[Dave Haynie]

The Sony AVC CODEC doesn’t offer variable bitrate encoding. Two-pass encoding is only of value when you can analyze your variable bitrate decisions.. the 2-pass algorithms allow for better balancing of the variations, based not only on what’s just come, but what’s about to come.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I think you, like most people, mis-understand the technical meaning of the term “supported”. What that means, very simply, is that the vendor (eg, Sony Media Software) has tested the product, under that OS, on that hardware, to the point they certify it works as expected. Once that happens, the technical support people are now required to work with you if problems develop. And that does cost money.

So, Vegas 8/8.1.. you can’t really say you’re surprised these are not officially supported under Windows 7, not honestly. I mean, Vegas 9 came out six months ago, Vegas 8 is no longer supported with updates, and Windows 7 isn’t officially out yet. So you’re asking for an old version of the application to be officially tested on an OS that hasn’t even shipped in its final form yet? Hello, anyone home?

There’s a good chance Sony will announce Vegas 9 is fully supported in Windows 7.. far as I know, not yet. This is still a supported product… perhaps they have an upgrade, though by all accounts, Window 7 is just Vista with much of the stupid taken out. Vegas 8 works fine in Vista… Vegas 8.1 (64-bit version) was flakey, in my experience. Vegas 9 works great in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You’re a little confused… Google’s HD is streaming at 2Mb/s or thereabouts. You can’t watch that, in realtime, not on 14.4kb/s, or even 31kb/s-51kb/s dialup. In fact, YouTube/Google HD is not happy on my 1.5Mb/s satellite link (the best connection I can get, in rural South Jersey). You’re clearly spoiled by too-fast internet connections.

In fact, YouTube’s HD format audio is variable bitrate, at a minimum of 100kb/s. Not for dialup, not even close. When did you last use a dialup connection for more than a moment? Even the old, non-HD, non-HQ stuff from YouTube (and most other FLV video sites) was just under 200kb/s, video and audio. That’s just dandy for any real broadband, but useless for dialup (sure, you can wait for the download, and YouTube does this better than many other sites) and not even functional for ISN and some cellular modem links.

And don’t be so smug.. an embeded HTML object absolutely does depends on the browser. Flash also depends on the right version of the Macromedia/Adobe plug-in being installed. I don’t disagree.. it’s the best way to deliver video today… that doesn’t make it great video, only better than other options.

I’m using Flash at 600kb/s to deliver soccer game video, several games a week. I shoot in 1080/60p, but for the internet, I deliver in 640×360, with audio at a mono 24kb/s. Much more than this and people can’t view it.. not everyone. Much less, and it’s more artifacts than video. So yeah, flash is useful, but it’s limited.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah.. it’s important to know who’s disc you actually have, even the specific disc you have, and how well it performs. Unfortunately, with may labels, you don’t know. Verbatim makes their own, and also sells Mitsubishi… who also sell Verbatim. They must have some arrangement. Rietek (RiData) sells their own, as do Taiyo Yuden. Sony makes their own, but also labels other brands… same with TDK, Philips, and many others. Most don’t make them at all.

It’s less of an issue today, but if, like me, you were around at the dawn of DVD and DVD-R/+R, you have some battle scars.

Much of these were due to bugs in the original reference platform Toshiba put out, through the DVD Forum, for anyone interested in building a DVD player. Many if not most of the players from those days inherited the same kinds of problems. Some companies found these problems and corrected them, many did not. Some (Pioneer, for example) were there in the early days and did their own implementation from the spec. I had a very early Pioneer unit, and it played everything; DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW. That’s is what happens if you have a bug-free DVD player, but few actually were bug free.

In fairness, things like the RW discs came out some time after DVD players shipped. An RW disc has a 25% reflectance… one bug in the original reference design had players automatically assuming a 2-layer disc if they saw such low levels reflected back.

You can get a sense of compatibility by checking out DVD-R or DVD+R types at https://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia. This is a good resource, as it relates hard media codes for different discs, as well as users’ experiences with compatibility.

