[Dave Haynie]

There’s nothing magical about Macs — they’re just bog standard PCs these days. If you have a particular Mac in mind, you can find a dozen PC laptops with the same specs for half the price. Really. I actually did this, in reverse, a little over a year ago. My daughter was going off to college, for broadcasting, and needed a video-worthy PC (go with the fastest i7 you can afford and you’re on the right track, at least 8GB DDR3 DRAM). I found a really nice one from Asus — cast aluminum body, i7 gen 3 processor, Blu-ray drive, HDD (for video, you need lots of storage, on a single drive SSD, I didn’t find it practical.. that before I had a 960GB SSD for my desktop), for about $1100.

But the school really recommended a Mac, since they were doing most of their video editing with Final Cut Pro 7, as well as other Mac tools. So I tried to find the same specs in a Mac. I couldn’t… and the closest I could get, which included a 700GB SSD, ran well over $3K. I wound up finding a refurbished Mac, directly from Apple, with a full warranty, for $1850, plus another $100 to add Windows under Bootcamp. So, close to twice as expensive. This was only a Gen2 i7, no Blu-ray drive, just DVD-R, fewer ports (it does have Firewire… she’s been using a 3-chip Panasonic tapeless camcorder for five years, so, not much value there), but it’s certainly a well-made laptop. Just over a year later, the HDD started failing, but it was just as easy to swap out as a regular PC HDD.

I couldn’t imagine editing on a laptop again, it’s just too slow and too restrictive. I gave up my laptop some years ago — my wife was happy to have one that’s totally over-spec for anything she’ll ever do (used to have 1.2TB worth of HDD, but one drive started failing, and I swapped that for a 256GB SSD… still overkill for anything she’s doing with it).

The i7 quad core in my daughter’s Mac Pro was just dandy for basic editing in Vegas. MacOS is mysteriously bad at handling video… I was kind of shocked. She had a somewhat older Mac Pro on loan during High School (she was in a “communications academy” within the local school), and it was totally incapable of handling basic AVCHD files. I had taken to reformatting them to Apple’s “I-Frame” format (quarter-HD resolution, I-Frame only AVC… apparently that’s a preferred format for editing on Macs). Even the i7 Mac Pro seemed like a totally different computer messing with video in MacOS over Windows. I have no idea what was wrong, but again, ok for basic editing, if you can live with one tiny screen.

Far as brands, I’ve had mixed results with HP. The laptop I gave to my wife is now a 7-year-old HP, and it’s never had a problem. My son, on the other hand, went through three HPs and a Lenovo as a teenager. At my old job, over the course of ten years, other folks bought Dells, and I don’t believe a single one of those didn’t have at least one trip back to the factory. I still have a very old Fujitsu laptop that got knocked 30 feet across a floor by a robot and kept on working, but I figure I got lucky on that one.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Great! I had originally thought about recommending chroma keying, but that’s very content-specific; if you have that color anywhere else in the video, you may have some serious masking to play around with. And the key quality could be an issue — I’d trust BCC’s keyer, but the Sony keyer is less flexible.

You only see the BCC compositors when selecting “other” for the compositing effect between a compositing pair — it’s not stand-alone effect. There are half a dozen BCC compositors, and a few Sony plug-in compositors, in addition to those built-in on Vegas (add, multiply, screen, etc). I haven’t used them extensively.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Matthew Jeschke] “I noticed apparently in Sony Vegas 10 Pro 64 bit Rev D (I’m on Rev E) they added GPU support for AVC rendering only. “

Yeah, prior to Vegas 11, GPU support was pretty minimal, and limited to nVidia GPUs only. In Vegas 11, they added OpenCL support (which works on either nVidia, AMD/ATi, or even native CPU — though not terribly useful, that last one) and added this in the compositing engine, many plug-ins, etc.

I do think that the AVC de-coding is single-threaded in Vegas. That means that, for video playback, you’re pretty close to being effectively single threaded, unless you have lots of plug-ins to render as well. Both Intel and AMD have some dynamic clocking, where they’ll boost a single core or dual core, out of all four, if the traffic gets really unbalanced. But it’s only of limited value.

