[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Adding another hard drive for renders will not affect anything because renders are rarely I/O bound.”

Which is true, until it’s not. You can run into I/O bound renders if you’re using lots of video layers and lots of stills… particularly if you’re using higher bitrate video (DNxHD or Cineform, DSLR video or other ~50Mb/s forms, or even the more recent AVC-Intra or RAW DSLR formats) and/or lots of very large image/photo files.

I have run into this. Then again, I’ve done animations with 60 layers. There are two main issues. Once is simply bandwidth: if the aggregate bitrates of your video files add up to more than the speed of your HDD, the HDD is your main and perhaps only bottleneck.

The other is seeking… the fact that your main HDD’s peak speed is for a linear track, like a single video file. Put dozens of assets into a project, and you’ll reduce this. Write the output to that same HDD, and it’s reduced even more… so having SOMEWHERE ELSE to put the output file, even just that one thing, may boost your performance. But as John said, this IS a rare thing… most folks working primarily with video from a 2-3 camera shoot won’t exceed the capacity of a single HDD.

And it’s easy to tell… fire up your favorite CPU monitor. If you’re running sans GPU, you really ought to see the CPU in the 90%+ performance range… I typically see 95-98% on a simple project. If you are using the GPU to help out, you may see that drop to 75%-80%. The first time I discovered I was I/O bound, I was seeing more like 20% CPU use… part of the reason my 2 minute video was taking 5+ hours to render 🙂

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Yea I think this is where their logic broke down. I actually had an Apple device (iPad then iPhone) before an Apple computer (MacBook Pro) so it was Apple’s intuitive device interface that drove me to buy more of their products and switch from Windows to Mac. Microsoft has no market share in the device market so they have no way to pull customers in and then they totally forgot the fact that placing a touch interface on a non-touch desktop makes it extremely hard to use”

Yup… in fact, the overall growth of the Apple market, particularly in the USA, is “iPhone coattails” to a large extent. My sister did the same thing: she got an iPhone, that lured her into the Mac world, so two iMacs (one for her daughter), and even the iPad that six month before “I’ll never need one of those”.

Apple’s still doing it correctly. They have actual UI designers, and they recently did a study of touch-on-the-desktop, and found that touchscreens are the wrong answer. That’s happened before, back in the 1980s. For a little while, pretty much every CAD workstation had some kind of screen-interface mechanism, sometimes touch, sometimes lightpens or other things. It didn’t take long for professional users to start suffering from “Gorilla Arm” and drop those for horizontal devices: graphics tablets and mice. Apple seems to be experimenting with the UI, moving some ideas from iOS to MacOS, but in a smart and controlled way (I don’t use a Mac, but my daughter, in the “Broadcasting and Digital Arts” program at Montclair University, was strongly advised to get one… so I have some familiarity with their latest stuff).

Microsoft always seems to react rather than act. That’s a fundamental flaw… if you didn’t see the need for a thing, and you’re just aping what someone else found to be successful, it’s hard to develop the sense of what made that original work as successful as it was. I think they also still have this odd sense of entitlement — that users are going anywhere Microsoft goes, and it doesn’t matter what it actually is, as long as it’s called Windows (even WinRT, which ironically doesn’t support “windows”), users will flock to it. I hope they’re wrong.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Angelo Mike] “So, when Vegas 13 comes out, is there some consensus on what OS to use?”

Windows 7.

With enough 3rd party hacks, you can make Windows 8 nearly as usable for desktop work as Windows 7. But I really don’t expect Sony or any other company making professional software to embrace the Metro UI anytime soon. Vegas would get horribly clumsy if forced into allowing every control to be operated with one’s fingers. It’s not necessary to support touch or Metro to work on Windows 8 tablets — they pretty much all come with Wacom-style digitizers in the screen, as well as the much less accurate capacitive fingery touch sensor.

Add that to the fact that Metro apps are always full screen, with a bit of a hack to allow very limited vertical tiles… nearly as advanced as the tiling in Windows 1.0 🙂 This is not an acceptable UI for professional work… I do audio, video, photography, programming, CAD, etc. and every one of these disciplines runs dozens of windows across my three screens. Whole-screen is often the right choice for media consumption… web surfing less so, but usually video, eBooks, etc. work well on just one screen. Not development of anything.

It is technically possible to allow a Windows 8 program to use either UI. It wasn’t originally going to be that way, but Microsoft caved on allowing this, WinRT and Win32 in the same program or some means of getting there. Of course, that means the program is Windows 8 only, no RT or easy ports to Phone or X-Box. So I wouldn’t be shocked to see some pro-class programs run this way, offering a reduced-function fingers-on mode. However, I doubt they’ll have many requests for such things.

