[Dave Haynie]

I’m gradually becoming a serious HDSLR convert… but the workflow isn’t for everyone.

I bought a 60D last year as a still camera, just before taking a vacation in Alaska. Money well spent, even if I needed to upgrade my PC’s RAM to 16GB for those 40-50 photos in a single panorama to be stitched.

But I do a fair amount of band and stage shooting, and the HDSLR is just so much better when it comes to low light.

I also bought a m43 camera, an Olympus E-PM1, for Christmas, as a replacement for a broken P&S camera… and thinking that m43 is being pushed into videography. That got me following the m43 market, and the Panasonic GH2 may well be the best overall video camera for “cheap”.

When you shoot video with the 60D, you soon learn that you absolutely require the Magic Lantern firmware upgrade (some call it “HACK”…). This doesn’t exactly get you more than 10-12min of continuous shooting, but it will quickly restart video, it gives you a passable zebra stripe display, audio meters, lots of cool stuff.

The firmware hacks for the GH2 give you 170+Mb/s AVC-Intra recording… something akin to the higher quality mode in the new Canon 5D mk III. Google this… there are video reviews selecting GH2 video over that shot with cameras 10x+ the price. And AVC-Intra (that’s AVC with I-Frame only encoding) is a much faster edit on any computer.

But it’s still an HDSLR workflow, not a real camcorder. My next video camera will be an HDSLR, but I also have two current real camcorders, as mentioned. The right tool for the job, but if I just had one tool as an option (and didn’t factor in still photography), I’d have to go with the camcorder.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Ruby Gold] “To answer your question of “why?”… Part of the reason I was thinking of switching to Mac is that I haven’t used PPro since it was at 1.5 and I thought the learning curve might be just as steep as learning the latest version of FCP; “

Probably not. Professional software is by its very nature evolutionary.. they can’t change things too fast or users complain — we don’t have time for arbitrary changes. Thus the huge outcry among high-end users about Final Cut Pro X… well, that, and the lack of upward compatibility, and the loss of some high-end features. May not be an issue for mid-range users, of course — which is where they’re pushing the whole Mac platform. They like consumers, they are no long interested in the Pro markets. Their bank balance suggests this is not a wrong business decision, just don’t get crushed by the shift.

[Ruby Gold] “my OS (PC is in a plastic bag behind the couch and still has XP Pro on it), as well as the processor, video and sound cards and getting a monitor for the PC (don’t have one currently) would be prohibitive. The appeal of the Mac was that I’d get something brand new that had all the upgrades I’d need for less money (I think) than it’d cost me to do all that stuff to my old machine. “

Apple products are largely luxury priced — that’s one reason Apple makes so much money. They’re making 5x the profit per PC as folks like HP and Dell. Bottom line — Apple makes a very nice, very sexy desktop-laptop in the iMac. But it’s never going to be a bargain. You’re paying more for the integral monitor than you would for a stand-alone, and you can’t reuse it, should you chose to upgrade. Like a laptop. My current dual 1200p MVA-LCD monitors have lasted over the course of three PC upgrades, as one datapoint.

Most PCs are just as “fully stocked” out of the box as a Mac, but there’s room for expansion in the main box. Need a DVD or Blu-ray drive… that’s an extra for the Mac, and it’s going to cost much more, because it’s an external add-on. Want a six-core CPU or a high-end GPU? Can’t get one.. Apple only ships these on the two-year-old Mac Pro, and they don’t offer a high-end consumer graphics card on any product, much less a pro-series GPU (if you do go Adobe, you’ll get perhaps the best GPU acceleration in the industry with a good nVidia card.. and I say this as a Vegas user. Apple doesn’t do GPU acceleration yet, one reason AVC editing is such a boondoggle on the Mac).

