Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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[Rachel Kodner] “Panasonic AG-HMC80 3MOS AVCCAM HD Shoulder-Mount Camcorder
-BandH dot com says this cam is bad in low lighting conditions!! 🙁 !!”Panasonic’s had a long line of very low cost shoulder-mount cameras, mostly hollow, made from the tech used in other cameras. They have often used entirely consumer-derived optics and sensors, and in general, were not very good.
The AG-HMC80 is the first of these that didn’t suck. This basically has the 3-chip sensor and lens from the HMC-40. That’s a system used in Panny’s low-end pro and high-end consumer models. These are 1/4.1″ chips, about 7.6mm^2 each.
By contrast, a higher end pro camera like an HMC-150 will have 1/3″ chips, 17.30mm^2 each, for better low light sensitivity. And a true ENG camera, rathern than just “ENG-style” will usually have 2/3″ sensors, 58.10mm^2 each. And you’ll pay $15K or more. Of course, the AF-100 will trump that, with the full micro-FourThirds system sensor… single sensor at 225mm^2.
As much as I like many features of the Panasonic line, the LCDs and EVFs have left much to be desired. I think they’ve addressed that in the very latest models.
-Dave
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Yup. I have a Panny TM700 as the “B” camera to my HMC-40.. it even uses the same battery standard (I have a cable to let me use the big cell on the TM700). The 1080p60 mixes just dandy with the 720p60 from the HMC-40.
The V700 is more of a mid-range model, and Panny changed the battery for their consumer models after the TM700, which seems arbitrary and annoying (the standard used on the TM700 and HMC-40 also worked on my daughter’s SD-9, a camera I bought her used when she started “Communications Academy” in high school), but they have a number of great improvements on sensor sensitivity and “hybris” stabilization (optical for X/Y, digital for Z-roll… makes a ton of sense). Not a non-issue… if I have both cameras, I’m probably using both on tripods, or the HMC-40 on my Glidecam. But sometimes I just grab the TM700 alone, and then it’s more likely to be a handheld thing. The OIS make that a useful thing to do.
-Dave
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[Ron Pereira] “After a few hours on the phone with Sony Tech Support I was told there was nothing I could do except disable GPU Acceleration in the render profile… disabling it in Preferences didn’t help.”
The HD7570 is pretty new. Do you have the very latest OpenCL drivers for it? If so, sounds like it’s not really ready for GPGPU computing yet. If not, get ’em… and don’t trust every graphics driver update to update the OpenCL stuff. You can get that as a separate update on the AMD site.
[Ron Pereira] “• 3TB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive”
Weird about the Vegas 10 installer.. sounds like they’re using 32-bit signed math to guess the amount of free space on your boot drive. Good thing I didn’t try to put it on my 8TB RAID 🙂
You’ll probably hear some people tell you to get a second HDD… that’s a good idea, but the reasons have largely changed. Back in the bad old days, the C: drive was where your apps lived and where your virtual memory swap partition lived. When you have too little memory, data is swapped back to HDD, app code is unloaded and then reloaded from HDD, DLLs are loaded and then kicked out of memory. Because of all this, and particularly, back before video was possible and everyone tuned for realtime audio, a single drive could lead to disc thrashing (the heads seeking back and forth, trying to do two or three jobs at the same time) and a total destruction of any realtime preformance.
Most that just isn’t an issue anymore… things load into memory and stay there, for the most part. But you’ll still want that second drive if you do any non-trivial video work. The problem now is that you have multiple HD video streams, still photos, a rendering going out, etc. And a very fast processor. The HDD is very fast, but it’s a muscle car: good in a straight line, bad at cornering. Loading a few video files, photos, and rendering back to the same drive, you’ll get lots of seeking… very possibly a full-on thrashing situation. That means that the straight-line disc performance is failing, the seeks are dominating, and your render won’t be maintained at full speed. Even something as simple as sending the output to a flash drive can get you back up to full speed, even on the single C: drive.
The other thing… if you’re doing serious video, 3TB will look small in no time at all. I have a pair of SATA drive bays, one holds a 3.5″ drive, one holds two 2.5″ drives (you can find these on Amazon or NewEgg for about $20-$30). You get full speed SATA, but you can pop out one drive, load up the next (backup, project, archive, etc). So I have all major projects (weddings, corporate videos, etc) on separate drives, as well as a C: drive for boot and a 3TB D: drive for “regular stuff”… and the RAID on FW800. Balancing project loads, I pretty much always get 95%-ish out of each processor on my AMD 1090T. Your CPUs are probably close to twice as fast, so you’ll be even more subject to other things becoming the bottleneck on a project of any complexity. And with just that one drive, that’ll be the first bottleneck you hit.
