Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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Technically speaking, a soft focus IS a blur — just a very visually pleasing blur.
There are really two options. You can soften a visual a bit by lowering contrast, but there’s only so far that can go.
Beyond that, you are blurring. In signal processing terms, the “hardness” is due to high frequency information: sharp, high contract lines, etc. To fix this, you run a low-pass filter over the visual — you’re filtering out some aspect of the higher frequency information. That’s exactly the same thing as a blur.
But you’ll problem notice, there are hundreds of different ways to blur something… that actually makes a ton of sense when you think in signal processing terms. Your “blur” is going to remove some high frequency information. It can be totally brute force, or very specific, about what’s being removed, and just how that’s done. You can blur simply by filtering high frequency data, by spreading just the high frequency stuff, even by lowering the amplitude of the high frequency data versus the lower frequency information, rather than removing it completely. Ok, I’m a geeky engineer.
In practical terms, your eyes tell the truth. Vegas has several blurring options… try them, but apply the blur sparingly. Most blurring algorithms have a number of degrees of freedom — different parameters that can be adjusted. For example, averaging adjacent pixels is the simplest form of a low-pass filter. If you totally average all adjacent pixels, you cut the resolution in half. But most algorithms let you tweak things, like the radius over which averaging takes place (the circle around each pixel that’s factored in to the new value of that pixel), and the strength of that averaging (do I add in 5%, 10%, 50%.. of the surrounding information). More sophisticated algorithms may only function on line detection, contrast detection, etc.
-Dave
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[Dave Petteruto] “One other question–after copying the video files to my computer, what is the best way to clear the card for the next batch of video to be shot?
“Quick Format (the default format for the HMC40).
While I believe it’s likely that any SD card used for typical camera media purposes will outlive its usefulness before it wears out (this has proven true so far, back to my first very early digital still camera, a Canon PowerShot 350, 0.3Mpixel), you still want to minimize wear. A quick format resets a few file system parameters, it doesn’t bother to actually erase anything. So it’s significantly less disc activity than deleting individual files.
-Dave
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[Dave Petteruto] “I’ve been shooting some football at 720/60p and it’s been coming out pretty good. The 1080 was definitely much more blurry in the motion of the video.”
Yup… you’re sampling at twice the rate, effectively. So there’s less motion blur in each frame, and also, fewer changes frame to frame, twice as many I-Frames per second.. things that make AVC encoders happy.
[Dave Petteruto] “Question 1–One thing I notice is that the quality of the preview seen through the eye-piece is not nearly the quality that I was getting with my old Sony vx2000. It seems to be somewhat grainy and not nearly as sharp or bright as the Sony. Does this seem right? I adjusted the brightness and that did make it better.”
Most electronic viewfinders are not great… and Panasonic’s no leader in this area. The HMC40 viewfinder is pretty low resolution, about half the rez of the flip-out screen. One reason I guess it’s not a $3000 camcorder, though I’ve used some $3000+ camcorders with questionable viewfinders. The only time I’ve used the viewfinder for sports was during a rain (with the camera in a bag)… once you get used to shooting with the screen (in the old still camera days, we called that a “sportsfinder”), you’ll appreciate the fact that you can see action that’s out of the video field at the same time.
[Dave Petteruto] “Question 2–For getting the video files onto my computer why can’t I put the card into my computer and copy the files off of it to the computer hard drive? 99% of my clips are less than 5 minutes in length.”
You can. The SD card will be formatted for AVCHD, which is a spin-off of the Blu-ray format. So you have to dig down to find the files, but they’re there. Look in PRIVATEAVCHDBDMVSTREAM, and you’ll find all your clips stored as .MTS (MPEG-2 Transport stream, AVC video, AC-3 audio) files. You can drop these directly into Vegas.
The only issue is when you have 4GB files. The HMC40, like most AVCHD cameras, will break the file into 4GB chunks, and not necessarily in a friendly way. Concatenating sequential files avoids any gaps in-between them; Vegas can do this automatically using the Device Explorer (off the View Menu for some reason).
-Dave
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In general, you’re going to need at least a decent dual-core processor — and pretty much of all of it — for camcorder-class AVC playback. The best place to start isn’t messing with bitrate, since that’s not your problem: your TV-PCs almost certainly have fast enough HDDs (assuming you’re not trying to do this all over a network or something).