I’m sure Mac fans will give you reasons to buy a Mac. I do believe there are people who will be very happy with Macs (my sister Kathy, for example, drank the Apple Kool-Aid awhile back and is quite happy with her iMacs, iPhone, and iPad.. but I do all her video editing). But I do not have any scenario in mind that would push one to a Mac for video editing. A year ago, sure, because while FCP 7 was aging (a 32-bit app in the world of 64-bit video editing, with poor multi-core performance), it was a legit pro choice. Now many of the pros are leaving the app, and even the platform. Adobe and Avid have been aggressively pricing FCP crossgrades — they saw their chance, and pounced. I’m also certainly not speaking for everyone, just trying to get all your facts in your head, so you can make the right choice for you.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Ruby Gold] “Hi again. As I move away from my beloved DVX100b because I need less camera, the simpler import of HDMI than tape capture, and less learning curve than a DSLR would represent, I’m wondering if you all have any suggestions for consumer HD cams? “

Import via HDMI? I think you want direct file copy from a modern flash memory based camcorder.

I’ve been partial to Panasonic’s consumer/prosumer models myself. They’re the only cameras in that range that give you three-chip sensors. Not as good in low-light as your DVX100b, but nothing in the consumer market is. I use the HMC40 and the TM700, both a few years out of current. The latest in the TM700 or Canon HF S200 ballpark is the HC-X900. The main advantage of the recent Pannys is a 1080/60p mode, which I don’t believe is supported on the Canons yet. I’m sure you’ll find various trade-offs… Canon makes a fine camcorder, too (they use a larger 8Mpixel single chip sensor, but “pixel bucket” so you don’t get the color fringing of older single-chip cameras).

Lens wise, all consumer cameras are limited on wide-angle. There are fairly functional wide-angle adapter lenses available for under $300 that really work (and a bunch, under $100, that stink). The S200 has a 35mm-equivalent lens at , the Panny has a Leica lens with 35mm equivalent of 29.8mm at f1.5 with 12x zoom; the Canon has a Canon lens with a 35mm equivalent of 43.5m at f1.8 with a 10x zoom. This is a pretty typical range.

As for audio, it’s my opinion that all built-in audio stinks. You can be the judge. The Canon has built-in stereo mics, the Panasonic a built-in 5.1 channel mic. For the record, as an audio guy, I think surround sound as a built-in on a camcorder is a stupid feature. Both support the use of an external mic via 1/8″ unpowered input; there are plenty of ad-on mics that’ll give you dramatically better sound. Your choice, and an easy upgrade if you don’t have the cash up front.

[Ruby Gold] “I’m also thinking of moving from PC platform and PPro editing to Mac. Seems that AVCHD (a format I’m unfamiliar with since I last worked with video six years ago) requires some conversion to get into the Mac.
“

That seems like an extremely bad idea. Why? Yeah, there was a time when Macs did better video than Windows PCs. There was also a time when Amigas did video and Macs only did word-processing. Times change.

There is exactly one application, er, app for video that’s on the Mac but not on the PC: Apple’s Final Cut Pro. The old version is … really old… does not compare to anything from the other companies, but it’s a full pro application from three years ago. The new version, FCP X, is a Mac “app”. It might actually be good for what you’re after.. but there are a dozen choices on Windows. Even a couple free ones on Linux.

My daughter has used a Mac for the last two years, in high school… she was in the local “Communications Academy”, learning to produce and shoot video (and she’s majoring in Broadcasting at Montclair University next year… a very selective program, and the only sign of my DNA in my kids’ activities… ok, my son can down crazy amounts of beer). They were converting from HD to DV to get her camcorder shots onto the Mac. I did some experiments, and at least for her MacBook Pro, HD AVCHD pretty much crashed the system. I converted it to 1/4 rez AVC, and it still failed. Finally, I did a little research, and converted it to 1/4 rez AVC-Intra (what Apple calls iFrame) and it worked very nicely. That’s slightly better than SD, but not HD.

Now, sure, she’s got a dual-core MacBook Pro. Thing is, I can actually edit AVCHD on my 5-year-old dual core HP PC under Win7 and Vegas 10 or 11. Not a really rockin’ edit experience, but it’s workable.. I have used this on-the-road for same-day wedding cuts/render/upload. I really can’t even explain why the Mac is so bad at AVC… Apple’s main format for iOS video is AVC, albeit at 1.5-4Mb/s, not 21-28Mb/s. But still.

