[Dave Haynie]

I’m still waiting for Acid 8.0… waiting… waiting… waiting….

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The FCC requires at least 1280×720 to be considered HD. But they only regulate ATSC broadcasts, not cable or satellite. They consider ATSC Digital TV, not HDTV; only 1280×720 and 1920×1080 are HD formats on ATSC… no others exist. The FCC had not put their stamp on any hard definition before the ATSC standard was finished… ATSC was there to define HDTV as well as DTV.

The Grand Alliance did a little backtracking.. before ATSC, which in turn pushed the formats for most of the HD stuff, Blu-ray, DVB-2, etc., it was generally considered HDTV if it was 1000 lines or more, but EDTV (enhanced definition) if it fell in the cracks between 480/576 lines and 1000. The CEA basically defined EDTV as anything from progressive NTSC (480p) up through sub-720p. But I don’t know of any FCC or other legal definition of that middle-ground, but the 720×480 allowed under ATSC would qualify.

Cable and Satellite companies, of course, have many more options for formats than those supported by ATSC. They might well be able to broadcast something that’s well into EDTV terratory.
-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Angelo Mike] “This isn’t a Vegas question, just something I’ve noticed while staying in hotels and at other people’s houses.
“

HDTV can look very good, but it depends on the material. Hotels are probably the worst place to look. Many hotels are using some kind of in-house video distribution system, often analog, rarely digital. Check it out… you probably have just a coax going into the television, most of the time. Unless they’re rebroadcasting ATSC or QAM (cable), you’re not getting HD at all. They may have what’s basically an in-house cable system… they’ll have a “head end” with a couple CATV or satellite tuners, the closed circuit channels for their own purposes, and a system that may just put this out over analog NTSC. The last few times I’ve stayed in a hotel, I had the ubiquitous 32″ HDTV, and some 16:9 channels, but nothing in HD.

Newer systems will have HD, but they always upgrade the TVs first. Given the power requirements, some hotels look at swapping out CRTs for LCD/LED TVs as a medium-term savings, even if the don’t change the content.

It’s also pretty amazingly true that many home users have HDTVs with no HD content. Some people buy the HDTV and hook it right up where the SDTV was. Or they’re just uninformed about HD, and maybe a little blind. I was skeptical about this, but last spring, one of my sisters got a big LCD TV. She’s a PhD, but not very technical… a Mac/iPhone user, you know the type 🙂

So my soon-to-be ex brother-in-law had set up the system. The BD player was correctly attached, via an HDMI cable (the only option), but they had a cable TV box, HD-capable, hooked in via the old evil yellow RCA-ended CVBS cable. And no one complained, until I saw that and … well, he’s gone now. True thing… though there were probably other factors than this involved.

There are a small number of satellite/cable channels that occasionally try to pull one over on you by upscaling SD to HD in their broadcast, and usually screwing with the aspect ratio as well. So sometimes you’ll see that, but it would be restricted to a single channel at a time. This apparently lets them claim their channels are full time HD. Pretty common in the early days, pretty rare now.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The BMPCC is “only” an HD camera, and while I imagine CinemaDNG files get pretty large, they do write to SDXC cards. So that’s got to cap the size to some extent. The 4K model writes directly to SSDs, which makes sense.

These are pretty attractive, particularly given my existing investment in both Canon EF and m43 lenses.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Do you need QuickTime Pro for that? I guess I haven’t kept up on all ProRes issues. I know rendering it out is kind of a problem, but I had a distant memory that reading it needed more than just a typical Vegas configuration.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Umm… where’s the 4K coming from? Is there actually a 4K hack for the GH2? 4K shooting ought to be no worse that 4x as large as HD shooting… so it depends on what you shoot. An AVC format ought to be just dandy at 100Mb/s, so that’s 0.75GB per minute if you scale to 4K. But it’s unlikely any HD camera would have the horsepower to hack a 4K AVC encoding. Maybe MPEG-2, depending on the compression engine. Or AVC-Intra.

Assuming AVC-Intra, that’s already pretty common. I think the Intra mode on my Canon 6D is around 91Mb/s, so that’s 2.7GB/minute. The GH2 AVC-Intra hacks go at least to 146Mb/s, scaling that to 4K will get you 4.4GB/minute. Of course, it’s not necessarily the case that you want to scale linearly going from HD to 4K. That’s also going to stress the memory card interface on any of these cameras pretty severely… particularly SD Cards.

There’s also the raw mode hack on the Canon 5D, which runs at 83MB/s for HD, so close to 5GB/minute for HD, which would be 20GB/minute for 4K… you’ll need a good SATA SSD just to be able to write that, it’s no going to CF or SD card.

