[Dave Haynie]

You’re probably thrashing you hard drive.

Cineform works out to about 15MB/s for 1080/60i video. That’s not a terribly difficult thing for a single, modern hard drive to stream. But once you stream two from the same hard drive, you’re seeking between the two files, and hard drive performance is going to get clobbered. 15MB/s + 15MB/s != 30MB/s when it comes to media streaming.

You may be able to prevent this by increasing buffers in Vegas (Preferences/Video/Dynamic RAM Preview), but I’m not exactly sure how Vegas uses the memory you give it. If you can, try each file on a separate drive.

You can certainly speed things up by lowering preview quality, too. Depending on what you’re doing in preview, you may be taking a big CPU hit, too. When you preview one file, you’re expecting the single CPU (Vegas doesn’t seem to use multithreading or any GPU accelerations in edit rendering… go figure) to decode one channel of video. No biggie. When you have two, layered, plus an effect… well, that’s more than twice the CPU load.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The problem here is easy: when you render an AVI, you get an AVI, regardless of what’s inside. If libavcodec allows a VP6 render inside an AVI, cool… but that VP6 in an AVI. An FLV file isn’t an AVI. FLV is a completely different A/V wrapper type, based on Macromedia’s SWF file format (Shockwave File).

Depending on what you have installed, you can create all kinds of things in AVI files: older Microsoft CODECs, DivX or XVid (based on MPEG-4), etc, via the AVI selection. But anything that uses a different file structure (MPEG, MPEG-4, RealMedia, Windows Media, etc) is a different render… these are on the same level as AVI, not below them. If Vegas did full fledged Flash, the emitter for it would have to be at top level.

Technically, it would be possible to render the AVI with VP6, then remultiplex from the AVI wrapper to the FLV wrapper, but I have not seen any software that does this. Supposedly, Adobe maintains the specs for the FLV file format on their web site.

The newer Flash Video stuff (.f4v) is based on yet another A/V wrapper, the ISO/IEC 14496-12 Base Media format, which is related to MP4 and Quicktime.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Not the practice of it, the quality. Most of the flash stuff is going into small web browser windows, or perhaps 480×320 mobile displays.. if you’re lucky (eg, most mobile displays are lower resolution).

Personally, I think BD and home video is evolving more toward the movie theatre experience than the 1950’s model of everyone crowded around the 12″ round boob-tube. You’d probably agree if you sat in one of the theater chairs in my media room and watched a Blu-Ray in 7-speaker surround sound on my 71″ screen 🙂 This is definitely not my father’s version of television.

I don’t have any problem with the various deliver mechanisms.. but most of the internet-based stuff survives specifically because of it’s distribution… you can see it when you’re not near the TV. Not all, but the bulk of it’s, as I said, video candy, 10 minutes or less, and quality is not an issue. It’s video, sure, but a vastly different form of video than film.

And that’s how they want it, apparently. I got myself on YouTube back in the days when video quality was heinous and uploads were restricted to 100MB, and usually, 10 minutes. I got myself a “Director’s” account, which permitted unlimited time, no extra size. These days, they let up upload a gig or two, but it’s still only 10 minutes… no more Director’s accounts. Clearly, Google believes that YouTube is perhaps an alternative to TV, more likely something you watch when you’re not near a TV, and very much not a place for film.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have done stuff like this pretty often.

First thing.. find your offending word, and cut the the audio portion out of the main A/V clip at that point. Slide it down to a separate track just to keep it around. Do the cut as close to the edges of the word as possible. If the background is quiet, this is easy to visualize… if there’s too much background noise, you may have to listen carefully to find the cut points.

Next find the replacement word. For this, try to find one as isolated from other speech as possible, and make the cut correspondingly as wide as possible… ok, you don’t have to cut, but it may be easier. Copy that isolated section to your problem area.

Next, try to line up the word as much as possible, using the original word as a guide. No big deal if it’s a little off, just match the leading bits, and most viewers will never notice.

Finally, blend in the lead and tail sections to the original audio… this is why you want the largest dead-air around that replacement word (assuming you have several to choose from) as possible. Blending from crowd noise to crowd noise is idea… no one will hear the edit. If you do a direct cut, there’s probably a glitch there, even if it’s a small one. Move the edges of the replacement clip that overlap (and crossfade) with the original audio to the cleanest sounding replacement.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

It may not be necessary going from HD down to SD, but for top quality frame-rate conversions, SD to SD, I have found the enable 2x or 3x supersampling in Vegas (assuming you have Vegas Pro) dramatically improves the conversion.

