[Dave Haynie]

[George Whitburn] “For a while now I’ve been editing photos and videos directly on my laptop, an HP Pavilion dv7. It’s a special edition so I don’t know the exact model number. It’s a decent laptop and it usually does the job for me.”

I have an HP laptop, too. They’re dandy laptops, but the screens, like most, are usually TN LCD. Which means high speed, narrow viewing angles, and questionable color. And if you don’t color calibrate on a regular basis, really questionable color. That’s true of ANY display.

[George Whitburn] ” From what I understand, most good monitors use DVI-D. I’m fairly certain someone sells adapters but I have to wonder if that’ll screw up how the color looks on the good monitor.”

Actually, given that DVI-D is a digital interface, there’s no possible way that the color is lost along the way.. largely because the interface isn’t sending color. It’s sending an 8, 10, or 12 bit (well, not sure where the DVI limits are) per pixel value, which is interpreted by the monitor. You pretty much either get the complete signal to the monitor or nothing.

But in fact, even less worry. HDMI is a superset of DVI. It has the same signalling conventions, different connector, and higher maximum speeds. So if your laptop, as mine does, puts out HDMI, you can use a cable (no actual converter needed) to route the right signals to the DV connector. And it has no possible effect on color. There are some HDMI rates DVI devices don’t necessarily support, but digital devices also handshake, so your PC isn’t going to send a signal the monitor doesn’t understand. Those days are pretty much over.

As for monitors and calibration… first the monitor. I have a pair of MVA LCD monitors, which were the best technology for color and video some five+ years ago. MVA and PVA are pretty much gone, due to IPS LCD falling in price and improving on video. Starting today for a photo/video screen, I would certainly not by a plain TN screen, and probably find a good IPS display (IPS, TN, MVA/PVA, and others are different LCD technologies.. there’s a good Wikipedia article on this if you’re curious on the technical details).

Next, calibration. You calibrate a monitor by running software on your PC that talks to a calibration sensor (officially dubbed a colorometer) .. a small hardware wand, usually something that sticks to your screen(s). I use an older Pantone product called Huey Pro, which is a fairly cheap model, but does the job. Basically, the software displays various color samples on the screen, which is going to be under the wand. It reads that back, and the software computes the changes necessary to make the reported color match the expected color. Most modern OSs (MacOS had it first, Windows has for awhile) support color calibration in the OS. The Huey Pro also works as a room light monitor when not doing the calibration .. that’s more important for photo work, I think, than video.

Do you have to calibrate differently for photo and video? It’s not necessary, but it’s probably a good idea. The color temperature and gamma standards for video aren’t the same for print. So if you’re working on video, you’re usually standardizing on 6500K light and a gamma of 2.2. Prints may have other setting.. I think 5000K is popular for printing. The calibration allows what you see to show up on paper or screen, regardless.. but the lighting you’re going to view a print under will change the effective look. And for video, all you can do create something that will look correct on a correctly calibrated monitor.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

That’s Apple proprietary ProRes HQ 4:2:2 stuffed into that Quicktime wrapper. I believe you need Quicktime 7.5 or later installed on your PC, and that will be sufficient to allow editing (but not writing) of this format in Vegas.

I have not had the need to edit ProRes files myself… I have more often tried to deal with getting Mac users something their Macs are actually capable of editing without going into a coma.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Joshua Engel] “Yes, I should have got the 4GB file correct. I should have my computer science degree revoked.”

Well, you never know. The limit sometimes is 2GB for these things, when the developers didn’t think ahead enough and enforce the use of unsigned 32-bit ints for everything. I just bump up against this so much these days, between the HMC40, the TM700, and the Canon 60D, it’s all I see when I close my eyes 🙂

[Joshua Engel] “Whenever I see new users especially with the HMC40 my first reaction is to always tell them about the file splits. Your software is not broken and your camera is recording everything, and there is no drop out.”