Going to actual 4K cameras, Redcode (which is compressed raw video) runs 1.7GB/minute, 2.2GB/minute, and 2.5GB/minute. Relatively mild, particularly they pretty much just use SATA SSDs these days.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

From what I’ve read of the BMPCC, it records in either ProRes or CinemaDNG. Not as easy a drop-in for Vegas… CinemaDNG is the higher quality format, and an open format, but not supported by Vegas yet. You can get some level of support for ProRes with Vegas via Quicktime Pro, but proprietary formats make me nervous.

There are transcoders that work with these formats, though: https://www.cinemartin.com/cinec. Still not as handy as dropping it directly into Vegas.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Scott Francis] “Perhaps I misspoke, it would seem odd that Vegas does not have a 1080p format with a built in preset, as that is a very common format.”

1080p60 is a pretty recent option in camcorders, as a recording format. Your Canon VIXIA G30 supports the AVCHD 2.0 format and a camera-specific MPEG-4 AVC configuration for the 35Mb/s mode. The templates are primarily based on common output formats. There’s basically nothing out there that supports 1080p60 as a playback format. Blu-ray does 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080i50, and 1080i60, that’s it for the 1920×1080 formats (you can encode 1080p30 as 1080i60 and most modern televisions will deliver it as progressive… most modern TVs can’t actually display in interlaced mode).

Given that AVCHD 2.0 does include the 1080p60 format (my Panasonic TM700 was the second consumer/prosumer camcorder to offer a 1080p60 mode; the AVCHD 2.0 spec came later, but Panasonic and Sony control the AVCHD spec, so they could retroactively make this part of the spec), I’m surprised there’s no template for that, but it’s pretty trivial to make up a new template for anything you’re editing or rendering regularly.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m not talking about peak streaming performance here. Yeah, you can do 220MB/s reads on your RAID.. but only in large chunks from a single file. Try running a multithreaded benchmark like CrystalDiskMark on your RAID, just for grins.

The math is simple.. let’s say you have a 10ms average seek time, 60MB buffers, and four files. So, you reason, you have a 220MB/s system, you ought to be able to fill all four buffers every second… 250ms per load. Only, with that seek, it really takes 260ms.. so you finish in 1040ms. Ok, not too bad.

How about this time we buffer up 44 things at 5MB each. So those ought to read, ideally, in 22.72ms each. But with the seek, that’s now 32.72ms each… so it takes 1.44 seconds per block… nearly 50% more time. Only, that’s kind of cheating, because there’s a bunch of additional overhead as you go to smaller blocks. Running ATTO Disck benchmark, I see single reads of 5MB blocks at only 143MB/s on my RAID, versus 325MB/s for a 64MB read or 365MB/s for an 8GB read. De-rating for block size, now that thing that ought to take 1 second actually takes 3.3 seconds.

And of course, that’s ignoring a bunch of overhead, and you don’t know exactly how Vegas is reading things: how many, what block size, seeks, etc. A taste of reality… I ran CrystalDiskMark on that same drive; it reported 244.8MB/s for the reads based on sequential reads of 1MB each (more overhead than 64MB or 8GB single reads). Going to randomized 512K blocks, it drops to 49.5MB/s. Going to randomized 4K blocks — nearly all seek and setup time, very little time spent on data transfers — I see 594KB/s reads! Ouch!

RAID actually makes seek times slightly worse for random access. Not for sequential access, because your blocks much longer, drives of course read in parallel. But for random jumping around on disc, the file system has to wait on the worse case of all of your drive seek times before it can return the whole block to the system.

DAW systems usually let you set the buffer time for each audio channel, which lets you tweak latency vs. throughput… increase latency, increase buffer size, and you get more tracks at the same time. Reverse that, and you have low enough delay, eventually, for overdubbing and live performance. Unfortunately, Vegas doesn’t have obvious tweaks or other settings to suggest just how much memory it’ll use during a render.

And there’s another one… forgot about that. Check your Dynamic RAM Preview settings. When this is too large or too small, Vegas slows down. This is primarily a setting for editing, anyway, but Vegas does seem to use a bit of it during rendering. I currently have mine set at 200MB; low, but it works fine. I did a few tests on this some years ago, and proved that it does have an effect — going too large, like 1GB or more, can make things slower. Unless that’s been fixed recently…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You can see the effect of a bogus plug-in, too. When you’re looking at your performance monitor at 20% or whatever, see how it’s balanced across your CPU cores. Plug-ins want CPU — they should help, along with Vegas’s compositing engine and the output rendering CODEC to eat up anything you can throw at them. BUT… if you have one plug-in that’s somehow blocking multithreading (not sure that’s even still possible, but it’s easy to see)… you’ll have one core pegged, and the others basically doing nothing, during your render. If you see something like that, a big imbalance in CPU core use, it could be an evil plug-in.

-Dave