If you have the higher end version of FCP (Kira’s using the intermediate version, from back in the FCP 7 days), you can convert to ProRes, which is an Apple proprietary intermediate format, similar to Avid’s DNxHD (adopted as the SMPTE VC-3 standard) or Cineform. That makes edits faster, but also takes up many times the hard disc space.

AVCHD is a special system format, spun off Blu-ray. It’s based on AC-3 (formerly Dolby Digital) audio, in 2-channel or 5.1-channel options, and AVC video at 24Mb/s or less. AVC stands for Advanced Video Coding… it’s also known as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10. This is pretty much the industry’s successor to MPEG-2.. it’s largely the standard for online video, camcorder video, and digital television via satellite and cable (broadcast in the USA follows the MPEG-2 based ATSC standard, but AVC is used in the European/DVB HD standards. Well encoded AVC delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at half the bitrate. But it’s much harder to encode well. So while most camcorders and HSDLRs use AVC (some use the AVCHD standard, some use Quicktime’s AVC standards, others just use basic MPEG-4 specs), many are conservative on the bitrate, given their need for realtime encoding and low power video DSPs.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Vegas can usually only render with alpha channel (the fourth “4”) to uncompressed or uncompressed-ish formats. That’s because you rarely want an alpha channel with any lossless compression, as you can imagine. I use this all the time for animation projects.

Some add-ons allow 4:4:4:4 rendering. Cineform does, and I think Avid DNxHD as well. For most project, though, the alpha layer is simply meaningless.

In theory Apple gear can render ProRes, that’s a proprietary Apple format. The license it out to some hardware companies. But I recently came across this program: 5DtoRGB (https://rarevision.com/rarevision.com/5dtorgb/index.php). It’s a freebie, and claims to produce proper Apple ProRes from an AVC input file (at least… maybe other formats, haven’t tried it). I have used it occasionally to put AVC into DNxHD directly. The author wrote this primarily to convert HDSLR video (Canon 5D, thus the name) into “something else”. I think this using the ffmpeg engine and ProRes CODECs developed in the open source community for libavcodec (the thing VLC uses to decode everything without the need to install Windows CODECs, and much of the basis for video on Linux).

I have not actually had the need for ProRes, so I don’t know how well this works. But something to try, it you must have ProRes.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The trick is to start with a bitrate calculator. There are many of these around. I did the back-of-the-napkin calculation up above, that Apple’s 4Mb/s super-compressed AVC video would give you two hours of HD on a DVD (regardless of logical format), if you can deal with the quality issues. But you can figure this out in more detail with the calculator. There are zillions of these; the best I’ve seen is Mark’s DVD Bitrate Calculator, which is a free download here: https://www.johncline.com/bitcalc110.zip (for Windows, of course).

So, this one can be complex, but don’t worry too much. First, select your Disk Type, which is probably DVD-5. Next, select your audio encoding… the lower bitrate on DVD is usually AC-3 (“Dolby 1.0”) at 192kb/s. Then, go to “Total Video Time” and enter your film’s length… the Audio Time gadget will copy that. The others are useful if you have a complex menu setup on the disc, but not needed for simple discs. If you have something slightly complex, tweak the “Safety Margin” setting.

This applies to any kind of production on optical media, but it’s specific to DVD. So when you get that number.. that’s the value to use for video rendering. Whether its MPEG-2 in SD for a standard DVD-Video project, or something like an AVCHD DVD for high-def playback, you need to render the video to that bitrate.

So what you do is choose an output template in Vegas that’s close to what you want, then customize it. So for a DVD-Video, I’d pick the “DVD Architect Widescreen” template (given that my last 4:3 project was about four years ago, and back then, the right choice), go to the custom panel. I’d select 2-pass VBR rendering (this would be the Main Concept MPEG-2 CODEC) the value given by the bitrate calculator as the average bitrate, then choose something higher (6000-8000kb/s for a DVD is a good range) and something lower as the minimum.. or just leave that defaulted. And select 2-pass… that allows the peak vs. average to be tweaked with foreknowledge of what’s coming.