[Matthew Jeschke] “I’m curious is there a setting to enable GPU hardware acceleration in Sony Vegas? I’m looking here but not seeing anything. I did however, find a setting to increase the amount of ram used. I bumped it up to 2048 MB (I have 8 gigs total).”

That setting is just “RAM Preview” memory, and too much actually makes things render slower. No good reason given why that is, but it’s best to keep fairly small (256K? I’m not sure of the latest magic values) unless you’re actually using the RAM preview feature.

[Matthew Jeschke] “I’m still only able to playback at half preview quality. However, I noticed in my resource manager my page faults pretty much disappeared which is helpful. Previously under 1/2 my ram was utilized and the computer was tripping page faults quite frequently.
“

Yup.. these days, you ought to have everything in RAM. So minimizing page faults is the best way achieve that. You can’t eliminate them completely, since some things in the OS use them for “cool VM tricks”, like just pretending to lode code segments that aren’t likely to be used while running (they fault themselves into memory as needed).

[Matthew Jeschke] “I also just noticed it’s reporting all 8 cores as completely floored (100% utilization) when I render which is good, and I’m rendering much MUCH faster than my old processors.”

If you’re seeing anything close to 100% CPU, you’re getting your money’s worth out of the new system. CPU is generally the bottleneck, so you want to see it being the bottleneck. When you’re not near 100% CPU during a render, that means something else is acting as the bottleneck, and nothing else should.

[Matthew Jeschke] “Would be interesting to see if the extra cores are helping me render faster than the Intel setup though.”

The only “standard” Vegas benchmark we have is the GPU benchmark, which you can download from Sony… but it requires Vegas 11 (the one with the red car). This previews in realtime 29.97fps on my new system with the GPU, a little shakey in a few places without the GPU, but mostly keeping up. On my old AMD 1090T six core, I averaged 8fps on full preview of the benchmark project, managed 28fps with the GPU. So on preview, the Intel is overall better than twice as fast, though it’s not silky smooth without the GPU. Though the Vegas benchmark gets complex in places.

Some other numbers: my AMD 1090T did a Sony AVC render without GPU in 5.95 mins, with GPU 2.73 minutes, both in Vegas 11. It did the XDCAM EX render in 5.37 minutes without GPU, 1.73 minutes with GPU. The new system (same HD6970 GPU) and Vegas 12, it did the Sony AVC render in 2.05 minutes without the GPU, 1.22 minutes with the GPU. And on the XDCAM render, it was 3:08 minutes without GPU, 0.56 with the GPU. Curiously, the same AVC render on the new system took longer on MainConcept without the GPU, but faster (0.43sec) with the GPU.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

No easy way that I know of… that’s why we pay more for 3-chip cameras, or DSLRs and other large sensor cameras — if you have at least 3x as many pixels on the sensor as in the video frame (eg, 6Mpixel or more for an HD frame), pixels can be “bucketed” for RGB, rather than interpolated, eliminating those fringes.

If the color is distinctive enough if your video, you might try some color correction. The problem there is that you might have fringing along any high-contract line, but the color you’d like to fill in for the blue/purple isn’t necessarily the same everywhere in the frame.

Another idea I got from a Photoshop trick for removing chromatic aberrations (see here: https://nicolesyblog.com/2010/06/25/two-minute-tip-removing-chromatic-aberration-in-photoshop). Double your video track, and apply a gaussian blur to the top, just enough to kill the fringe. Photoshop uses a color compositing mode, but there not built-in compositor for that in Vegas (BCC’s RGB compositor, maybe, if you have BCC). You might take the edge (sic) off it by just making that blur layer transparent until the fringe just becomes noticable, then back off, but it will soften the overall video. I’d try BCC’s DV fixer too, just to see what the would do.

There’s another photoshop technique for this using an adjustment layer, but that’s not an option in Vegas.

You might do something with edge detection and masking, but that’s an even higher-level trick… just thinking “out loud” the kind of things I’d try.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I agree with John… on several levels, in fact. I had an AMD 1090T system, 3.2GHz, and even that often benchmarks faster than the new AMD architecture. I never had an issue with HD playback of simple stuff, but it’s also true that Vegas isn’t terribly efficient a decoding of input material. For compositing (eg, more complex projects), the GPU acceleration helped quite a bit. On the Vegas GPU benchmark project, for example, I was running pretty slow, CPU-only, but full frame rate with the CPU+GPU. It’s been my observation, as well as others’, that GPUs particularly help you with the CPU is slower.