-Dave
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[Carlos Silva] “a) I am not confident about setting the recorder to either low (1) or medium (2). With 1 I catch less noise/ambient sound than with level 2, but the volume is lower. I am thinking on recording in level 1 to avoid the noise (the interviews will happen in offices, then external voices and phone rings, even air conditioner or car noise from street would be minimized).”
Your best recording possible will be maximizing the digital levels… you want your peaks to be close to 0dB (eg, full scale), but never over. If you have a real 24-bit recorder and intend to deliver 16-bit audio, it’s easy and safe to leave a few dB of guard at the top of the scale.
For “run and gun” type video shooting (usually on-camera mics), I use a single mic going to a stereo channel, with the gain up on one channel and down on the other. This pretty much guarantees I’ll have good levels on at least one track, no matter what happens.
Recording at a lower level really won’t help you at all. You’ll have a higher level on background noise, sure, but it’ll track with the subject. Lower the volume in Vegas, and you’ll have exactly the thing you would have had with the lower recording volume.. only, with less system noise.
Also, with the higher levels, you have a higher quality signal that may hold together through a bit more manipulation. Background noise can be removed or at least minimized in various ways: noise reduction tools like Sony’s plug-ins, EQ, etc. My rule for recording — get as much useful information when recording, as full a level as you can on each track (I do 16-track recordings from time to time), and you have done as well as you can during the performance. Fail at this, and you’ll inevitably have more work to do in editing, and likely a lower quality result.
-Dave
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[Or Zamir] “I will buy i7 3770 and 16GB RAM, now my question is:
Do I have to buy external GPU or the Intel HD graphics 4000 will run Vegas fine?”Vegas does not require a fast GPU. It can use one, via OpenCL, to accelerate some rendering activity. However, it seems to be the case that, the faster your CPU, the less GPU rendering is going to help you. This kind of makes sense — there’s an unavoidable overhead when Vegas has to code up a render for the GPU, send it, wait on GPU completion, etc. When your CPU is relatively weak and your GPU relatively strong, this is worthwhile. When your CPU is very fast, it may well be faster to use the CPU for everything. I expect that, in time, Vegas will become more efficient in this overhead part, if Sony really puts in the development time (seems to be the case that Adobe has, so that kind of sets a bar of possible achievement that Vegas hasn’t met, yet).
In your case, the CPU is one of the faster available.. I put an i7-3770 in the PC I built for my Son’s birthday, and got one in my work computer a few weeks later (Karma?). Not sure if the GPU is much of an issue in such a system, but it’s definitely not required.
-Dave
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[John Rofrano] “Not reliably. Blu-ray video on DVD media is not an “official” part of the spec so Blu-ray playes do not have to support it. My Samsung Blu-ray player cannot play those discs reliably. They stutter and eventually stop playing. “
In fact, some Blu-ray players will reject “Blu-ray on DVD” without even trying. Of course, some won’t play BD-Rs, either. Like DVD before it, the Blu-ray people didn’t really consider the small producer when defining the requirements.
If you can’t do BD-R, your best best is AVCHD on DVD. Curiously, while there’s almost no difference between Blu-ray on DVD and AVCHD (which was derived from Blu-ray) on DVD, data-wise or structurally, you’ll find that nearly every BD player supports AVCHD DVDs. The reason is simple: it’s a camcorder format.
DVD Architect can’t make AVCHD discs, but there’s a freeware tool, multiAVCHD, that can. There are more restrictions than on Blu-ray. AVCHD only supports AVC video and AC-3 audio. You have to encode the video at 18Mb/s or less… that’s actually also true for a Blu-ray on DVD to have any chance at working without stuttering, either, simply because Blu-ray players are only expected to have a 2x drive in DVD mode… that 18Mb/s is roughly twice the ~9Mb/s you get for DVD video. There’s no guarantee, but this will be more compatible with BD players than any format other than Blu-ray.
-Dave
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[Jeff Schroeder] ” As far as I know, Vegas cannot render a prores file of any kind”
That is correct. ProRes is an Apple-proprietary format. Vegas can decode it, but only if you have the right version of Apple’s Quicktime installed. And Apple doesn’t allow it to be created on anything but a MacOS PC, or a few recording devices that have specifically licensed the format.
-Dave
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[Tyler Kemp] “As soon as I put the footage on my computer it doesn’t look as nice. (could just be my laptop’s monitor at that point?)”
Yeah, and for several reasons. For one, a good TV has a high contrast display, usually a 1:15,000 or better dynamic range. Most laptops have a 1:1000 or lower dynamic range, and while some do have better displays, most use a TN-LCD which may only deliver 6-bits per pixel, rather than the 8-bits (for 24-bit color) that you normally expect.
Second problem is timing. When you play a video on a TV display, the refresh is synchronized…. each video field is a television field. On a PC, your video plays into a frame buffer at the video display rate, but it’s refreshed by the PC’s graphic card at that graphics card’s display rate. There are some players that can sync it up, maybe. Most of the time, no. So, simply put, don’t expect video to look as good on most laptops as on a good television.