I first did this years ago, to do an NTSC to PAL conversion. I had tried demos of all sorts of programs for this, but none did a good job. Though it took over a week (8.5 days) to render the 2 hour video from DV NTSC to DV PAL (then, a 1GHz PC, single CPU), it was well worth it (and proof that Windows could actually go over a week without crashing or asking to reboot..)

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, it’s all based on the “extension”, in Windows.. but your default .mp4 player (which may be the Quicktime player, but doesn’t necessarily have to be) is the thing that plays MPEG-4 transport streams, no matter what’s hidden inside. Same idea as .flv.. if you have a Flash player installed (which most people probably don’t… this is far more a web format than a PC format, though many players, such as VLC, will play it just dandy), anything in a Flash video wrapper will play, H.264 or On2.

If Adobe wants to build on this, they should work to make the format more popular. MP4 had no special advantage early on… it was just a spec from the MPEG people, and they don’t even really creat end-user specs, they create documents other people (such as the DVD and Blu-Ray people) use to make other, end-user specs. It was initially Apple that popularized the format… because it’s supported on the iPod, and they give away a player for it (two, actually).

Of course, Google has the same issue, if they intend to do anything with On2… there’s an advantage to your video format being popular, but you generally have to give some pieces away for free. At least Google is used to this.. this is also how the DivX folks popularized their various video formats.

I don’t know how the On2 licensing was done. Back in the day, MPEG-2 and On2 were licenced only by the player, not the content. They changed that with MPEG-4, and it’s quite possible others took note of that, too… did On2 actually change per play? If so, could be Google had no intention of using VP6 for anything, and just simply bought On2 because it was cheaper than paying royalties. A company like Google can do that math 🙂

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, actually, you have to do two things. And not all versions of Windows respect those settings, even if you do.

You have to set the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag, on the program or DLL, assuming it’s not already set. Setting this is usually a linker option, left to the programmer, since, if your program isn’t written correctly, this setting may cause chaos (pointer comparisons using signed arithmetic, stuff like that, will crash and burn).

Next, you have to boot Windows with the /3GB switch set, which turns on the 4GB Tuning mode. If this is not set, the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag is ignored. Similarly, if 4GBT mode is enabled, it only makes a difference on binaries with the large address bit set. This applies to Windows XP Professional and various server OSs, it is not supported by “Home” versions. I’m sure there’s a hack… Read more here, including the cautions:

https://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/23/memory-management-demystifying-3gb.aspx
https://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/22/218527.aspx

Even /3GB on the OS and /LARGEADDRESSAWARE on the application won’t help if there’s no free memory. How could there not be? Too much I/O… like a 1GB graphics card. In fact, this would be a general problem for 4GBT mode.

On 64-bit systems, you get 2GB user mode virtual address space with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE clear, and 4GB with it set.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

A couple of things to consider.

For one, watch your DVD bitrate. Assuming you’re really authoring MPEG-2 bog standard DVD-Video discs (eg, via DVDA), you want to keep a fairly healthy bitrate. There’s no need to run at the maximum 9Mb/s or whatever the “NTSC DVD” preset would have you use, but for an 1-1.25 hours of video on a DVD, I have a preset that does a variable bitrate encode, 5Mb/s average, 7.5Mb/s peak… works good. Use AC-3 audio, separately rendered, and do check that DVDA is not re-rendering.

Obviously, DVD isn’t going to look as good on the computer as your original video… make sure you preview it on a real TV. If it still looks bad there, something is screwy… the Flip HDs are no prizes, but they should produce acceptable video, as long as you have good lighting. And while what you see on DVD will certainly be downrezzed versus 720p, it should look decent, if not necessarily comparable to professional mastered DVD video viewed on the same rig.

With that said, I’m no fan of the Flip camcorders. They use relatively tiny sensors, poor lenses, and low bitrates for encoding. Their HD models (MinoHD, UltraHD) only shoot 1280×720/30p video, encoded at around 8.8Mb/s. I’d be much happier with 12Mb/s or more, even for 720/30p… most “real” camcorders these days do AVC at 17-24Mb/s, at least as a high-quality option.