Ditto. The first thing I usually do is pop open a Cygwin shell, and do a cat *.mts >/cygdrive/d/somewhere_else/biggie.mts, that kind of thing. I didn’t know about the Device Explorer until someone pointed it out here, but it’s handy. Still doesn’t grok TM700 24p-on-60i video, but it will handle multiple merged segments all at once, which doesn’t suck. And this is a much better “non-geek” option to steer folks toward.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Joshua Engel] “One more item of note that you’ll want to be aware of if you’re shooting long (LOOOONG) shots which if you’re filming football you might end up doing”

Not all that long.. at the peak of 21Mb/s average (24Mb/s peak) in PH mode, you eat about 10GB per hour. I know, shooting four years of JV and Varsity Girls Soccer, it’s always 2 files per half.

[Joshua Engel] “There is a bit of an odd quirk that happens at least with the HMC40, it splits the files with each file being I believe 2 GB in size. “

It’s a break at 4GB, not 2GB, and it’s S.O.P. for any camcorder using FAT32 as a file system (and plenty that have updated their SD card support for exFAT and SDXC, but still impose the 4GB limit, even if it’s not an issue in exFAT).

The break doesn’t occur on clean boundaries. So yeah, you can as Joshua recommends here, simply concatenate the sequential files. Of course, you do have to be careful about that. In Vegas, you can use the View/Device Explorer option to find your camcorder… this is wise to the ways of AVCHD splits, and will deliver single large files when imported to an NTFS or other 64-bit file system.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

LTH discs aren’t a durable as HTL, but they’re as good as your average DVD. Of course, check the submission guidelines for the specific festival (sure, should be obvious). I favor HTL for long-term storage — the non-organic phase-change materials are more stable than the organic dyes used in LTH. But that’s a concern over years, not over weeks or months.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Technically speaking, both SATA and USB3 are going much faster than your HDD is going. It may be possible for USB3 to show some odd latency issues over SATA — the software stack is a bit deeper over USB than over SATA. I have not noticed it to be a noticable issue, but I’m also not depending on USB3 for higher speed drives (I do have a RAID on USB2, at least when my FW800 interface decides not to work — pretty regularly, Windows is not the platform for Firewire).

My solution for large projects is a SATA drive bay. You can find these for about $20-$30 online. You put one in a 5.25″ drive bay (assuming a desktop PC, natch) and your 3.5″ drive goes in as if it were a cartridge. This makes is easy and cheap to swap out drives, and of course, they’re going at full SATA speed. Smaller projects go to my internal 3TB drive and get eventually wind up on the 8TB RAID (and optical media archive, of course). But I’ve had single projects that run around 1TB once everything’s put together, so the SATA cartridge is ideal for that. New project, new HDD.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Dave Petteruto] “1. What is the best way to copy the video files from the video camera to the computer?”

Being an expert computer and digital video guy, I basically just concatenate sequential segments from the SD card to my HDD. That works just dandy, leaves no gaps. But the Vegas Device Explorer is probably the current “standard” way of importing files these days, and it works, too.

[Dave Petteruto] “2. Once the video files are on the computer can I import them right into Vegas for editing or do I need to convert them to another format?
“

The HMC40 shoots in bog standard AVCHD format, which is MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264, aka MPEG-4 Part 10) video with SMPTE AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital) audio in an MPEG-2 Transport Stream file wrapper. This is directly supported by Vegas since at least Vegas 9, and pretty much every other modern NLE.

[Dave Petteruto] “3. I burn a lot of my projects to DVD, should I build my Vegas projects in HD and render for DVD using SD render settings?”

Always do your editing in HD. Well, almost always.. if you have a slow PC, you may want to use an SD video proxy for editing (manually, or via a tool like GearShift). But do the editing work such that you can render to HD. This isn’t going to work on a DVD, but you can render HD for online, for Blu-ray (someday, if not necessarily right now), and if you have a Blu-ray player and a short-enough project, you can render to AVCHD DVDs (though not from DVD Architect) as a way to make Blu-ray like video discs without a BD writer. In short, keeping in HD keeps your options open.