For the record, there was a time when Rietek’s did very well.. I went through a few hundred of those. At some point, they got wonky, and I switched to Taiyo Yuden, which remains my choice today.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

A brand name itself doesn’t matter… but it’s an indicator. Because the specifics of the DVD-R actually do matter.. I’ve sold over 500 videos on DVD, I have a decent history on this.

Some manufactures actually make their own discs, others basically buy in bulk on commodities markets, and sell you whatever they get that month as the same product. That can be a problem.. the Memorex disc you bought in January may not be the same you get in May, even if it has the same SKU.

The few companies that make their own, well, at least you have a chance at consistency. They do change the product from time to time, but if you buy a Taiyo Yuden disc, you know you’re getting one from Reitek.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yes, that’s true… Vegas doesn’t render to flash video. Most NLEs don’t, largely because flash video has been such a proprietary format. Adobe has it, but only after buying Macromedia (the originators of flash). You can get it as a Quicktime plug-in directly from On2 (the .FLV CODEC is based on On2’s compression technology).

I rather expect there’s some heinous licensing issues involved, or more companies would support it. After all, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 adds cost, and I agree, flash is no less popular these days (though converters from “something else” really are a dime a dozen).

As for quality… it’s a non-issue, really. Export to any reasonable format, and you’re adding so much crazy compression to deliver an online video, you’re not going to make things measurably worse going though an intermediate CODEC. If quality was that big of a concern, you’d go H.264 anyway.. or offer both. FLV takes up less space because you typically crunch it down more, and people accept this. But at the same quality, H.264 wins, easily.

I’m not talkin’ out my butt here, either, I put up a few hours of FLV video every week.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

As with camcorders, I have a collection of field recorders. I still use my Sony MD recorder on occasion… it’s a bloody pain to have to do an analog transfer back to the PC, but it’s very compact.

I also have a Tascam recording interface for a PC, which provides phantom power for condenser mics. That’s useful in situations that don’t require much portability.

My main field recorder is the Tascam DR-1… same idea as the Zoom, only it doesn’t break as easily. It only does stereo, but at 24-bit, 48kHz uncompressed, it’s a happy stereo. You can hook up an external dynamic mic, or run a condenser in via a preamp.

Audio on the camcorder is ok.. but just ok. If you’re recording in high definition, you’re probably recording compressed audio. HDV uses MPEG Layer 2, straight AVCHD uses AC-3, and some of the generic MPEG-4 cameras use AAC. So you can get better audio off-camera.

The big improvement, though, is bit depth. Unless you have a sound guy, you’re likely to run into trouble field recording when you have at least a 16-bit target (DVD or Blu-Ray), but you’re recording in 16-bit. AGC usually crapifies the sound, but if you have 20 to 24-bit audio (always a question just how many of those bits are actually marketing bits), you have plenty of head and leg room.

There are two reasons to use an XLR adaptor… you’re running 50ft XLR cables to the camcorder, or you’re trying to hook up better microphones, those that don’t exist on 1/8″ plugs.

You don’t need the low-noise (differential signaling) of XLR going the foot or so from the mic to the camcorder, and there are plenty of good mics available battery powered and capable of hooking into an 1/8″ jack. I do have XLR with my Sony (came with), and better mics (one Rode NG-1.. a decent one, about 1/2 the price of the HF-20, though you can spend as much for mics as you did for your camcorder and not be cheated). If you’re just after better audio, you can do as well with something like the Rode VideoMic.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Watch the Main Concept CODEC.. most of the presets there are intended for devices, like iPods, not something similar to Blu-Ray in quality. Perhaps you can set up a higher quality output (I’ve actually been messing around with this), but not without a much higher bitrate setting.

You really don’t want to be editing MP4/AVC anymore than you can help it. While obviously that a problem to be solved with an MP4 camcorder, rendering out to MP4 should be considered a delivery format only, not a thing for re-editing. AVC is very CPU intensive, moreso than any other format at least currently in common use. As an example… 1080/60p video from my Sanyo VPC-FH1 (twice the usual amount of information) takes about 65-75% of my Q9550’s CPU (eg, all four cores) just to play back in full resolution and full 60fps speed. It’s much better with GPU-accelerate playback, but you need a player that does this.