[Tyler Kemp] “When I render the footage in Vegas using “best” quality, and 100 for sharpness, it looks nothing like the quality that I know the camera is recording.
I usually render as a 8mb/s WMV file, although I’ve tried a few others that didn’t increase the quality noticeably, but did make the file size tremendously large and couldn’t even play back on my computer.”
Well, let’s consider your camera video. The Vixia HF R32 is a mid-range consumer quality HD camcorder, that records 1920×1080 at 24Mb/s in the AVCHD format. You didn’t describe the resolution of your WMV conversion, but think about this: WMV has a lower “coding efficiency” than the AVC that’s part of AVCHD. “Coding efficiency” basically means, how much can I compress a video and have it look as good as some specific reference. In short, if I’m recording AVC at 24Mb/s, I might need to record WMV at the same resolution, but at 35Mb/s, to look just as good as my original video. And you’re converting, so there will be some small loss doing that.
But you’re also crunching it way down. Given the difference in coding efficiency, your 8Mb/s WMV is effectively compressed about 4x more than your original video. So there is absolutely no reason to not expect it to look much worse.
Before anyone can make a recommendation on your recoding efforts, the big question: why? What’s your goal? Why are you recompressing the video to a much lower bitrate? What’s your intention for this video? If you’re thinking about online uploads, I recommend one of the “Internet” formats (Sony AVC or Main Concept AVC presets).. these will look pretty good on your PC, and they’re generally good enough that, when YouTube or Vimeo or whoever recompresses them again after you upload, you’ve probably done as well as possible (eg, higher bitrates wouldn’t look better in most cases).
-Dave
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[Carlos Silva] “For now I am trying to deal with the mentioned USB headset microphone. In Windows the mic level is set to max.”
Check that the mic itself doesn’t have an external volume control. What you’re getting, at least based on your picture, it a very low level recording. That’s going to result in more noise and a lower quality signal even if you do normalize/amplify it.
[Carlos Silva] “I am not confident about the use of the “normalize” function. Is it a feature to be used often? I mean, if this be recommended in the low level mic situation, it seems I will use it very often… “
It depends. Normalize is a usual function, it’s simply a smart volume adjustment. The simple form that Vegas does is that it scans the clip for peaks, and then boosts volume to put the peak at 0dB. The problem with this approach is that your peaks tend to be fairly random, particularly if there’s any background noise.. so normalizing won’t adjust adjacent clips the same way. Using an audio editor like Sound Forge, or maybe some plug-ins in Vegas, you can normalize based on RMS (a weighted average level, also called the quadratic mean), which will be more consistent, sample to sample.
The real issue with using a normalize or even just an amplitude adjustment is your sample’s resolution. There’s nothing you can do in the digital world to salvage much from that sample…. it’s like a video or photo that’s 2-3 stops underexposed. Looking at your initial levels, if this is a typical 16-bit sample, you are lucky if you’re actually getting 8-9 bits of signal in your recording. If you have a log-scale available (again, you can get this in Forge), see where you peaks hit. It’s one bit per 6dB in the signal… a full-scale 16-bit signal has a maximum 96dB resolution, a full-scale 24-bit signal has a maximum 144dB resolution (ignoring noise, of course).
If this is really the best you can get out of that mic, I suggest getting a better mic. You don’t necessarily need something like my recording rig (I have a 16-channel interface which can take 12 mics and two line-level inputs; also in the same mobile rack are two dual-channel tube pre-amps… and I have a choice of two-dozen mics), but you definitely need the ability to record a full level signal. You’re going to want something with real analog-world gain control. And of course, even before you swap gear, try moving the speaker closer to the mic if possible
-Dave
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I agree about Pinnacle. Way back, before DVD Architect was out, I used a fairly expensive DVD authoring tool from Pinnacle. This was the absolute buggiest piece of software I have ever successfully managed to use for any actual work. And they offered no support, only a single update over the life of the program (and that didn’t help much). Maybe they’ve cleaned up their act, but I wouldn’t bet money on it.
It’s a shame that Vegas isn’t what it used to be. I haven’t personally had serious issues with Vegas 11 after the updates, but I go get isolated crashes every now and then. But when I first moved to Vegas, I had found serious problems with every other NLE, including Adobe Premiere and ULead Media Studio Pro (ok, sure, it was awhile back). Vegas at the time was the most stable program of any kind I used on any platform, and that included $10K+ EE-CAD tools. It pretty much remained so until the switchover to Sony. No idea if it’s Sony’s environment or just the increased complexity that’s leading to instability. But they’d get an upgrade out of me if they did nothing more than harden the code against these bugs.
-Dave