And this kind of defeats the purpose on other ways. WinRT does two things for Microsoft: it gives them power management control over programs, like iOS and Android have, but which can’t be done in regular Windows. WinRT is always or nearly always managed code (the politically correct term for “it runs in a virtual machine”, as do all of the .NET common runtime programs, even in Windows 7, as well as Java, Dalvik, etc). And it gives Microsoft absolute control over an Apple-like walled garden. Sony couldn’t sell you a Metro/RT version of Vegas, you’d have to buy it in the Windows Store. And MS will take their 30% off the top, just as Apple does.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Steve Rhoden] “Why the hell didnt they just release Windows 8 like that?
It bogles me at what some experienced corporations do at times
and what goes through their line of thinking.”

This is Microsoft in Panic Mode. We saw this before, with Windows 98. Back then, Microsoft has missed the web. Entirely. So they had cranked out Internet Explorer during the Windows 95 days. And in Windows 98, they went “all in” to a stupid degree, making the whole Windows desktop look like badly designed web pages. By default.

So once again, Microsoft missed the whole phone/tablet thing. Sure, they’ve had both for over a decade, but they lost all of their phone business, and the tablets never sold beyond a niche. Apple’s did. And then Android, using the same consumer-focused market, became the first application-oriented OS to outsell Windows since, well, the days of MS-DOS being the only application-oriented OS to outsell Windows.

So once again, the “all-in” approach… Everything has to be Metro. Ironically, this is only UI, not application compatibility… you can’t run full Windows 8 programs on Windows RT, you can’t run RT apps on Windows Phone, you can’t run Windows Phone apps on X-Box, etc.

Microsoft could have done just as you suggest. Or even better, as I suggested back before Windows 8 was out, ship it with two graphical shells, the Windows 8 one we all know and despise (well, most professionals), and the Windows 7 shell.

Here’s the thing… Microsoft IS in panic mode. They have clearly decided that the desktop is failing, and as well, that desktop users aren’t going away entirely. So they’re not too worried about making us happy. Microsoft wants to be Apple, and so they’re thinking nothing but Metro, Tablet, Phone, TV. The Metro UI on the desktop is designed to get you and me and my cats all used to Metro UIs, so presumably we’ll be more inclined to use non-desktop Windows devices.

And I’m also guessing that this was just not well orchestrated, from the management level on down. There were people telling Microsoft everything we’ve heard and read and experienced for ourselves, how bad the UI was, even if evaluated on a tablet as a GUI independent of Windows. It’s simply not a proper GRAPHICAL User Interface… the UI doesn’t make things intuitive. You just have to learn its various quirks. Lots of what used to be done with clicks is far more efficient with keyboard commands… on a UI designed for a fingers-please tablet. Microsoft clearly had a pronouncement about the UI, and no one was hiring real GUI designers or running proper usability tests. But I digress….

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Windows 8.1 will reintroduce the Start menus and allow you to boot directly to the desktop avoid their “Hello Kitty” Metro screen. So it will be a lot more like Windows 7 and a lot less like the unpopular Windows Phone.”

A little more. The Start Button they’re delivering doesn’t have a Windows 7 style Start Menu attached, at least in the versions shown so far. It’s got a much simpler menu, and when you want to launch a program, it’s still going to fire up the Metro-style Start Screen for you. It doesn’t restore the full Windows 7 menus the way all those various third party start-menu-replacements do.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Christopher Key] “Thanks for the info – I just assumed it was a plug -in,”

PluralEyes 2 was only a plug-in, and by its nature, NLE-specific. Singular Software also had DualEyes, which ran stand-alone. PluralEyes can sync up any number of video and audio clips, while DualEyes was designed to replace audio in video files with better audio.. pretty much going after DSLR + Recorder users.

PluralEyes 3 works as both a Plug-in and as a stand-alone… at the same time. In Vegas, you start PE3 as an extension, with the tracks to sync selected, much as with PE2. Only, this causes the tracks to transfer to PE3. You perform the sync there, then send the set back to Vegas. The problem with this… and why you might still want to keep PE2 around, is that this only works for file types that PE3 understands. So I had a project here with dozens of video files in MP4/AAC, and a main track composed of FLAC files. PE3 doesn’t know FLAC, so I’d have to bounce that to WAV to make it work. Or use PE2.

You also get PluralEyes 2 and DualEyes 2 with it. And PE3 claims to be many times faster than PE2. Wasn’t much of a question of upgrading when Red Giant took it over… even more value if you’re a user of multiple supported NLEs.

I haven’t had PE3 that long, but I’ve played with it a bit… I’ve used PluralEyes for years.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Simon Moo] ” I have also noticed that the Xeon CPU is maxing out at 90% across all 8 cores but the i7 doesn’t even get over 13% across all 8 cores. “

One immediate observation: the Xeon E3-1240 only has four cores. Each core can do hyperthreading, which makes it appear to have eight cores, but that doesn’t always translate to additional performance. So, first thing, try setting your BIOS to disable hyperthreading and see what happens.

