[Dave Haynie]

That’s not a huge shock. This was also a problem when DivX was popular. The AVI container is a really bad match for MPEG-4 era CODECs like MPEG ASP (the basis for the original DivX) and H.264. And it’s worse, yet, for editing. I don’t think the Vegas designers have really even given much consideration to editing MPEG-4 CODECs in AVC wrappers, because, essentially, they don’t exist in common use.

You might be able to get a program like XMedia Recode or Yamb, re-multiplex the AVI into an MP4 wrapper, and try that in Vegas. As others will probably point out, the MPEG-4 specification is a monsterous thing, and it’s not guaranteed that any given MPEG-4 reader will handle any given MPEG-4 file. The MPEG folks are primarily making these technologies for use in other specifications, not directly… thus you have MPEG-2 technologies as a part of DVD and ATSC, MPEG-4 technologies as a part of Blu-ray, etc.

With that said, I’ve never had a problem editing any MP4 files created by Yamb. In fact, I used to have a toy-ish Sanyo camcorder that produced flawed .MP4 files, which, once re-multiplexed in Yamb, worked just dandy in Vegas. BTW, Yamb and XMedia Recode are both freeware.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have used Vegas extensively for recording. Though in recent years, not so much. It crashed during a recording session once, but oddly, only some background process crashed, so I didn’t actually see it fail (I was probably doing too much… along with the multitrack recorder, I had a field recording and two camcorders running). So I’ve been using another program for critical, on-site multitrack recording.

I’m probably still going to use Vegas if I’m just recording something at my regular desktop PC. And while I have a bunch of other DAW tools (Sonar, Acid, Reaper), I still tend to do mixes in Vegas.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Kendrick] “I have recently upgraded my kit and one item that came with my prebuilt machine was a GT640M card.
I previously had a i950 GTX 260 and I now have a i3770s with the GT640M.”

I assume you mean you had an i7-950 and now you have an i7-3770? Based on a handy benchmark, the i7-3770 does a 9642 average CPU Mark, while the i7-950 does a 5717. So, ok, that’s a 1.69x improvement on generic stuff.. and if there’s any Ivy Bridge optimizations in the video CODECs (or things that just optimize well), you might well see a 2x improvement just based on the CPU.

What version of Vegas are you using. Since you said “CUDA”, I’m thinking maybe 9 or 10? Earlier versions of Vegas with GPU acceleration didn’t do all that much acceleration. Part of that was that the GPU can only do so much if the CPU is the weakest link, prior to Vegas 11, only the CODEC could be accelerated (well, not entirely true… some plug-ins used OpenGL). If you’re using Vegas 11 or 12, you need to enable OpenCL in the options panel.. it’s not a per-CODEC setting anymore.

But also, consider the difference between CPU and GPU. The CPU is fairly easy to program, very general purpose, used in a straight forward way. For rendering, it’s also fairly simply to make things scale to multiple threads, so each CPU core can be kept busy. But you only have four cores.

The GPU, on the other hand, is a very specialized processor, kind of hard to program, and made up of hundreds or even thousands of processing elements. OpenCL (or, previously, CUDA) made this eaiser, but it’s still in a sense fitting the problem in a special way. And there are delays — the problem has to be compiled for the GPU, sent to the GPU, received by the processors, etc. So it gets very complicated to make a program like Vegas use both your CPU and your GPU very efficiently.

The bottom line is that, as your CPU increases in performance relative to the GPU, and also compared to the fairly fixed delays in processing data for the GPU, you find the GPU helps less and less. When I did my experiments with Vegas 11, I had a six core AMD processor, and used both nVidia and AMD processor cards (both cost around $300 each, so it was a price-based comparison). I found that with both cards, my usual 90-95% CPU utilization fell to around 80%. The nVidia card reported 60-80% use, the AMD reported around 50% use.. and yet, things rendered faster on the AMD. Hard to say just why.. different architectures, and I suppose AMD might have been ahead of nVidia on OpenCL optimization. Both helped me.. but you have a much faster CPU.

So do check the settings, don’t worry about GPU unless you have Vegas 11 or 12, least as far as Vegas goes (might be useful with other tools), and don’t worry too much if the GPU doesn’t help on everything. It will probably help out more on some plug-ins than any general rendering, anyway.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

How are you capturing your gaming video?

I agree with the other guys, it sure looks like you’re blending two interlaced frames into a single progressive frame. The tell-tale is the “mice teeth” you see in high motion areas.