First thing, try lowering the complexity of the AVC. Try MainConcept rather than Sony AVC. MainConcept allows you to render high definition in the AVC Baseline profile, which is simpler to decode (and, simply put, I have found it decodes better on low-power devices, like tablets, than Sony, for whatever reasons). You might experiment around with “Tablet”, “iPhone”, and other settings designed for lower power devices.
If your TV-PCs have GPUs (unlikely, but check), you want those helping the decode. This is easy if you’re running Windows 7, since the Microsoft AVC CODEC (built-in) uses the DXVA 2.0 API for GPU-enhanced decoding.
Another possibility is to render out to a higher quality HD format (high spec MPEG-2, camera-quality AVC, whatever) and use a more programmable encoder, such as x264 (TMPGenc, Handbrake). With enough control over the AVC format, you can make decoding much simpler, by eliminating B-Frames or even going all the way to AVC-Intra. This will also increase the size of the file needed to keep the quality the same, which is an issue if you’re using networks, but no big deal on an HDD.
-Dave
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You can’t.
DVD resolution is 720×480 NTSC or 720×576 PAL. Period. Your HD original contains about 4x as much information. You can make a very good looking DVD from an HD original, but you are not going to get HD quality on a DVD.
-Dave
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[Mike Clouse] “I have to go through all the 7-hrs of footage and see what is usable,but after that I know I cant just dump 7-hours of footage on the timeline and expect Vegas to handle it…..so would something like this work…render a clip or two at a time and save to a separate directory ,then back into Vegas for the final product.”
Vegas will handle that much video just dandy… I have routinely dropped in 3-6 hours of raw video with no problems. I have a slightly faster PC than yours (AMD 1090T), but not dramatically different.
My usual workflow is to apply global effects to all video first. This is color correction and matching (you’re only matching if you use multiple cameras; for a wedding, the definition of “white” is usually the bride’s gown). I shot a wedding once that took place in a dimly lit nightclub; in that case, I added noise processing as well, to all clips. If you do this, and have the disc space, you can render out to Cineform ($), DNxHD, or high bitrate MXF/MPEG-2 as an intermediate form, which will also make your editing go faster than AVC. If you’re using any of these (MPEG-2 at about 40-50Mb/s), you’re not going to see any significant loss over the original video. You will need a good deal of spare disc for the project.
When I shoot a wedding, I typically devote a spare ATA drive for the project and all the assets. If, for some reason, I shot with just one camera, I hopefully have a deal with the happy couple for access to digital photos (I shot one in Florida once covered by three separate pro still photographers… there was at least one photographer in every one of my shots, but I had plenty of stills, which can animated,”Ken Burns” style, as useful B-roll cuts).
If you’re having stability problems with Vegas (not uncommon these days) or just organizing things, it’s certainly possible to break the video up into segments. I usually do this, whether then actual project is a single .veg file or multiple separate projects. For one, I strongly recommend not delivering a long wedding video, unless the customer has specifically asked for it. I prefer to break it up into segments on the disc itself: a montage (if you shot this), the main ceremony, the reception, etc. Even if they do want a single 3+ hr. video, knowing there’s virtually no chance they’ll ever watch that in one sitting, I use the magic of DVD to ensure the segments are separately available… or if really necessary, use it as an excuse for breaking it up into actually viewable segments (a 3hr single video needs a DVD9_R disc, which is sketchier about playing on the typical DVD player).
So you can have a top-level DVD menu with “Wedding”, “Reception”, “Play All”, and “Extras” options. It’s reasonable to create this as separate projects, since that’s how the assets go into the BD/DVD authoring app anyway.
-Dave
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[Nick Griffin] “I’m surprised that I can’t find this on the COW, so maybe I’m missing something. That said, What’s the highest quality / most reliable brand of Blu Ray blank disks? Are there different grades, for example “Mastering” versus regular?”
There certainly are. But there’s no standard for any of these things, so it’s really one manufacturer telling you their “mastering” or “archival quality” disc is superior to their cheaper one… and by extension, the other guy’s, too.
One thing that’s physically different out there in the BD-R world is “HTL” vs. “LTH” media. The original Blu-ray disc is “HTL” (High to Low), based on a non-organic technology. The disc starts out highly reflective (“H”) and the laser burns the non-reflective pits (“L”). The original technology used a layer of copper and a layer of silicon. When heated by the laser, the two materials combine, forming the low-reflectance part. This is a very reliable technology (in theory, much longer lasting than the organic dyes used in CD-R and DVD-R), and it’s also stable in sunlight.