I replaced it last month with an Intel i7-3930K (you might see the pattern here) and it’s at least twice as fast at pretty much everything. I’ve never found memory to be a problem with Vegas, even on complex projects I’ve rarely gone beyond 8GB on my old 16GB system… I have more memory on the new machine, but that’s really only for photography.

I’m a little suspicious of the new AMD cache architecture: CPU core pairs share L1-Data and the unified L2 caches, along with the L3. And typically, AMD caches have been slower, with narrower buses than Intel’s. So the AMD core, while it has a larger L2 cache (2MB vs. 256K), share it between two cores, so there’s bound to be access contention (Intel’s only sharing between hypertransport threads, which, by their very nature, generally can’t be in contention for memory at the same time). And the Intel Socket 2011 also has four memory channels, versus AMD’s two. So caching isn’t even quite as critical for Intel.

Processor speed these days is the sum of many, many little things. AMD seems to be optimizing for cost over performance, and they’re winning much of the low end… including the next two major gaming consoles.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Only Intel has virtual (hyperthreaded) cores.

Assuming the latest AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture, he’s got eight real cores. Sort of. This architecture is based on modules consisting of two integer cores, one floating point unit, and a shared L2 cache. So basically, he’s got eight integer cores but only four floating point units.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

There are a couple of reasons to use intermediate CODECs.

One is simply to speed things up. If you’re shooting to AVCHD or some other AVC/H.264 format, you’ve probably noticed that it takes substantial CPU power to edit. Intermediate CODECs generally file size for CODEC complexity, so they’re faster for editing.

Another is layered processing. If I take an AVC video in, edit it, and render it to my final format, no big deal. Technically, there may be some quality loss, but it’s not something you really worry about. However, if you’re processing in stages for some reason (for example, I’ve done animations that took several hours per minute to render, with just half of the project loaded into Vegas), maybe using external tools for processing as well, most of the intermediate CODECs are less “fragile”; they don’t degrade quicky with re-encoding.

And finally, you might want to use the alpha channel. Highly compressed CODECs can’t really preserve transparency, since the effect of compression on the alpha channel can be highly visible. So your choice for preserving transparency is either RAW or a few of the intermediate CODECs.

As for interlaced video — if you render to a non-interlaced format, you won’t technically have interlaced video anymore. But as you’re starting with interlaced video, you’re still going to see the effect of that original interlacing in your output video, even if the format itself isn’t interlaced. You can eliminate this, to an extent, by setting your de-interlace method in Vegas (project preferences) to blend or interpolate the interlaced fields, rather than simply copying the straight from 50/60i to 25/30p.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

What was this shot with? Blue or Purple fringing is often the result of de-bayering. When you shoot with a single sensor cameras, there can be a color interpolation error around borders.

When you upscale, some algorithms look to follow, smooth, and enhance borders in your image, in order to make the upscaling cleaner. So it’s quite possible the upscaling is enhancing just that part of the original video you don’t particularly want enhanced.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Paul Robbins] “Ok but back to my original question. The original file is 600mb for one minute of video. The highest quality I can do in rendering is 110mb. That is roughly a 1/6 drop in quality. Is there any way either in Vegas or some other program that I can get the same size and quality out of the file that I have put together as the original.”

Ok… you have a 600MB file that’s 60 seconds in length, which translates to 10MB/s or 80Mb/s… video rates are usually measured in megabits per second. So you’re shooting in “All-I” mode, as Canon calls it… everyone else on the planet shooting video would call this AVC-Intra. It’s basically like HDV or Motion JPEG, only using the AVC I-Frame. In short, you’re encoding every single frame separately, none of the “MPEG Magic” stuff that really shrinks video down.

This will make editing much faster (unless you have a slow HDD) and increase quality, particularly for fast motion, obviously at the expense of storage on the SD card and the need for a Class 10 or UHS-I SD card, rather than the Class 6 needed for older Canon video. That’s ok, you want a really fast card for burst shooting photos, anyway.

