[Dave Haynie]

That’s a weird situation, maybe DVDA is confused. While DVD itself needs 3:2 pulldown for 24p, Blu-Ray handles 24p as a native format. I would think DVDA would be smart enough to do the right thing, but technically, 24p with 3:2 pulldown is 30p, and if done DVD style is actually stored as 60i, which is a legal format. But then you’d expect it to play properly.

So, sorry, no help here, but try a real 24p render and see if the problems go away.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have a number of cameras that do this .. AVC is a native recording format these days.

But seriously, if you’re talking about lower resolution/quality web video, you could by a cheap MP4/AVC camcorder that produces native AVC. A Sanyo Xacti FH-1A will do HD (1080/60p, 1080/60i, 720/30p, 480/30p), for under $300. Some of the fixed focal-length “flip” style camcorders (from Flip, Kodak, others) are slightly more dubious in quality, but run even cheaper. If it’s for a blog or something, that may be all you need.

I know Grass Valley makes some MPEG-4 capture boards… not sure if they’re actually H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, or only MPEG-4 Part 2, but it might be worth checking out, though not cheap, I expect.

I did a video server project some years back that needed realtime H.264 encoding. At the time I didn’t find anything reasonable for that specific application, though there are a number of boards for security camera operations that do this, if you’re happy with CVBS quality capture. Thing is, they get pricey, since they usually want to take in 8 or more cameras at once.

The solution we used there was software… on a Q6600 processor (my 1U server had two of these), we could get about one SD-ish channel of video encoded into H.264 in an MPEG-2 transport stream per core, using Linux, GStreamer, and x264. But you may not want to dedicate the better part of a PC to this. This guy here did something similar: https://www.wu.ece.ufl.edu/projects/wirelessVideo/project/realTimeCoding/download/doc/howto.pdf

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I ran into this sort of problem years back, on a wedding video, in Cineform, with many dozens of JPEG files in 6MPixel and 8MPixel sizes.

Without really thinking about it, I had all assets on one hard drive, and I was rendering back to that hardware. Being an audio guy, I should have know immediately that this could be a bad idea, but it took me awhile to get the clue.

Hard drives are we know them have two primary performance metrics. One is their straight-streaming performance.. maybe 25-50MB/s or more for a good drive these days. If you run a simple HDD benchmark, that’s the number you get.

The other is the seek time, usually quoted as an average … it might take 5ms (milliseconds) to seek from track to track. For large files, you of course have more seeking… since the distance between files is more. So large PNGs, video files, etc. all on the same drive… could be bad. And where are you writing the render… not back to the same drive, I hope?

Anyway, essentially, as you add tracks, the performance of the drive moves away from that streaming peak, and toward the seek time. And not surprisingly, if you have more cores, the effect is all that much worse, since you’re hoping to render multiple segments of video at the same time.

I’m not sure just how smart Vegas gets about this if you have more memory (hopefully, a 64-bit version of Vegas and at least 4-8GB of memory)… when there’s more memory, individual buffers can be larger, minimizing the number of seeks per second. But I don’t know what Vegas does in this respect.

In any case, try directing your output to one drive, move the video or PNG to another if possible, and see if that helps. Don’t worry if the C: drive is involved; if you actually need page swapping during a render, you’re already beaten. Another trick to try — cut the render down to two or three cores, and see if the CPU utilization actually goes up.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ok, not a Red user, but I can help on the math. An R3D file runs either 28MB/s or 36MB/s… yeah, that’s not far from the limit of some 7200RPM drives, but you should be just dandy with one layer per drive. More than that, and you’ll potentially get HDD thrashing… I’ve run into this with Cineform files, which are only about half that size (60GB/hr).

You specified that you’re seeing 120Mb/s on each drive… I assume you don’t mean that (eg, 120 megabits per second), but actually mean 120MB/s (120 megabytes per second). An actual 120Mb/s would be limiting.. your files are a minimum of 224Mb/s.

On your setup, I suspect RAM is a limiting factor. Vegas 32-bit can only use 2GB, and that’s not even all that comfortable a chunk for large 2K projects, much less 4K video. Think of it this way… if you’re only working in 8-bit color, you’re going to need about 27MB per frame per layer, plus all the memory used for Vegas, for compositing, etc. At 32-bit color, that’s over 100MB per frame. No matter how you slice it, 4x the memory footprint of regular 1080p HD work.