I suppose you could see the same thing if blended alternate lines from two progressive frames (say, rending a 60p video, badly, to 30p), but usually in such cases, you just want to drop one frame. Not sure how you’d set up this in Vegas, anyway (I could do it pretty easily in AVISynth). But how does your original frame rate compare to your output rate?

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

This sounds more like a hardware problem, related to your USB 3.0 controller, or the controller in your USB 3.0 drive.

There’s really no such thing as “putting too much strain” on a hard drive. They’re meant for that. USB is plenty efficient these days. Yes, it’s true that USB drives can’t initiate transfers (technically speaking, Firewire drives can, as could SCSI before them). But basically what happens is that your PC starts a USB transfer, the USB controller uses bus-mastering DMA, just as Firewire or SCSI would, and as the transfer progresses, the USB controller interrupts the processor. This is, in fact, exactly the same kind of thing that happens with PATA and SATA.

And of course, on USB 2.0 drives, the link is slower than many drives, so you had lots of waiting. But there is no situation in which a properly functioning USB drive would just lock up. USB 3.0 is actually faster than any HDD is going to be, so it’s going to moving data faster. But it’s designed to do that, all day, every day. So if it’s the drive or the controller, that’s an implementation problem. First thing I’d do — update all USB 3.0 drivers.

Second hypothesis… maybe it’s not the drive. I know DNxHD is fairly hard core, size wize (usually 144Mb/s or so), so try a little torture test: put some uncompressed or Huffmann encoded HD video out on the drive. Beat it up just as you did the DNxHD. If it’s working, that suggests a problem with the DNxHD CODEC (which, last I checked, hadn’t been updated in ages) or Quicktime (running the latest version?). Anyway, places to look for a fix.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’ve been very happy with my HMC40. A couple of things to consider. I’ve collected a bunch of SDXC cards lately, but the HMC40 is limited to SDHC, so you only get 32GB, and files are broken up into 4GB chunks, like many SD media cameras. And yet, I don’t really see a newer model I’d pick instead.

I have the audio adapter as well, for my various and sundry XLR mics. If you’re doing fairly fixed interview-type shoots, you can hook a wired lav mic directly to the XLR inputs, run them from phantom power, etc. I have a couple of these, nothing too expensive, from MXL: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/581525-REG/MXL_FR_355K_FR_355K_Lavalier_Interview_Microphone.html. I needed some for a project, these did fine (one omni, one cardioid). If you don’t have the XLR module, you can find some that hook in via the 3.5mm jack.. no recommendations here.

Beyond that, if you’re shooting action, you’ll need some other system. Lots of people use wireless lavs; those systems are expensive, but let you monitor on-camera, at least if two inputs are enough. I prefer to put a field recorder on each subject, set it to 24-bit, and pretty much not worry too much that levels will ever be a problem. There’s probably a shotgun and/or boom mic on-camera at the same time, if it’s an “in-studio” sort of shoot.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Dieter Moreno] “When you connect your audio interface to your laptop, Vegas 10 can select the input channel from the audio interface to record to,”

Indeed. I use a Tascam US-1800, which offers 16-channel recording. I think most pro-class audio interfaces will have ASIO drivers, which usually allow you to record individual mono tracks as well as stereo pair.

Think about recording as something self-contained. When you’re doing the recording, your goal should be to capture the highest quality audio you can muster. That’s all. How you’re going to process that audio comes later.. that’s why they call it “post”.

[Dieter Moreno] “then the method that I mentioned with recording then rendering as MPEG-2 elementary streams to demux the signal into separate audio tracks works?”

Not sure what you’re after here. MPEG-2 audio is never something to speak of during the recording process — that’s a rendering thing. If you need MPEG-2 audio for some project, fine, but otherwise, it’s the wrong direction.

For any audio track in Vegas, it’s trivial to render it out to the format of your choice, independently of anything else in the project. If you have a stereo pair track, you can switch that track to just left or right, solo that track, and render to your uncompressed format of choice. But as mentioned, with pro-level drivers, you should have the option of individual inputs recorded to individual tracks.

My usual mobile recording rig is a 4-U rack with the Tascam and two 2-channel tube amps, so I have 12 channels of mic and two instrument inputs (most of the mic ins also take instruments, if necessary). I have a dedicated PC for this, but eventually I’ll put in a 1U rackmount PC, to make it a little easier to set up. I do my mixing in Vegas (though I might switch to Sonar if I ever bother to learn it better, for audio-only projects), but Vegas … 9 or 10, don’t recall for sure.. crashed on me during a recording session. Once. And it was a silent crash — some Vegas background thing crashed, and the UI didn’t report it. So I’m using Reaper now for the recording part.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

As the others suggested, you probably don’t need the 4K video. About the only reason I’d choose that, other than were I working on a 4K project, might be the match to a 24p project, rather than a 30p project. As long as the 1080p30 version has a camcorder-class bitrate, it ought to be fine for most purposes.