Where hyperthreading can hurt you is on memory intensive processing. Hyperthreading helps when there’s a balanced need for memory access… each core can swap threads while a read operation would otherwise result in a pipeline stall, basically filling in that lost time with useful work. However, when you’re memory intensive, too many memory access operations stack up — you’re effectively doubling the load on the memory bus (real 8-core Intels probably have 3 or 4 memory channels, rather than the 2 channels on these) and halving the per-[virtual]processor L1, L2, and L3 cache. Yeah, that’s worst case… so sometimes the hyperthreading helps. Sometimes, not so much. No idea on this specific case, but from what you’re saying it sounds like you’re hitting some bottleneck that’s not really computational, given how fast that very similar i7 gets it done.

Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the difference. These are practically the same chip. They’re both Sandy Bridge, both support the same kind of memory, both 32nm parts. The i7 clocks 100MHz faster, both in normal and turbo mode, but that’s not faster enough to make significant difference. Any chance that i7 system is overclocked? Is it set for hyperthreading or not?

The Xeon is apparently optimized for power, with a TDP at 80W, vs. 95W for the i7. But again, they’re practically the same chip.

It’s true that there often exist Xeons that outperform the mainstream Intels, but it’s not true across the Xeon line.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I totally agree with Mark. Sure, you want a high quality on-camera mic. I typically use two shotguns, in a “run and gun” configuration, gain around 30dB apart, one to the other. But that’s just the camcorder.

Little recorders are your friend. Even before today’s compact digital units, I had grooms wired with Sony MD recorders, good for several hours if you dropped to the second compression level. These days, you can get 24-bit (ish) resolution out of a cheap recorder and a lav, and the groom won’t even notice it’s on him. I have also put recorders in plants, on podiums, etc.

And yeah, if there’s a house audio system, get a tap on that. But don’t count on it…. that was my only alternate to on-camera audio some years back, and the house audio failed during the wedding. I learned a whole lots of new audio tricks that next month. As with cameras, you want redundancy on audio for any event, but particularly for weddings.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You’re buying several f-stops, going from a 1/3″ camcorder to a 4/3″ camcorder… it’s a shame to wasted that with an f/5.6 lens.

Fortunately, that’s not necessary. If you need zoom, start with the Panasonic 35-100 f2.8. If you need more light or other focal lengths, maybe some primes will help you out. The Olympus Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 is really nice, and kind of a bargain. Olympus also has a 12mm f/2.0 and a 75mm f/1.8, a 14-35mm f/2.0 zoom. Olympus also has some standard four-thirds lenses (fully functional via adapter), including a 150mm f/2.0 and a 90-250mm f2.8. There’s also a Leica 25mm f/1.4, Bower 24mm and 35mm f/1.4, the Voightlander Nokton 17.5mm and 25mm f/0.95 (manual focus), etc.

In short, you’re going to find more options in micro four-thirds than anything sort of a Canon EOS mount camcorder (Canon C series, Blackmagic, etc). Now, if your task is serious low-light sensitive, you might also think about HDSLRs… you’re not going to find much on the planet for video better at low light than an EOS 5D mk III or 6D, and there are fast lenses in every focal length. But you’ll need more money, and certainly, not every video task is suitable to DSLR video workflow.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I don’t use m43 for video (yet), but I do have an m43 system (for then the Canon is too big to take along, or I need to shoot underwater).

The m43 format (4/3″ sensor) is half the size (one-quarter the area) of a full-frame 35mm. So yeah, to get the normal effect of a 50mm lens on 35mm, you use a 25mm lens on m43. My 40-150mm zoom on my Olympus EPM1 delivers essentially the same image as my 70-300mm Canon on my 6D. I’m pretty sure the EPM1 plus that and three other lenses (14-42mm kit lens, 45mm f1.8 Zuiko, and 20mm f1.7 Lumix) weight less than the 6D with standard zoom.

I think m43 is the best supported mirrorless system, that’s due to both Panasonic and Olympus playing in this field, an early start on mirrorless, Panasonic’s move to m43 camcorders (I’m interested, just found the AF100 too expensive compared to my Panny camcorders and Canon HDSLRs).

The wider aperture long lenses I know about: Panasonic makes a 35-100mm f2.8. Olympus doesn’t have a great fast-long zoom in m43, but they do have a few in the original four-thirds mount (adapters give you full support, better than going to Nikon, Canon, etc.). There’s a 35-100mm f2.0, a 90-250mm f2.8, and prime 300mm f2.8.

It’s weird… if you go down to under 100mm, there are many different options at nearly every focal length, video-oriented lenses, ultra fast, Leicas, Pannys, Zuikos, and a bunch of others. But not much on the fast long zoom for m43 yet.

-Dave