So when you encode to AVC for Blu-ray or the Internet or anything, you’re absolutely not losing 1/6th of your quality (or even 5/6th, if you did the math correctly). What you’re doing is changing the nature of your encoding.

In full fledged MPEG, all sorts, you start with an I-Frame, which as mentioned, is the entire content of you 1-minute of video. I means “Independent”.. it’s like a JPEG photo, more or less (it was originally EXACTLY like a JPEG photo, back in the days of Motion JPEG, but DV, HDV/MPEG-2, and AVC/MPEG-4 have each added their own refinements to the still photo part). You’ll typically see only one I-Frame for every 15 video frames.

So then, what are the other frames. The next kind is the “P” frame, or predictive frame. Crazy sophisticated algorithms take your I-Frame and compare that next frame of video to it, and compute “motion vectors”, which essentially turn that first frame into the second one. Motion vectors are tiny. And they’re not perfect, so the encoder computers the difference, then encodes that… a full frame with practically no information in it. The P-Frame encoding plus motion vectors are stored in a tiny bit of space compared to that second frame. And then the third frame is compared to the second frame, and so on .. until it’s time to store another I-Frame. The result is, rather than getting 5:1 or 8:1 or so compression from the Intra Frame only video, you get much, much greater compression: as much as 50:1… all depends on the bitrates set.

Your 70D can record in “IPB” AVC as well, not just I-Only. The “B” stands for “bidirectional”; it works the same as a P-Frame, except that it can be encoded based on predictions from either the former or next frame.. or both. So they take even less space to store.

So basically, going to this more sophisticated encoding scheme, you aren’t necessarily losing any quality. When you are, particularly at higher bitrates like those for Blu-ray (16Mb/s or 25Mb/s are typical Vegas presets), you’re getting into some digital distortions — aka encoding artifacts, particularly in areas of high motion. But on many subjets, you won’t see any difference in quality. And that’s the key — your eyes work. If it looks bad, it’s bad. If it looks good, it’s good. But all commercially distributed AVC and MPEG video: DVD, Blu-ray, YouTube, Satellite, Cable, etc. it’s all IPB encoded. What the AVC-Intra mode gets you is a clean copy without certain classes of MPEG artifacts (eg, those due to predictive frames) even possible. That makes for a cleaner edit, etc.. though usually, with the higher bitrates used in DSLRs and pro camcorders, that’s not much of an issue anyway.

And there’s no I-Frame only distribution format. You could cook up a video pre-set (at least in Vegas Pro) for I-Frame only rendering, and maybe even successfully upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. But they’re re-code it to IPB anyway… for one, no one’s happy streaming 80Mb/s video 😉

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

HP made a printer with 5″-round-shiny-thing print capability for a short while. It sucked, and couldn’t print full bleed on a disc. I’m not sure if they gave up because they sucked or because of a lawsuit with Epson.

I used to have an R300, which was kind of a bad printer, but ok I guess for discs. That was kind of a panic replacement when my Photo 960 died suddenly. These days I use an Epson Photo 1400… hardly new, but my primary photo printer — I have a separate Canon “SOHO” type printer for “business stuff”.

I have heard tell that the Canon PIXMA MG5420 and some of their others do CD/DVD/BD printing. This is a current model that can be had for under $100. I know Canon had CD printers outside the USA for years, so could be something in the law changed, like a patent expiring. Canon’s not one to spend an extra $0.10 for a license if it can be avoided — like their 29’59” limit on video recording in the USA, due to taxes in other countries that shouldn’t affect the USA even slightly.

Still have Epson for my main printer, but I’ve been frustrated with every Epson printer I’ve owned and their inability to feed paper of any kind. But once you get the paper to feed, the results are good. Had a set of frustrations over a decade ago with a Canon printer, swore them off for awhile. I had a number of really reliable HP printers for business, but the last one was a mess, so that got going back to Canon (won’t even consider the drek Lenovo makes), and I’ve been really happy with their multis, though mine does not do CD/DVD/BD (and didn’t need to, because of the Epson). Might even consider Canon for photo printer, next go ’round.

-Dave