However, everyone’s after cost savings, so some time after the BD-R was introduced, some manufacturers introduced the LTH BD-R. This uses the same kind of organic dyes used on DVDs (more or less… some tweaks are needed to change the optical response); the disc starts out low reflectance, and the laser changes the dye layer to expose the reflecting layer (this is the opposite of the way HTL, CD, and DVD work, but the technology is similar to that of DVD). LTH discs have the same vulnerabilities as DVD. Older BD-R writers won’t support LTH without a firmware upgrade (pretty obvious).
[Nick Griffin] “I also have yet to find white/printable Blu Ray blanks. Are there such things and where would you recommend buying them?”
Inkjet printable BD-Rs have been available for several years; I started using them around the time I bought my BD-R reader, which was in February 2008, right after the Blu-ray victory over HD-DVD had been assured — Warner Brothers dropped HD-DVD support, and the game was over.
Anyway, I buy in bulk, CD/DVD/BD online, for several reasons. The prices are usually better, but also, companies like Rima (https://www.rima.com/) publish the ID codes of the media they sell. That’s important… maybe not as important as the early days of DVD+R/DVD-R, but important. Many store brands sell whatever they happened to buy in bulk under the same product name (a few, like TDK, only sell their own discs). So buying this way, once you know the disc you want, you can keep getting it, no surprises. Tragically, they don’t list more details, such as LTH vs. HTL, but knowing the disc codes, you can look these up elsewhere.
I have mostly used TDK. I wouldn’t worry about using the HTL discs from Verbatim, either, though they also sell LTH, and you don’t always know the difference from the packaging or online details.
-Dave
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Not sure what Vegas Studio offers in settables. The quality levels you’re talking about are just made up — your DVD recorder is trying to relate the quality to the tape speed (thus quality) options on VHS tapes. But DVD quality is continuously variable, and based on several factors.
In general, the best rendering you can get is when your rendered DVD fills the disc, and when you render at 2-Pass Variable Bitrate. On Pro Vegas, you’d set these parameters by selecting a DVD preset that’s close to what you want (I’d probably choose “DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen”), then clicking on the “Custom” button. Here you can change the rendering mode and set up your bitrate options.
Bitrate is of course the analog to the “speed” of the VHS tape; slower bitrates will fit more video but the quality will be less. For any given project, you can figure out pretty optimal settings by using a bitrate calculator (there are dozens of these online.. you can find more about this searching the Vegas forum for “bitrate calculator” too). Here, you enter the length of your video, the type of audio being used (probably 2-channel AC-3 at 192kb/s or 5.1-channel AC-3 at 448kb/s), and the media (such as DVD5), and the calculator will suggest bitrate parameters to set in Vegas.
One other thing to consider… DVD has a maximum video bitrate. Professionally encoded DVDs store considerably more than an hour per disc, and also use DVD9 (8.5GB) discs. But you’ll often find that regular video is encoded in the 4-5Mb/s range, with action sequences and other fast motion boosted up to 7-8Mb/s. They have some other tricks to minimize MPEG-2 problems when encoding, too. For those without professional mastering gear, you’re going to encode it all at high bitrate if the video is short. Pretty much under 1 hour, you can encode it at any speed you like, and even CBR, since the benefit to VBR is smaller size.
The hard limits for audio and video together is 9.8Mb/s, which encodes an hour at 4.41GB… so this just fits on a DVD. In short, you can use the highest available video quality for an hour or less and not run out of room. The fact that you have a substantial bit of space left on that disc means you probably ran a lower encoding rate. Which can be a good idea, depending. Some early players were marginal on playback at full speed, and may fail completely on DVD-Rs with the same bitrate. So you usualy avoid too high, but for shorter videos, 8Mb/s or so is usually plenty.
-Dave
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[John Rofrano] “Yes it is. The reason is that you don’t want to have drive head contention between the OS and your render. The OS is constantly accessing the C: drive and in a memory constrained situation it will be writing to the swap file. You don’t want that to interfere with writing to your video file. So video on D: and programs/swap on C: is the recommended approach. “
That’s a subset of my recommendations.