The big issue I have is the lens… take a look at any camcorder, where you think the lens ought to be. If it’s all glass there, all lens… good, you have a real camcorder, at least by one metric. If there’s a plastic ring inset, and a tiny lens down in there, you have some kind of toy.

Now, if you need something like a Flip that fits in a shirt pocket, go for it… though the similar Kodak Zi8 delivers better quality video and full 1080/30p or 720/60p video, though it’s still sporting a fixed, pinhole lens, just like the Flips (it’s very clearly a clone, but for this market segment, a good one).

My favorite “cheap” HD camcorder this month is the Sanyo VPC-FH1, just over $400 — sure, about twice the price, maybe a bit more. Cheap is a matter of prespective. This is a real camcorder… 10x optical zoom lens, video bitrates up to 24Mb/s, etc. It has an interesting 1080/60p mode, double the resolution of any Blu-Ray legal mode, great for sports video. I bought one of these so I could shoot my daughter’s JV soccer season without undue wear and tear on a profession camcorder, but it’s actually better. You can cut this down to 1080/60i, 1080/30p, or 720/60p for Blu-Ray use.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Your best bet is to render AVC based on the video you shot. Blu-Ray can support 1920×1080, 1440×1080, or 1280×720 sized images, and it can handle 1080/60i, 1080/24p, 720/60p, 720/24p… and the PAL-based version of these, too (eg, 50i, 50p).

So if you’re shooting in normal NTSC HDV mode, your best render is 1440×1080/60i.. Blu-Ray players and the devices that display their output can deal with interlaced video. These days, it’s probably upconverted to progressive video, simply because most digital TVs can’t actually display an interlaced video. But they do this clean.

A basic video player for a PC isn’t doing any of that special de-interlacing magic to make your HD video good on the computer screen. Some more sophisticated ones will.. try Nero Showtime, or the free Splash Lite, and you may see better-looking video on your PC as well as your TV.

If you have the sort of camcorder than can shoot in progressive mode, you can certainly render that for Blu-Ray and PC, without any of the interlacing issues. But it’s unwise to do frame rate conversions… it takes huges bits of CPU power to do right, and still looks iffy. Best to render in the resolution you shot in, where possible.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Sony’s not currently trying to support every cheesy consumer niche. Which, right now anyway, is Flash… particularly since, for anyone who’s using the standard services like YouTube, isn’t even needed. They want AVC or WMV uploads, not .flv. All the new YouTube stuff has moved to AVC anyway, even if it’s in a flash wrapper.

Folks doing “serious” (DVD-ish or better) streaming video aren’t using flash, either, but dedicated, application-built systems. Netflix, for example, is streaming WMV at 2.4-3.8Mb/s in 720p, as their answer to “HD”. That’s essentially the same bitrate they’ve been using for SD streaming, and right now, not even remotely a threat to anyone actually interested in high definition. But it is buzzword compatible… they get to claim “HD”, despite the fact that most DVDs with upscalers will deliver a better film experience than Netflix streaming HD. Particularly because they only stream stereo audio.

The folks doing downloadable and streaming video are really too late to be a big replacement for Blu-Ray. They don’t have to be… their real target isn’t Blu-Ray, anyway, it’s television. I don’t watch films on a SD set, but for news or some TV shows, I’ll put on the old Sony and play it from a TiVo, despite the horrible picture. Internet video is doing that quality now, if you’re link is fast enough.

The On2 people, long before YouTube came along, were claiming about 1Mb/s as matching DVD quality, in their opinion. Maybe that’s true, but it’s also true that even DVD quality wasn’t needed for the goofy stuff people are self-authoring and uploading. Those are not keepers, not immersive experiences, they’re 10-minute-or-less video “snacks”. This stuff works fine for that, and it’s getting better, sure.

The other main use is video-adjunct on web sites… well, the 10% or less that isn’t simply linked to something on YouTube, anyway. This sort is intended to be viewed primarily in a little window in a web browser, not on a 70″ TV. Quality is not a huge issue.

The problem downloading/streaming is going to have to take on, that’s what comes after Blu-Ray. You need a continuous stream of 35-40Mb/s to match Blu-Ray… you’ll need 100-200Mb/s to handle proper 4K video in the future… more or less, depending on where they go with encoding technology. And this has to be sustained performance, if you want to offer real streaming, not just downloads. Maybe the networks in 5-10 years will be up to it, or maybe everyone will have download caps, and none of that will be practical… particularly in my home 4K theater of 2017!

-Dave