I’d recommend using 64-bit Vegas and at least 8GB of memory, before you look any further. A Q6600 is also a pretty ancient 4-core machine… I replaced mine with a Q9550 well over a year ago. But as you’ve seen, it’s not the CPU load that’s the issue.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

A hard crash like that certainly indicates something’s seriously wrong. Although Raylight has a good reputation, it’s easy to suggest that could be an issue — can you try a similar render without it, or use RayMaker to create AVIs from your MXF’s. Vegas supports MXF directly, but apparently, only Sony’s flavor.

I have rendered hundreds of hours of video with Vegas 9 in the last year. The only problem I’ve run into recently was a 3rd party video plug-in with a memory leak, which caused Vegas to crash after about an hour of video (12+ hours of realtime… not the fastest processing on the planet, this plug-in)… kind of a problem when processing four hours of raw video. I managed to render in sections, and all was good.

And I even have Windows 7, 64-bit, all up-to-date. I’m generally using the 64-bit version of Vegas, if that makes any difference.

Back in the Vegas 7/8 days, I ran into instability in a very well defined scenario. Basically, I had a very large project: several layers of video in Cineform, multiple 6-8Mpixel digital JPEG stills, lots of compositing going on. When I foolishly rendered from my D: drive back to that same D: drive, I didn’t quite understand why, although at the time I was on a 2-core CPU, the CPU wasn’t busy. Renders took crazy long, and frequently crashed.

The problem here was hard drive thrashing — the HDD was going nuts, seeking all over the place for the various random assets. Why that should make Vegas and/or Windows crashy, rather than just slow, I don’t know. But I had previously run Vegas on other projects for 8 days straight without a crash (that was a high quality NTSC to PAL conversion of a 2 hour film), so I didn’t just blame Vegas. Anyway, to solve this, I ultimately put the Cineform on one HDD, the stills on another, and rendered to yet another drive. Renders now went fast, and didn’t crash.

In retrospect, I was probably also getting low on memory, and it was well documented that older version of Vegas had some issues with large still image files, which has not been an issue in Vegas 9. Anyway, that’s the only real problem I’ve had with Vegas itself. I’ve run into problems once in awhile with Vegas not handling errors in video files all that well, but since leaving tape behind last year, I haven’t seen a single error in a video file.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Don’t know what’s wrong with your Quicktime setup. I have regular Quicktime from Apple (eg, the free playback version), Vegas installed, and the Avid DNxHD CODEC installed, and I have no trouble rendering DNxHD under Quicktime. I haven’t tried any other Quicktime rendering recently. Could well be that the CODEC you’re trying to render is “read-only” under the free version of Quicktime. Do you have Quicktime Pro? You might need that for certain kinds of output under Quicktime.

As for uncompressed, that 2GB limit isn’t a FAT32 limit anyway… it sounds very much like an AVI limit. Under the old Video for Windows API from Microsoft, from back in the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 days, there’s a limit, which works out to either 1GB or 2GB depending on just how old it is.

The solution to this is a thing called OpenDML, which uses the RIFF structure to allow multiple 2GB chunks to be stacked in an AVI file. This is also known these days as AVI 2.0. If you render to a “Video for Windows” CODEC (which might be VfW or might actually be DirectShow… the details are kind of hidden), you ought to check the “Create an OpenDML (AVI version 2.0) compatible file” box (this is in the “Custom” menu, not on the file dialog), or you might hit that 2GB limit.

I haven’t used Uncompressed in ages, but have created gigantic files (100GB+) using various other AVI CODECs (Cineform, SonyYUV, ffdshow), so the mechanism is definitely still intact.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The iPhone 4 records AVC (aka, H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10) video in 1280×720/30p at about 10Mb/s. This is fairly comparable to video recorded by some of the “Flip” (and Flip-style) pocket camcorders, but less than half the complexity of a “real” AVCHD camcorder.

Most AVC camcorders record using the AVCHD standard, which means you get AVC video at up to 24Mb/s, AC-3 audio, all wrapped up in an MPEG-2 transport stream (eg, same container format as HDV). Some variations include Sanyo’s models, which record AVC video and AAC audio in an MP4 wrapper – the standard MPEG-4 file format. Apple’s recording in the Quicktime file format, which is a well established Apple standard (much as Microsoft has AVI), also quite similar to .MP4.

Anyway, you can’t edit this in older versions of Vegas, you can probably re-mux it to MP4, which will work, without the need to re-encode — much faster, no quality loss. You need Quicktime installed on your system, most likely. Anyway, try YAMB (Yet Another MP4 Box GUI), which can find here: https://yamb.unite-video.com. This is pretty good at re-muxing to proper MP4. I was messing around with a Sanyo camcorder last year, which produced slightly flawed MP4 files that could crash Vegas. Re-muxing them in YAMB (which uses the command-line MP4Box tool for its main work) made them work find in Vegas.

If you find iPhone 4 video to be taxing on your system, you’ll want to upgrade that PC before jumping into using an AVCHD camcorder.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, dual layer can be a real issue.

Older players had quite a list of bugs, and unfortunately, at the dawn of DVD, some of these bugs were in the Philips devkit code. So unless you were a company like Pioneer, who developed their own DVD implementation head to toe, you probably failed to read DVD-RW, maybe even DVD-R, on players made some years before these formats existed. I had a Pioneer from back then, and it worked just dandy on all of the newer DVD formats.

Much of this is based on reflection. A glass mastered DVD returns 80% of the light it’s hit with. A DVD-R has to return at least 45% to meet spec, and a DVD+RW at least 25%. But one of the bugs was that, if the player saw 35% or less reflectance, it automatically assumed a dual-layer disc (glass mastered, of course).

I haven’t seen any hard numbers on the reflectance of the second layer on a dual-layer DVD-R, but it can’t be great. And it’s kind of an exotic form .. BD-Rs cost less per disc than DVD-R-DL or DVD+R-DL. DVD manufacturers test with DVD-R and DVD+R, but DVD-R-DL is less likely. And more subject to issues as the disc and player age.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Don’t have to convince me.. I was the guy doing 2 and 3 camera shoots, with separate audio rig (recording to laptop) at my kids’ band concerts and plays. It’s good practice for “paying gigs”, but also… if you do know how to do it right, and don’t, it’s just wasted effort.

First thing — always use tripods. I have a nice >$200 tripod with video head, but a few extra for stationary cameras or mics… got ’em for $10 each or less, at yard sales. Certainly some of the better OIS systems can make handheld shooting an option when you need it, but I really try not to need it (I also have a monopod which fits the same Manfrotto base mount as my main tripod — and I built one of those into a GlideCam 2000, as well).

Distribution has to be a little boring, because if it’s not, people won’t be able to play it. This was an issue back in the early days of DVD, but as long as you stick to single layer, good quality discs, and print-on-disc labels rather than stickies, you’re pretty much a “go” these days.

For plays and concerts, I run the video straight through, but do a good chapter index. That way, you can watch as intended, but if Mommy’s Special Boy is doing a solo only on second act, fourth song, it’s easy to punch that up for people who won’t sit for the whole show. I also do a nice DVD authoring, including a menu transitions and a credits section (which you can make from program hand-outs).

This is also good experience for other things. I’ve shot several dozen weddings over the years, but it was the kids shows that really got me thinking about “site collected assets”.. still photos, particularly close ups, programs, anything you can use later for the video disc authoring, to avoid the cliched “Wedding on a DVD” clipart/clipvid that so many people use to fill out a wedding video.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Last I checked, FCP didn’t support much of any native AVC/AVCHD editing. So when you add AVC files to a project, it logs and transfers the files to ProRes copies. So yeah, fast edits. You can do the same kind of thing, at higher quality, using Cineform on the PC (Cineform Neo runs around $100).

For cheap, there are other options. One is, just using Vegas, transcode to a high bitrate MXF/MPEG-2 file. You’ll drop a small bit of quality, but MPEG-2 editing is pretty fast on a modern PC. Another option is the open standard DNxHD CODEC from Avid: https://www.broadcastautomation.com/dnxhd/

That’s high-end-ish, and since I use Cineform I haven’t needed this, but it’s worth a check-out, if your PC isn’t quite up to the demands of native AVC editing (as few are). If you install DNxHD, the version from Avid runs under Quicktime, not DirectShow or Video4Windows.

-Dave