This should deliver a result that’s optimal… small enough to fit, but no extra space.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Not sure what you’re expecting to do here. A DVD is the physical media, and of course you can put any format on that you like. However, the DVD-Video format will, of course, not support any form of HD video.

You have to decide what you’re trying to achieve with this… where is it going to play? If you’re trying to play HD on DVD players, forget about it — can’t be done. If you want HD on DVD to play on a Blu-ray player, that works pretty well. Of course, if it’s for a computer, you may simply put a file on your DVD, maybe with a startup script to get the PC to auto-launch a player.

For HD on DVD, you have two possible formats. One is simply the Blu-ray format, the other is AVCHD, which was derived from the Blu-ray format. DVD Architect will create a Blu-ray format that’ll fit on a DVD if you specify DVD media in your project. But many Blu-ray players will not play this.

The alternative, AVCHD, is the Blu-ray derived standard used for memory card and DVD recording. Virtually all Blu-ray players support this format, but DVD Architect does not. I recommended creating AVC video with Vegas (must be at 18Mb/s or less, since Blu-ray players are only guaranteed to support 2x DVD speeds), then use a tool like MultiAVCHD to create the AVCHD format for your DVD.

Also, keep in mind that 2 hours is way too much video for an HD format on DVD. Sure, you can crunch your video down to Apple levels (Apple’s HD format is AVC video at 1920×1080 and 4Mb/s… that’s about what you want for 2 hours of AVC encoded video on a 4.7GB DVD)… but it may not be pretty, depending on the subject matter.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Kristoffer Hansen] “On a GPU you often have 500+ cores, and using a pcie x16 bus, you wont have a bottleneck there.

The GPU is build for parallel processing, with a architecture that support the load, with a bandwith of +50GB/s
“

Well, there are processors and there are processors. I could technically give you a cube with the power of 10,000 Commodore 64s…. but you’d rather have a single high performance x86 today.

Each GPU computing element is very good at what it’s supposed to do. But the job of converting a particular problem, like video rendering, into that compute model, itself takes time (an OpenCL program is basically like a language, and it gets “just in time” compiled for your GPU when you run it).

The other big issue: the GPU can’t solve the whole problem. There’s a communications latency problem: the CPU has to set up a problem for the GPU to work on. Then the GPU gets this work, does it, then it has to tell the CPU, and get more work. This results in a bunch of waiting for each unit. If you had other work for the CPU, that might be ok. But if it’s just Vegas doing rendering, you have to think about what that extra 30-40% CPU wasted for overhead might actually do for you. With a fast enough CPU and just the Vegas process, the GPU absolutely can slow things down.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Brad White] “I’ve decided to bite-the-bullet and build a new computer system to support my Vegas Pro editing. I’m reasonably comfortable with building a system from scratch, having done so before. What I need is faster processing of HD and associated rendering.”

Since you haven’t posted your current system specs, despite Steve’s comment, there’s absolutely no way anyone can tell you just quite how much of an improvement you’ll see with the new system. But given my current AMD 1090T system (six core, 3.2GHz)… I would not be surprised to get close to twice the rendering performance moving to the latest i7-3K series.

With that said, it also follows that the faster your core CPU, the less of a relative boost the GPU will give you. And at the current state of the art, it’s actually possible the GPU will slow you down. Part of this is the classic “communications problem” inherent in any loosely coupled multiprocessing system (going a little Computer Engineer on you here…). Basically, as you go faster and faster with more processors, the bottleneck starts to become communications. This is made worse as the frequency of communications goes up.

So if Vegas could give your GPU 5 minutes of solid work, there’s no measurable communications overhead. But if it has to send something to and get it from the GPU once per frame, then of course that’s 48 to 120 messages per second, if you’re able to render in realtime. And if there are more than one per frame, it just shoots up.

Communications generally take place via interrupts.. the CPU sends something to the GPU, that work might be immediately started, or it make take a small bit of time for the GPU to see it… not to mention the time to take the OpenCL code and JIT compile it for that specific GPU. On the way back, the GPU definitely interrupts the CPU. That means a lag of some small number of microseconds in all likelihood (Windows isn’t hard realtime, so it doesn’t specify interrupt latencies, but chance it are it won’t be crazy long).