Now, you can go faster, but the Q9550 is still a fairly respectable CPU. Now imagine the resources you’re spending trying to edit that, particularly since Vegas, like most other NLEs, seems to use only the one CPU for rendering during edits, and no GPU acceleration. This is the problem with AVCHD and other MP4 editing today.

WMV (the latest version of which follows the open VC-1 standard) is hardly lossless. It’s not quite as sophisticated as AVC, but it has a family resemblance… some of the same people were involved in both. WMV was designed to require fewer resources, particularly on playback, so yeah, on your relatively slow machine, it should play back better. Microsoft also set their original WMV/HD standard to use 720/30p video… easier to fit on a DVD, easier to play back on PCs and devices that couldn’t handle AVC just yet.

Nothing wrong with WMV. If your main distribution target is PCs rather than DVD/BD players, you can technically create a WMV/HD DVD that’ll play automatically on a Windows PC when inserted, complete with menus and everything. Quality is not Blu-Ray level, but hey, you’re watching on a PC, so you’re not looking for that, usually, anyway. Authoring is a bear.. this was never successful enough to spawn lots of authoring tools. Before BD, anyway, I used to hack these by hand… HTML and JavaScript, you see..

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ok, let’s look here… The HF11 is a good camcorder. Use it if you’re shooting video. The TX5.. I have a TX5. It’s a great pocket P&S camcorder, and sure, you can get a little video on it. Much better than a “Flip”, but take a close look… that’s highly compressed motion JPEG. It’s chock full of artifacts you won’t see in the Canon’s video.

Also, the Panasonic has weird autofocus seeking behavior. This is due to its origins as a still camera. A video camera may need to trim focus regularly, but it needs to do this in a way that’s not so obvious, or no one will use the autofocus. A still camera needs to find the focus quickly, but just use it for one frame. They have improved this a bit in the latest firmware (do get the upgrade, from the Panasonic site), but I still find it dicey compared to real video.

So on to your questions:

1. Use 1080/24p. It is not even slightly overkill “for what the human eye sees anyhow”. The human eye has 6 million color sensitive photo receptors (cones) and 120 million luma sensitive photo receptors (rods and cones). You can see all benefits of HD, you can see the compression artifacts in HD, you can see the benefits of 4K (four times the data per picture as HD), all of that. It just depends on what you’re using to view it. The 15″ TV in my kitchen will not do justice to 1080p HD.. the 71″ TV in my media room will.

2. Is 720/24p good enough for video on a 42″ TV? Well, it’s better than 480/24p… and there have been a number of excellent films shot on 480/24p. Like “28 Days”. Many others. There are plenty of bad films shot on 35mm, too. For full visual acuity on a 42″ TV at 1080p, the average person should sit about 5.5 feet (there are standards from SMPTE and THX about this, based on the viewing angle, too). At around 15 feet, you’re at the maximum distance to resolve 720p. So basically, if you’re closer than 15ft, you’ll get some benefit from 1080p. Unless you have lousy vision.

3. WMV at 4.8Mb/s for 720/24p? Well, sure, that’ll work. I made my own WMV/HD discs for some years (before Blu-Ray), and generally went to around 6-8Mb/s for 720/60i (cut down from 1080/60i). Obviously, the image improves with bitrate. You can’t make any blanket statements.. 3Mb/s (the standard rate for 720p DivX-HD) may look good on slow moving video, but fail big on sports video. Content matters.

4. Wasting time and space? Nonsense! You should always shoot as high as you might ever need. Storage is cheap (says the guy with 3TB in the PC, 640GB in the laptop, and 8TB of external drive storage), reshooting and regrets are not. I have entered web contests for video (even won one.. look up hoagiefest.com) and kept it 1080i or 1080p all the way to the point I crank out that cheesy 480×360 video for upload. I can always render a better version (which I actually did.. “hazydave” channel on YouTube)… but if I shot in lower resolution, I can’t. That doesn’t mean you need to shoot a film in 1080/60p or forget about it. But even considering deliver in 720/24p, I would shoot and master at 1080/24p. Of course, I’m not trying to squeeze this onto a DVD… I’d made a Blu-Ray, then downconvert to a real DVD-Video for the Blu-laser-challenged among us.

5. 1990x180x12? Someone’s confused… whatever you’re using (Windows?) to view the properties may not be well versed in the ways of AVCHD. The MOV stuff (MJPEG in a QuickTime wrapper) is much more well established (eg, it’s old fashioned).

6. You want to speed up “import and editing process” with smaller clips. Well, first of all, if you’re editing in Vegas, there’s no import time. You mean, copy-from-the-camera time? Is your film that unimportant that this is a big deal? I shoot 2-3 of my daughter’s soccer games a week, in 1080/60p, and think transfers from a flash-based camera are The Bomb. You get that way, after 20 years of tape 🙂

As for editing, yeah, AVCHD is slow. AVCHD at 720/24p is still slow. Two ways to go here. One is to use an intermediate CODEC. I use CineForm. While it’s true a short video I’m doing (soccer highlights from 2008) is currently occupying 462GB of Hard drive with all that Cineform, it’s fast editing. I mean, like, wiz though the video with your jog-shuttle-wheel fast. No waiting. It’s like editing DV, only in HD. MPEG-2 is too slow for more than casual editing, AVCHD editing is just self-flagellation.

The alternative: use a proxy. Go buy “Gearshift” for Vegas. You can edit in SD, nice and fast (but ugly on that second 1200p monitor, compared to the full HD). Switch to HD when you want to see HD. There are other options, but proxy editing is the other path to sanity.

> I’ll get my prosumer camera in the future 🙂

The HF11 is a dandy camera, plenty of prosumer appeal in there. And these have evolved fast… my “Pro” Sony from some years back was pretty much matched by the Canon HV10/HV20 only a few years later, at least in image quality. And the HV20 added 24p! Now I have this frickin’ $400 Sanyo, and it’s even at least in the same quality ballpark, and offers 1080/60p and 30p modes (and some others). And it’s dang near pocket sized. Your camera is not the problem.

But your sound might be. If you’re shooing a film to be watched by actual humans, don’t forget that they have ears. The built-in mics on every camcorder ever made suck. Use an external mic or two, or a field recorder. Or a PC. Or all of the above. Pristine 1080/24p video, with perfect lighting and editing and everything else you can apply is still unwatchable is the audio sucks.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

HD is entering the mainstream, definitely. Not the toy HD in the “Flip”.. those are only for kiddies concerned with YouTube uploads.. the video quality is horrible, unless you’re targeting a 2Mb/s-or-less medium like YouTube.

The DSLR market is still growing by double-digits… that’s hard to equate with “tanking”. Most people who buy DSLRs are professionals or prosumers.. there has never been a market the size of the P&S camera market, or for that matter, consumer video. They’re around 11 million units a year, with Canon and Nikon owning about 80%.

Most DSLR users are not video people, or they’re like me, and have many cameras (two DSLRs, six film SLRs, various film rangefinders, three HD camcorders, one still pocket camera with 720p video… sorta-kinda, it’s only MJPEG).

I think Sony wants to dominate all areas of the video and photo market, as much as they can. After all, only that can explain why they bothered to buy the Minolta-Konica SLR works, given the tiny bit of pie left after Nikon and Canon have at it. Sony’s Webbie is a much better answer to the “Flip”.. the problem was, if you bought a Flip, you didn’t give a hoot about quality, or even a real lens. What you bought was software that held your hand from camera to YouTube. With most video gear, you have to learn something about the process. Not with the Flip.

And yeah, Canon was caught sleeping on that video-in-the-DSC thing. And on the “big zoom in the pocket” thing. Panasonic kind of drank their milkshake on that, which is why I have a Panny Pocket P&S camera, to augment my Canon and Nikon DSLRs, and Canon and Sony camcorders. Oh, and one Sanyo.

-Dave