The basic idea is that a hard drive is like a muscle car: really fast in a straight line, not so good on twisty back country roads. If you’re working with a simple project, like a single video input file, you’re best off with the OS, etc. on the C: drive and the project on another.
However, that starts to change as the size of your project grows. I first discovered these issues on a wedding project that included one HDV track and 6-8Mpixel stills from three photographers. This was in 2006, so HD rendering to Blu-ray was pretty slow… but I was seeing it much slower than expected, and also Vegas was pretty crashy.
Turns out I was “thrashing” my project drive… that’s when you’re doing so many seeks, the speed is basically dominated by seek times. Being an audio guy from way back (seek times are the main limiting factor in multi-track audio projects), once I realized this, I moved a big pile of of the stills to the C: drive, rendering to a USB drive, and my render when over 3x faster.
The C: drive does get busy, but with many of our modern setups, only when you start a program, or change program behavior. With lower amounts of memory, there’s paging of data to/from disc and paging of code from disc, as part of Windows’ virtual memory system, as well as the occasional load of a new DLL. The thing to realize is that all of this code is tiny compared to the size of media files. And if you have gigabytes of RAM, in practice these days, you’re not going to notice much sustained HDD activity on the C: drive during a render, particularly if you’re just rendering, and not doing 20 other things at the same time.
In my setup, I usually have three fast (internal) drives; my system stuff on C:, a general purpose small project and scratch drive on D:, and a plug-in frame for adding large project drives (plugs in a SATA drive as if it were a cartridge-style drive). When things get big (I’ve done animations and music videos with 50+ video tracks), I’ll have media on all three. For a basic one or two camera video, it’s on the D: drive, maybe rendered to another drive.
And of course, the other reason not to render to your C: drive is if you’re using an SSD, particularly a lower cost SSD made from MLC flash, you want to avoid unnecessary write, as these drives don’t last anywhere near as many write/erase cycles as an HDD. You also don’t want your swap partition there (Windows lets you put it anywhere).
[John Rofrano] “Some will go as far as recommending 3 drives, one for OS, one to read video files (your project drive) and one to write video files (your render drive). This way there is no contention between reading the source file and rendering/writing to the target file. The problem today is that most renders are CPU bound so there is little to be gained by this approach but for SD video with smart-rendering there may be a benefit.”
I’d go so far as to say that if your render isn’t CPU-bound, you’re doing something wrong. That’s not a problem if the cause is GPU acceleration… if the GPU is really working for you, you should see some decent levels of GPU activity (grab GPU Shark if you don’t have a GPU monitor), but perhaps CPU only hitting 60-80%. There’s an inherent communications delay in Vegas’ use of GPU acceleration, but it should be a net win.
While I like three or more drives, I don’t recommend a dedicated drive for rendering output. Unless you’re rendering uncompressed (I do this sometimes for animation, to preserve alpha channel between projects), the output data rate isn’t large… generally much, much smaller than the input data rate, at least if you have anything at all to worry about. One big reason to put the output somewhere other than an input drive is just to keep that output render from slowing down the input with additional seeks. I pretty routinely rendering output to C: or a USB drive; either one is virtually certain to not be the critical element in a render (eg, if you’re not approaching 100% CPU, something else is the problem).
-Dave
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I have gone from NTSC to PAL in the past… it can be done.
There are two ways to deal with the frame rate differences: interpolated rendering or “cheat”. I did an interpolated rendering going from NTSC to PAL, 29.97fps -> 25fps, in Vegas. After some experimentation, I used some high quality settings, let Vegas do the rendering, and it took just over 8 days. But that was a few computers ago.
The “cheat” is for going from PAL to NTSC. Simply put, you lie about your video and claim that it’s 24fps, not 25fps, then do a 3:2 pulldown render — or in Vegas terms, render to “NTSCFilm” (23.98fps) rather than plain NTSC. This will slow your sound down by 4%, so if there’s music or anything really sensitive on it, you can do a pitch-neutral length conversion in something like SoundForge.
I imagine, if you simply change your PAL DVD project to NTSC and tell it to render, Vegas will render it, and you’ll get SOMETHING. The big problem is that if the render isn’t smart enough, you’ll see weird interlacing effects and other problems. But that’s the easy one to try, assuming you have a way of viewing NTSC DVDs (I know pretty much every DVD player in the UK will play NTSC, sometimes output as “PAL-60”, not sure about elsewhere out your way).
-Dave