So look at that OpenCL compile and interrupt as dead time.. you’ll actually see that if you do performance monitoring. Your CPU won’t hit the 95-98% average that a well tuned system can with Vegas on render, and your GPU won’t be maxxed out either. If you have a really fast CPU, that missing time could actually be used for real work… maybe even resulting in a faster render than using the GPU. It’s not that the GPU isn’t faster — it is, on ideal benchmarks. But fitting the problem to the GPU and avoiding communications delays, your mileage may vary.

With that said, on my system, I see my AMD Radeon HD6970 is absolutely making things faster. On ideal previews (eg, where the GPU helps alot), I might see a factor-of-three boost. On simpler renders, it may not help at all… which is why, if you can afford it, you definitely spend first on CPU for this kind of work right now.

For the same money, nVidia offered less boost, and I the GTX570 I bought suffered from horrible video output quality issues (pretty amazing, given a digital interface… but that presumably could have been fixed with a card swap). But you may get a different story if you look at it as a performance for any price thing, rather than maximum bang for buck. nVidia is also better supported by other tools, since some use the nVidia proprietary CUDA computing interface rather than the multi-vendor OpenGL interface.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

DVD Architect will absolutely allow you to author a playable BD. BD support was added in DVDA 5.0, so you pretty much want 5.2, but slightly earlier versions will work.

Here’s the thing: DVDA is basically creating a DVD emulation for BD. If you look at the specs for DVD and BD, most authoring programs put their own “abstraction layer” on top of that spec. They make things easier to do, but they add limits.

DVDA doesn’t remove the BD’s greater support of title sets or various other elements. But it also doesn’t really let you at any of the really cool BD features, like pop-up menus. It takes the DVD-inspired DVD Architect abstraction layer, and puts that on Blu-ray.

The bad thing: you can’t anything really specific to Blu-ray.

The good thing: the BD project you create will got to DVD almost without a change (it’ll even re-render your video for you). Almost anything you can do for DVD in DVDA you can do for BD, plus a little extra (less limits on colors, etc).

If your goal is creating a really crazy and wild BD user interface, go somewhere else. If your goal is doing basically what you did on DVD (and honestly, even as a hobby animator, as a one-man shop, I’m pretty set with the number of things I do on DVD… I don’t really demand any more tricks), with the additional advantage of taking that BD project to DVD _almost_ automatically.. DVDA is a great choice.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m still using DVDA. One big reason is that it’s very little work to do both DVD and BD with slight tweaks to the project.

Part of the trick of DVD creation. And to get where I’m coming from, I started doing DVDs with Pinnacle (formerly Minerva) Impression. This was probably the buggiest program anyone ever tried to actually sell. It was just for assembling assets — any graphics you wanted had to be done in your photo or video editor.

But that was a good lesson. This was kind of “to the metal” as to what a DVD could do, but it did allow me to do just about anything that was possible. When DVDA first came along, it made things really easy by comparison, but there were a number of things I could do in Impression that were impossible in DVDA. One example: I did a scene menu, with each scene shown as a drawing. When you put a particular scene in focus, it sprang to life with a small video representation. If you know how to “hack” DVD, that’s possible, but DVDA… nope.

This was a good lesson, because, once you realize that your DVD authoring program will never do everything for you, you simply need one that doesn’t get in the way. So I don’t expect a button press to not be abrupt… I chain that button press to a transisitonal video that then links to the thing the user is after… at that point, it’s totally under my control, and in fact, the more abrupt that change, the better. Once you hit the button, I want an instant transition to my link video… I’ll fade out the UI buttons, maybe drop in an animation, then lead, smooth as silk, into the video or sub-menu you’re after.

No DVD tool is going to do that for you, well. Some consumery DVD programs let you automate some kind of transition. If you’re in a hurry, maybe that’s what you want. But that’s always going to be limited, rather than the authoring app just not getting in your way, and letting as many of the real DVD features through.

-Dave