[Dave Haynie]

[Stephen Crye] “First, even though the nVidia driver is certified as OpenCL capable, and GPU-Z reports that fact, I can’t find anywhere in SVP12 to set it to use OpenCL. Here are some screen shots:”

Oh, sorry… when it says “GPU acceleration of video processing”, that’s OpenCL. Vegas only uses OpenCL, and nVidia basically merged OpenCL into their CUDA drivers. So they say “OpenCL compatible” or something, but don’t say much else about OpenCL.

The old pre-Vegas-11 acceleration, set only in the rendering panels, were CUDA-only.

You are getting 79.8% CPU use, and your GPU doesn’t have much work to do, at least from the look of things. Try rendering that project with/without GPU (the above “GPU acceleration…” setting switched on and off) and see what this does to your CPU use. And which one renders faster.

Here’s the back-story. There’s some overhead for using the GPU. The OpenGL system actually runs a compiler — Vegas sends a higher level description of the problem to your nVidia OpenGL system, and it compiles that down to a program that can run on the hundreds of nVidia processors, which of course are different than the hundreds of processors you find on an AMD card, or even a bit different than those you’ll find on a different generation of nVidia chip.

That compiled version then gets sent to the GPU. This is a “loosely coupled” multiprocessing job — the code is sent, the GPU wakes up, does the work, then has to signal your main CPU that something’s finished, etc. In short, there’s some extra work to do, and some waiting by the CPU that might otherwise turn into useful work by that CPU. You don’t care if the GPU does the job faster — bottom line for me is rendering time, not how much of each processor’s time is being used. Of course, I’d feel better if both CPU and GPU went to 100%, but that would take a very, very deep pipeline in Vegas… it would have to be processing many things at a time, to give the CPU work to do while waiting for GPU tasks to finish, etc. I expect these things to improve generationally, but 100% of all resourses is a hard one to achieve.

The rendering project Sony put out for Vegas 11 (the car ad thing) is a really good test for GPU acceleration, because it’s able to use the GPU for in-project compositing as well as video rendering (CODEC dependent, of course). I still see a significant boot my my HD6970 on these, even with the much faster 6-core i7 these days (when Vegas 11 first came out, I had a 6-core AMD… much slower).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The GPU percentage in your graphs looks very low. Do you have OpenCL enabled in the Vegas options page? I typically see about 40-50% utilization of my AMD Radeon HD6970, and I saw up to 80% utilization on a nVidia GTX560… but it ran slower, so I went with the AMD. These were actually with Vegas 11, I have not done recent detailed benchmarks. But GPU still makes things faster, even on my 6-core i7-3930K. You didn’t post your Xeon configuration, but you ought to be in the same ballpark. Unless your machine is so fast Vegas just doesn’t use the GPU… not possiblem far as I know.

But it’s true an older card may not be as useful. As for the pro vs consumer cards, they always use the same GPU cores. Sometimes the chips are identical, more recently the pro parts have been internally the same but supported more RAM. They’re so similar that the type of chip, as seen by software, is set on nVidia boards by a couple resistors… it’s not baked into the chip, even at the packaging level.

That, of course, determines the driver software that will bind to the card. The pro cards have more stable drivers in general. They do more testing of OpenGL, and you don’t see a new driver rekease for every new game that comes along. The consumer cards do support OpenGL, do eventually get fixes from the pro side code base, but it’s been well proven that nVidia at least intentionally cripples OpenGL performance in software on consumer drivers.

Dies that matter? Some plug-in do use OpenGL, I don’t know that you’ll run into tge crippled operations or not. They will matter if you’re doing mechanical CAD or some other OpenGL heavy lifting. There are some articles that detail this, on ARStechnica and probably some other geek sites. The crippled code is always proven: the author does the same operation using different code (OpenCL, multiple passes of simpler ops) and always gets close if not exactly to the performance of the pro drivers. But I digress.

I know there’s been some contraversy about performance of the GTX6xx versus GTX5xx. No idea if that is still an issue with the latest GTX7xx series, but you’d kinda of hope nVidia has improved things since 2009. Obviously Vegas benchmarks would be best, next other video packages. Games and CAD are using the GPU differently.

I looked around last summer, when I upgraded my PC, and did not find anything that would boost GPU performance over my HD6970 that was any sort of a reasonable ROI. Vegas will only use one GPU, so dual cards or dual processor cards may help on OpenGL things, but not OpenCL, which is all of the rendering and compositing other than the 3D stuff. And yeah, some plug-ins still use nVidia’s CUDA rather than the OpenCL standard, so if you use such, you definitely want to stick to nVidia.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Sorry, was supposed to say $100 off. I did buy a copy.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

And it’s $100 this month, direct from the FX Home web site. I get some of this in Boris, but I’m thinking of getting it. Would really be useful in upping the caliber of my a mixed media animations.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Stephen Mann] “Normalize tries to increase the volume of quiet audio and decrease the volume of loud parts. It’s imperfect but it works best in dialogue, worst in music.”

