Chris Young
Forum Replies Created
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Terje ~
I think what Gary is getting at is, as I understand it, is that the Pentium D Dual Core procs are just that, dual core, not hyper-threaded as in the P4 3.2. The only Pentium Dual Core with HT is the Extreme edition, which for the massive increase in price I couldn’t justify for just for the added benefit the HT would offer. With my P4 3.2 with HT I run both threads for rendering and am doing the same using both cores with the dual core box. The benefit of the dual core lies in the two separate execution cores. A big step up from the HT P4 series. Basic Vegas tests I have carried out here show me that the 3.2 dual core is considerably quicker than my P4 HT 3.2 unit. If I can do two separate things, such as render and edit with one execution core and one thread for each job I think it will prove quicker and more efficient than doing two separate jobs at the same time with the P4 HT 3.2 using just the one core trying to maximise the two threads available. These things I will no doubt find out as I test these theories out. What gave me some understanding of the differences and benefits between the P4 HT and Pentium D dual core units was a demo on the Intel site. If you go to:
https://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentiumXE/
and click on their dual core demo video you will see why I am asking these questions re Vegas with the Pentium D/Core units. Mind you this is all new to me so I may have it wrong but no one has given me any better insights so far.
Re my Radeon dual display problem with Vegas not seeing the ‘secondary display’ after some setting changes in the ATI GUI it is now working. Problem is I am not sure exactly what I did to get Vegas to see it! Geez I hate that.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Gary ~
Thanks for that, thought that was the case using only two but didn’t twig to the fact of using only one whilst doing something else.
Cheers
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Geez! You live and learn, didn’t know that one. Thanks Pete.
Chris Young
Sydney -
Mahesh ~
Yes we have used it for MPEG2 creation. Procoder has a number of presets for DVD such as, standard DVD, fast DVD and Mastering Quality. In the advanced options you can change a myriad of settings, CBR, VBR, bitrates, number of passes, WAV audio, MPG audio etc, etc. To give you a pointer, at ‘mastering quality’ the encoding is about real-time 1:1 and the quality is very good. This is on a P4 3.2 Gig box. Depending on the complexity of movement in your file I find the encoding rate generally varies between .75 > 1.5 times but in the long run it comes out at about real-time. On the same box I find it faster than either Vegas or DVDA. Procoder produces two separate streams. The video stream produced is an ‘m2v’ stream which causes problems with DVDA. By renaming that stream to ‘mpg’ you overcome the problem. If you want an AC3 audio stream push that out of Vegas and bring it into DVDA along with your renamed.mpg stream and the whole DVDA process is vastly improved in terms of turn-around time. To date we have had no sync problems with this method. On the other hand you can get Procoder to render out a .wav audio file and pull that into DVDA along with the renamed.mpg file.
Procoder also has a myriad of WMV, Quicktime, AVI, HD, and VCD etc, etc export options. If you have a number of files to do you have a ‘watch folder’ option where any files that get dropped into that folder get encoded automatically with whatever profiles you have predetermined. All in all I find it a very useful and importantly a very stable tool to have in the arsenal. I reckon it’s worth the money just for the DVD side of things. Its standard conversion options just come in as a big bonus plus.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Mahesh ~
Procoder is well worth the look. Learning curve is virtually nil using the presets, especially for PAL>NTSC conversion. Choose source, choose target, encode, That’s it! What sold us on it was a doco on the history of steam, which had been shot, not by us thankfully, on various formats over the previous twelve years. It had heaps of those big traction engine big spoke spinning wheels with those big crank type connecting rods. An absolute nightmare to convert usually. The shudder and strobing even with good hardware conversion was still a problem. You had to use something like Snell & Wilcox’s Alchemist [very expensive] to get really good results. To give you and idea the Procoder conversions were so close to the PAL originals that most who saw them never realised it was converted footage. Very, very good motion interpolation.
A footnote: I know the two guys, Glyn & Greg from Farnham; hence the name G2, who started G2 systems, knew them well. I used to install G2 kit and train TV station techos on all the G2 broadcast graphics units and character generators. In fact I still have a G2 Manuscript CG in our linear suite. Glyn Powell Evans, one of the two G’s went on to found Omnibus Systems who are now one of the major suppliers of system automation infrastructures to broadcasters the world over. It’s a small world!
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
We have done quite a few broadcast jobs going from PAL > NTSC. Whilst Vegas isn’t bad at conversion the solution we have found that works the best when looking for a software answer was to use Canopus Procoder 2. Do the entire edit in PAL, render to PAL observing all the necessary broadcast video and audio requirements for PAL and then convert that render to NTSC in Procoder. The results are very good plus it’s quick. Short of going to a hardware solution using a high quality standards converter this is the best quality/price solution we have found.
We tried the Atlantis software and it was quite impressive. The downside for us was that they have a novel approach to conversion in as much that they use a unique proprietary method to create new frames to interpolate with which creates a different look. It’s cunning, but the results were more of a 24p/25p look, which is not what we were after.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Desperation can sometimes drive one to discovery. Someone once said “All progress is the product of the unreasonable man”.
🙂Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
The following works for a single track. As you pointed out, in detail view right click on the clip you want and choose ‘Select timeline events’. Now click on the timeline track header so its highlighted. Next hit your ‘[‘ key and this will take you to the head of the highlighted clip.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Doh! Forget the dumb suggestion. Of course it’s going to generate new T/C on the render outs!
Chris Young
Sydney -
Just a thought, never having experienced DV T/C problems. If Premiere sees the correct T/C wonder what would happen if you tried rendering the files out of Prem as new DV files and then see if Vegas can pick up the correct T/C on them. Shouldn’t lose much if anything in quality I guess. As Ed asks, how were they captured, sounds like a curly one!
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney