[Dave Haynie]

Vegas will “smart render” many sorts of video that’s unchanged.

I’ve done very large projects in Vegas for years, in both dimensions (eg, 2+ hours long, 40-60 different video layers, etc). If you add enough stuff, you can bring any machine to its knees.

In some cases, there’s a good reason to pre-render some things. For example, I shot a wedding recently that was very light challenged… it was held in a dark nightclub. I have good cameras, but this was really a job for a video DSLR, which I don’t yet have. In any case, a little intelligent de-noising via an appropriate plug-in works wonders… over time. The plug-in (Neat Video) is great, but slows everything down.

I could wait until the edits are done, but I was moving some AVCHD to Cineform (for faster edting) anyway, so I just did the filtering on the raw video. Several days later, it’s all done… and I’m back up and editing very fast (I have a Core 2 Quad at 2.83GHz, 8GB DRAM, and 1 TB HDD dedicated to this job, as well as another 3TB on the PC and another 8 TB in a RAID). The nice thing about Cineform is that is upscales your HDV/AVCHD color to 4:2:2, and even if you need edit in several staged projects, you don’t lose visual quality. One of my 40-50 layer edits just worked better as two projects… no matter the NLE, you can add only so many composite layers before your PC cries “uncle”.

On many of these things, you’re not going to see much difference from NLE to NLE… when you need a faster CPU, you need a faster CPU. Your machine is about as fast as my three-year-old laptop. I COULD edit video on that box, but not unless I had no other choice. And as far as resources go, Vegas itself is pretty compact. You will run out of memory in 2GB if you put in enough layers, HD video tracks, very large still photos (I’ve done lots of “Ken Burns” stuff), etc…. no much you can do about that, with Vegas or any NLE — this takes memory. One 6MPixel photo is going to take 18MB+ of working memory, for example. A single frame of HD is going to take 6MB of working memory, and that’s if you’re only compositing in 8-bits/pixel.

Adobe recommends 12GB for Premiere CS5, with a very recent nVidia card if you want GPU acceleration. While Avid’s minimum for Media Composer is 4GB minimum, with a dual core processor and a nVidia graphics card FX 560 or greater. So you would need hardware upgrades to be happy with either of these anyway.

Another tool for large projects in Vegas is the fact that .veg files look like any other piece of media. So it’s pretty easy to make subprojects and then assemble them in different ways, if you have different edit targets for the same video (eg, web, trailer, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Blu-Ray (and DVD-A) supports 720/60p, 720/50p, and 720/24p as well as 1080/60i, 1080/50i, and 1080/24p.

For a 720/60p Blu-Ray, I would export video in AVC at an appropriate bitrate, audio in WAV or AC-3, depending on my needs. If you don’t have a 720/60p Blu-Ray template (I swear they’re in there, but it could I made my own… it’s been some years), edit your 1080/60i template, change the resolution and frame rate, then save as a 720/60p template (actual rate is, of course, 59.94fps).

Then, in DVD-A, fire up the “properties” requester, and mess with stuff. Change “Video format” to AVC, “Resolution” to 1280×720, and “Frame rate” to “59.940 progressive”. Now say “ok”.

The AVC files you created at 720p should drop right in, now, and not show any re-encoding in the “Optimize” chart.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Cineform is a great alternative for some things.

If you’re doing complex editing, with many layers, it’s noticably faster, even on a fast machine. On my Q9550 PC, Cineform is as fast as DV was back in the earlier days of DV. But you do have to have a decent hard drive… you get about 60GB/hour from 1080/60i or 30p, 120GB/hour from 1080/60p. Add a few layers of that, and you can find yourself HDD-bound, rather than CPU-bound.

Of course, it’s an extra step. You can batch convert, of course. And you’re coming over from HDV acquisition, it’s still faster than realtime if you have a decent PC for the conversion. And no dropouts.

But particularly for editing it’s good. Unlike MPEG-2 or AVC, Cineform is intraframe compression only… no need to process N frames to give you the preview of the one you want. Cineform Neo converts your 4:2:0 AVC to 4:2:2, so if you’re doing processing on it, you may actually get better results. There’s technically a loss in quality going to any intermediate CODEC, but Cineform is using a wavelet compression technology, totally different approach than the DCTs using in MPEG-2 and AVC. So you don’t “stack” compression artifacts in a way they would reinforce each other (which can happen going from AVC to MPEG, which is what some people do).

About the only bad thing I can say about Cineform is that their anti-piracy technology is flawed. I had a huge headache with this in the fall, after my Win7 upgrade. Fortunately, the company is pretty responsive (which is why I’m still recommending the product).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, I agree. Particularly given that I use Vegas, play rock music, and use a PC.. and of course, Vegas. Ok, I also own 64-bit Sonar 🙂 And yet more often that not, find myself mixing in Vegas. Oh, and yeah, I also own a Panny AG-HMC40, which replaced a Sony HVR-A1, so I get beat up over the “consumery” camcorder. And that’s before I even mention a few consumer models I also use from time to time (the Sanyo Xacti sucks at everything else, but it’s damn fine video for $400).

And of course, you can counter many of these arguments. And they won’t go away. In part, it’s what you’re used to — if I’m more effective in Vegas, or can’t afford an $6000 camcorder, or whatever, that doesn’t mean I’m jealous of your “better” stuff. It’s also what’s better FOR ME… I really don’t want a 12lbs camcorder, I really do believe that, having used just about everything, Vegas suits me best. And really, how is YOUR suprior NLE at audio?

But you know, this is part of the human experience. There’s also a “mine” vs. “your” out there. Before I got into video, it was all Canon vs. Nikon for years (I had Olympus, back in the 70s and 80s), PC vs. Mac (I had Amigas), Ford vs. Chevy, whatever. You spend some not-insignificant cash to become a member of a quasi-exclusive club, and many people feel the need to preach the virtues and deny those of your chosen club, even when they’re not so familiar with that club. That’s ok to a point… I don’t mind learning (and for the record, I have both Nikon and Canon cameras today, I’ve had JVC, Sony, Canon, and Panasonic camcorders… but since Apple knocked my “Mac Clone” company, PIOS AG, out of the Mac business, I’ll have no more interest in Apple products).

It also helps to not be so full of yourself. Someone coming at me with Avid and Protools and XDCAMs is probably more dependent on these for a living than I am with my gear. I guess Elvis Costello put is well: “I used to get disgusted, now I try to be amused”… now, don’t beat me up with claims you have a better Elvis!

As far as music goes, though.. I’m totally happy with my Martin D15… the only way you’ll best me there is with a better Martin!

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m using Boris FX, Vegas 9, and Win 7 too. And yeah, if you use FX in plug-in mode, it’s only found in 32-bit Vegas. Of course, you can have both 32-bit and 64-bit installed on a 64-bit system, and still run 64-bit when you don’t need the plug-in.

You kind of have to cut the other guys a little bit of a break… Vegas was way ahead of the pack in developing a full 64-bit NLE (and even in developing one that works… I had a few issues with Vegas 8.1). You can probably count on the upgrades coming, and costing money. So I’m holding off any upgrades until 64-bit versions are out.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Apple is, strangely, a bit behind on several aspects of the HD process. I’m not sure why — they control the OS (including any GPU acceleration APIs), they were an early adopter of AVC, etc. I guess they’re all working hard to get Blu-Ray support in there.. something we got two years ago in Vegas.

I get fullscreen, full quality playback with Vegas Pro 9 on AVCHD and similar AVC files on my desktop. It’s a Q9550 CPU, so Quad Core Intel Core2 at 2.83MHz. Multi-core does improve the performance of Vegas… not on everything, but in general. It also doesn’t hurt to have lots of memory and 64-bit, too (64-bit offers FPU advantages, more registers).

You don’t need a GPU.. Vegas isn’t using to accelerate things. That’s kind of sad, in a way. I can play back a 1080/60p file at full frame rate under Windows 7, just using Microsoft’s CODEC, and only take about 12% of CPU… this because it’s using DXVA 2.0 acceleration. Other programs are starting to use GPU acceleration for video rendering, also an issue. Hopefully, Vegas moves in this direction — that would ensure my upgrade on Day One. Not that they have all THAT much to worry about.

The thing is, yeah, AVCHD editing, particularly at normal 1080/60i, 30p, or 24p resolutions works. But it’s rare you’re just going to drop in a single track and do a few cuts. Add two cameras, and now you have color correction, cross fades, etc. at the minimum. Before you know it, what used to be acceptable is now too slow, and I’m rendering out to Cineform or something.

That’s going to happen anyway, once you get complex enough… in any NLE. I had a project last summer with two sets of about 20 layers, including animations, greenscreen, and other crazy bits. It was a three-something minute music video, and took about three hours to fully render. The reason it was two separate projects was that, with all that work, Vegas still gets slow. If tapping into the 118 processors on my GPU in addition to the four in the CPU could help, that would be very amazing.

Yeah, it’s different kinds of processing. But for some aspects of video rendering, the GPU is simply better at it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, it does that… Vegas 8.1 is not too stable.

The point wasn’t so much working better on a 64-bit system, as releasing a native 64-bit version for us to play around with. One big advantage of a 64-bit system is access to more than 4GB of memory… but only if you have a native 64-bit application. A small advantage is that code can sometimes run a bit faster… though it can also run slower in other situations.

Anyway, the 32-bit version of Vegas 8 will work just dandy on a 64-bit system as well.

You may want both, anyway, but the first thing I’d do in your shoes is install the 32-bit version of Vegas 8, which is far more stable, and see how it does on your project.

One thing to consider.. when you install a 64-bit version of Vegas, you need to install other 64-bit stuff for it to play nicely with, such as plug-ins and CODECs. It’s quite possible some of the cool stuff you have for 32-bit Vegas won’t yet exist for 64-bit Vegas.

Vegas 9 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, too. Overall I have found it a bit more stable than Vegas 8, and quite a bit moreso than Vegas 8.1.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

As long as this camera produces correct H.264 (1080/30p at 12Mb/s is the claim) in an MPEG-4 file wrapper, Vegas should have no trouble editing it.

Of course, H.264 is a slow editing format… some people use an intermediate CODEC like Cineform for editing. But Vegas will do the job.. I have editing both AVCHD (H.264 and AC-3 audio in an MPEG-2 transport stream) and “generic” MPEG-4 (H.264 and AAC audio in an MPEG-4 container) in Vegas without problems.

If there are problems, it’s probably due to errors in the format. For example, the Sanyo VPC-FH1 produces some funky weird MP4… negative timecodes, maybe some other weirdness, that crashes Vegas 9… at least most of the time. If you re-multiplex the A/V back into an MP4 wrapper with the timecode fixed, though, it’s perfectly editable. At least on a fast PC.

If they have any downloadable video clips, give ’em a try in Vegas.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Get back into DVDA, with all of your clips as before.

Go to the “File/Optimize Disc…” dialog. Presumably, you see check marks next to the audio, signs next to the video, as before.

Check the global settings, over on the right in that dialog. It should say something like:

Disc format: DVD
Video: MPEG-2, 16:9, 720×576 (PAL), 25
Audio: AC-3 Stereo, 192kbps

If not, hit the “Project Properties” button and make the appropriate adjustments. If you make any project changes, check to see if the change to checks.

Next, select your first video clip. Click the “Video 1” tab over on the right, look where is says “Recompress Required”, and expand that. Below it’ll give you “Reasons for required recompression”. For example, if I put a 24p progressive (NTSCfilm) video into just such a PAL project, DVDA will tell me here, “NTSC Media is incompatible with PAL project”.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m pretty sure the “DVD Architect 24p…” template does 24pA. I generated a little video in that format, dropped it into DVDA, and, at least according to the “Optimize” dialog, my video was just dandy.. no re-rendering necessary.

I’m referring to the project properties in DVDA, not Vegas. You should go to “File/Properties” and go to the “Properties” tab. Here, you should have “Aspect Ratio” set to “16:9”, “Resolution” set to “720×480 (NTSC)”, and “Frame Rate” set to “29.97”.

Next, add you video clip, and open the “Optimize Disc” dialog. Select your video clip, then “Video 1”, and you should see it say “Recompress No”, “Aspect Ratio 16:9” and “Frame Rate 23.976 progressive”.

-Dave