That one is incorrect. Normalization is applying a linear gain to get your audio to some specific reference. A normalization function will scan some unit of audio (a clip, the selected region, your whole file) and make a gain adjustment based on that. The Normalize check-mark in Vegas just sets your peaks to just below 0dBFS (the actual peaking level is a setting the options menu). More meaningful to how you hear sound is RMS normalization, which puts the average energy of your sound at a specific dB level… for example, music is typically normalized to around -16dBFS (real music, not the hypercompressed garbage sound made for pop radio). RMS normalization usually works together with a limiter to bring down peaks that would otherwise clip, and it had to be used with care across very dynamic music or speech.

What you’re describing there is compressor-expander combination. A compressor sets a threshold… anything below that threshold is given unit gain, anything above that threshold is adjusted by a gain ratio relative to its volume (eg, one dB increase in output for every 2dB increase in input). A limiter is the device/plug-in which actually prevents a signal from exceeding 0dBFS. It’s really just a special case of a compressor, with an infinite or near so compression curve. If the compressor is described as “soft knee”, then there’s a gradual transition from the linear range to the compressed range.

An expander does kind of the opposite … it applies a gain ratio to the audio below a certain specified threshold. One classic use of a compressor/expander has been in noise control: you shrink the dynamic range of a signal by compression, transmit it, then expand it back to the original when received. Every modern LP record uses frequency-based compression and expansion (companding) together… to drastically cut the low frequencies (so LPs can hold 22 minutes and needles don’t go skating off the disc) and drastically boost the high frequencies (which can noisy and lossy on a the disc) before being recorded to vinyl. The reverse transform (called the RIAA curve) is applied when playing an LP back. But I digress.

A noise gate is another dynamics processor… it’s basically a volume-driven switch. Below a certain input level, the switch is off, above that level, it’s on. A little bit like the opposite of a limiter.

[Stephen Mann] “Dialog Normalization (I.E. Dialnorm) is a different bird altogether. Many people, including me, don’t completely understand it. But I try. “

I have been working in audio since I was a teenager. I’ve taken college courses in audio production, and I’m an EE on top of all that. And even I’ve been confused by the particulars of “dialnorm”, aka, “dialog normalization”. This is very much a setting for Dolby AC-3 only, not found anywhere else in this form anyway. And there’s even a Wikipedia entry on this, but it’s not all that satisfying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialnorm.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Lots of data presented there, but one big missing item: when you’re capturing video and hitting that 3.99GB limit… what device is it writing to? Writing uncompressed HD at 60p is not an exercise for the weak of heart… you would need about 380MB/s of sustained throughput to do that to a single drive in real time. You should check into the kind of compressed video available, and how that matches your HDDs.

And if you’re writing to a 32-bit file system (eg, not NTFS or exFAT), you are pretty much getting some kind of error at 3.99GB… or perhaps just rolling over and over-writing the start of the file, depending on the software. You need a 64-bit file system. Assuming other users are not having this problem, that’s the thing to look for.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Check this one out… from a contest entry in 2009. About half of it’s animated GIFs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNmfm-BAwzs

You can also layer previous video loops/clips with green screen or alpha channel (has to be raw or a few other specialized formats, since compression artifacts in the alpha layer is a Bad Thing). With some restrictions, SWF animations also play in Vegas.

-Dave

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[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to address that. I think it may well be an unavoidable thing, but I’ve never quantified just how slow it gets. Certainly no slowdown that I know of is an advantage.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

And also, on most digital systems (TVs and projectors), the displays have long since gone to something that doesn’t support interlace anymore. But they’re good at both scaling from interlace to progressive and detecting correctly-cadanced telecined video. So that pulldown from 24p to 60i is probably being reversed when you play it back… the primary disadvantage is just a little wasted space on the disc.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I do music things… the audio capabilities are often more important than the video. Or at least the potential… it’s likely most listeners aren’t going to have systems that fully exploit CD, much less full-on Blu-ray audio. But some do… Neil Young didn’t start doing his “archives” until Blu-ray came along, as he was waiting for a format that sounded as good as his studio recorders.

But even from where I sit.. everything I record in the field, whether video or video + audio is nominally at 24/48k or 24/96k these days. If I do a recording session, you might notice that I can’t afford a dozen Neumann mics, but the recording quality is going to be way up there. Good times we live in! And if you’re just doing stereo, the audio part at full 24/96k isn’t even all THAT big.

Blu-ray also offers a slew of higher quality compressed format. Two problems with that. The most practical is that DVD Architect doesn’t support any of that… DVDA’s goal is pretty much to let you make a BD that’s very DVD-like, but using some of the BD media types. None of the higher-end BD features, and that suits me fine most of the time, since that way, I’m not compelled to waste time using them. But the other thing about the higher-end audio parts… some BD players don’t decode these, some receivers don’t either… like DTS back in the DVD days. So you have to also include a second compressed track in standard 192kb/s or 448kb/s AC3, if you want to be certain everyone can play them. So I haven’t found this a huge issue for DVDA, because I’m not certain I’d use those features very often.

-Dave