It’s important to understand the real differences, which aren’t really Quicktime vs. MP4. Both of those are content wrappers, and in fact, very similar (MP4 was derived from the proprietary Quicktime format). The .mp4 version is offering an H.264/AVC encoded version, which ought to be a fair match to any camcorder or HDSLR video you’re shooting. They could have offered pretty much the same thing in a Quicktime wrapper.

The Quicktime files are both 4K and encoded in JPEG.. that’s so much larger than the AVC, not just because it’s slightly over 4x the resolution, but because it’s intraframe compressed only — like AVCIntra, DV, Cineform, etc. Each frame is separately encoded, so it’s going to deliver maximum quality, but for a huge size price.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] ” MPEG-2 only supports industry standard resolutions.”

That’s not the case. Generic MPEG-2 can be rendered at any resolution, with the constraint that it has to be done in integer multiples of 16 pixels in each direction. However, modern MPEG-2 rendering engines, like Main Concept, kind of hide this from you. In this case, if I render a 1024×600 video (just tried it, at 16Mb/s, just to be smart, works just dandy), I should be getting a 1024×608 MPEG-2 file with metadata indicating that 8 pixels are to be blanked. That’s actually just what happens for HDV and ATSC, too… you’re actually getting 1440×1088 or 1920×1088, but those last 8 lines are blanked.

For a render from Vegas, you want to select a generic MPEG-2 output (“Output type:” on the Video tab in the Custom Settings dialog). There are a bunch of other types, like HDV, DVD, ATSC, etc. which are specific constraints for industry standard formats and may well reject any non-standard settings (in fact, best practices suggests they ought to.. not sure what really happens).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “IMHO, this should weight heavily in your choice of cards. Today you may just be using Vegas but tomorrow you might want to branch out into Motion Graphics and so you purchase Adobe After Effects only to learn that it only supports CUDA so you’ll need an NVIDIA card.”

Adobe is moving to OpenCL, too. I say “moving”. Their “Mercury” video engine, for CS6, does both, though unlike Vegas, it’s currently doing both, not moved entirely to OpenCL yet. I’m not an Adobe person for video, so I don’t know, but I suspect this is a process, and you may still be better off with CUDA than OpenCL for Premiere.

The newer Mercury Graphics Engine, for Photoshop, is pure OpenCL. That seems to be where they’re headed.

Part of this shift is the obvious case that CUDA is proprietary. That may be fine when nVidia and AMD/ATi are the only choice, and it certainly was back when nVidia was inherently faster, and the only company really pushing for native GPU computing. But now there’s Intel doing GPUs that are actually capable of GPU computing, even if at lower performance levels than the others. But also developments like Intel’s “Phi” — that’s 60 x86(ish) cores on a single under-$2000 PCI Express card. And already supported by OpenCL.

[John Rofrano] ” didn’t benchmark with two cards like Dave did, but I did compare rendering with the CUDA option and OpenCL option and for my Quadro 4000, the CUDA option was much faster. I’m not sure how an AMD card would have done with OpenCL”

I would definitely expect the same benchmark to run a bit faster on CUDA than OpenCL on nVidia. For one, CUDA was designed based on how nVidia GPUs work. But also, OpenCL is built on top of CUDA… nVidia didn’t trash CUDA and start over with OpenCL, they just added to what they already had.

It may also be benchmark dependent. In my tests — admittedly just two hardware sample points in a very complex question — I got measurably better performance out of the AMD than the nVidia in Vegas. And yet, the nVidia has the edge in pretty much every gaming test done between the two. I was actually a bit surprised, given that AMD uses more, simpler processing elements versus nVidia (about 3:1 in this generation).. but nVidia seems to be moving more in that direction in their future chips.

I also found that the nVidia was using far more of the GPU, 70-80%, versus around 40-50% on the AMD. While that suggests the AMD was actually much faster, spec-wise, than the nVidia, it also kind of suggests it’s a harder architecture to use. That kind of suggests that, if you’re looking for performance at any price, a super-high-end nVidia might deliver more than a super-high-end AMD. I did not test this. I do have a pretty fast i7 Gen 3 at work, and a nVidia 4000-series GPU.. maybe worth a benchmark at some point.

-Dave