and framing for the roughly 2.35:1 aspect they are shooting in. The lighting seems pretty much clean ambient with maybe 1-2 lights and daylight bounce. You can try softFX lens filters or overlay them in post for the highlight flares and soft looks.
The end of roll transitions are probably just digital juice type of effects.
In post crop your image to the matching aspect ratio, assuming you framed using the guides in the 1st place.
White balance at night will be your most critical issue, since with RAW formats you can play with it in post easier than AVC from your 6D.
-
I agree with John on the Apple hardware choice. The PC supports way more hardware than MAC, and PC manufactures sell good deals for them and not the end user. If people bought the best PC hardware, they would have a lot less problems. People unfortunately by hardware based on cost and not the best tool for the job. Once a PC system is built DIY all the individual profit margins add up and exceed the volume discount apple offers on their hardware. A top of the line PC/PC workstation will computationally outperform a MAC Pro, this largely due to how infrequently Apple releases new hardware configuration. For example the as of this writing Apple does not support the AMD Fury-x, nor have any DDR4 or skylake offerings. The “Trash Can” is looking pretty weak right now, since it has not been keeping up with the times.
-
I know its hard to imagine after all the cash that has been poured into your xeon systems, but times have moved on. An x99 system with 32GB of ram and a Fury-X or 390x would massively outperform your xeons, more cores or not.
Look that placement of the X5690 vs the i7-5960 :
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
There is solid architecture improvement going on with the Gen 5 and 6 i7 systems that is vastly surpassing the older xeons like the Z800 has incorporated.
Another way to look at things is comparing the Mega-FLOP performance between processors, and then compare the GFLOP performance of the GPUs you are considering. Main system memory bandwidth would be the next thing to compare, as the Gen 5+ are all using DDR4.
There is a difference between Pro GPUs like Firepro or Quadro, but mainly the differences are in very pro specific features like deep color, more VRAM, and pro video interfaces. Compute wise, AMD “X” series desktop GPUs use the same core chips as the top of the line Firepro cards, so the GFLOP performance is the same at 4X less cash. So you really need specific reasons to go with the professional line of cards. Modern apps that use CUDA or OPENCL will take advantage of multiple GPUS, or the dual GPU cards like the 295X. Motherboard bandwidth is the issue when running dual cards, as you want the max 16x bandwidth between core RAM and GPU RAM. Vegas is not a modern implementation of OpenCL, and will only use the CPU compute units and the compute units from one GPU combined.
Optimizing CPU compute ability, then system RAM bandwidth with 16-32GB+, and then GPU GFLOP performance is the recommend way to build for Vegas. Core count is important as well just as long as you are not gimping your compute performance vs modern developments.
Get a copy of Luxmark v2 and compare GPU results, as this application uses system resources in the same way Vegas does.
-
If you are not having problems editing your footage from the phone, then there is nothing to do to work with it. Most of the issues I have seen people having with that footage has to do more with QuickTime issues. Converting to an .mxf container/codec can help with playback smoothness and clip quantity.
Running tests on your own system is the only way to see any benefits. Create a test project convert some clips, do some cross fades, add some plugins you use typically and look for the difference in frame rate drops or lack there of. Enable 32-bit video levels mode and check the difference between the converted clips and the camera format. Keep in mind that only the 1st instance of Vegas will use the GPU.
-
EBay a HD7970-ghz would be a better buy than a 270x,280x, probably most non 390x cards. This based mainly on specs and how they appear to OpenCL, which is how vegas uses the GPU for assistance.
I recommend Sony AVC over Main Concept. Main Concept offers very little over Sony’s AVC encoder. Sony’s encoder will use the GPU as needed for calculations that can use the GPU. MC encoder does things different with the GPU, and there are other posts that talk about the artifacts that GPU encoding can be added to your image. A GPU that supports MC encoder is a very dated mind set. Improving your systems overall compute ability via CPU and in kind with a high GFLOP GPU.
In a very technical way, the XT or “X” series AMD GPUs have an edge over non X GPUs. The X series GPUs have max compute units for the design in the way they appear to OpenCL. More compute units on the GPU generally means greater OpenCL performance.
Converting the IPhone footage to HDCAM-SR-Lite, Cineform-LOW, or even AVC-I(HD 60P profile) would be the way to edit that material in Vegas.