[Dave Petteruto] “4. If I render the HD video for DVD can I still get about the same amount of video run time on a DVD or will the file size be much larger than SD renders?
“

You can’t render in HD for a “DVD-Video” format on DVD. That’s 720×480 NTSC, 24p or 60i, MPEG-2. Pretty much your options (well, there are two lower resolution video modes). You can create an AVCHD formatted video on a red laser DVD that will play in nearly every Blu-ray player, but not on DVD players. You can of course simply put HD files on a DVD, and there are other, even more esoteric HD formats possible on a DVD (I used to make Microsoft WMV/HD discs, I even had a red laser player that played them in HD, but that was too much work, since you had to hack the HTML and Javascript by hand, there were no authoring tools).

[Dave Petteruto] “5. For Youtube (in HD) what is the best way to render? “

Anything that doesn’t have to be interlaced shouldn’t be. YouTube will accept practically anything these days, but it’ll transcode to whatever it feels like, basically. That’s usually 24p or 30p. You could sent it 1080/60i or 720/60p directly from the camera and it would probably take it (though curiously, if you send H.264/MPEG-4/AVC, it requires the whole video before it starts processing, if you send an MPEG-2 TS file with MPEG-2 video, it starts processing as it’s uploading).

[Dave Petteruto] “6. I shoot a lot of football at night. On the camera what video format would be recommended 720 or 1080?
“

With sufficient lightly, sports video nearly always looks much better in 720p than 1080i. The very reason there IS a 720p format is that ESPN, which is of course owned by ABC, which is of course owned in turned by the mighty Disney Co, lobbied this during the days of HDTV development and the “Grand Alliance”. I shot all of my soccer video over the last two and a half years (since I bought my HMC40) in 720p,
and it was the right decision.

For a DVD target, you absolutely don’t care, if that’s your only target. Both 1080i and 720p will be 480p on the DVD, and they’ll look identical. Online, your 1080i will have blurring from de-interlacing, but it’ll result in a 1080/30p video with some blurring. Your 720/60p video will probably be reduced to 720/30p, unless YouTube has changed recently. That will probably look better on high motion than 1080/60i converted.

And there’s the other reason you like 720/60p for sports: AVC encoding. The whole deal with AVC, like MPEG-2 and other modern video CODECs, is that you shoot one I-Frame (independent video frame, like a JPEG) and then use motion estimation and other magic to store a bunch (maybe 14 or more) of “P” (Predictive) and “B” (Bidirectionally Predictive) frames. They store the changes between frames as motion vectors, then just the differences between that predicted frame and the real one. So it’s much, much smaller. But if you have too much motion, frame to frame, it starts to get bad.

You’ve probably seen this on SD video… in high motion, you start to see blockiness. Those are the MPEG-2 macroblocks (all of these video encoding mechanisms break things up into bite-sized pieces, such as 16×16 blocks) becoming visible, because the compression algorithm has to chop out too much, due to the very large changes, frame to frame.

So, back to 720p.. all thing being equal, the change from one frame to another is half at 60p than it would be at 30p (and, for various reasons, it’s similar for 60i). So you get half of the high-speed
breakdown you would with 60i, or you get to shoot twice the speed … however you like to think of it.

I recommend testing… shoot a scrimmage, some at 720p, some at 1080i, see which one you like better. View on an HDTV, view on a PC, view uploaded to YouTube. You’ll very likely discover that, for high speed sports, 720/60p is the better format.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Did you try actually concatenating the sequential files? I have found that works with my older Panasonic camcorders. They seem to split the MTS files right at the 4GB boundary. So when you line up clips, you find that sometimes, the break was in a bad place and there’s an effective gap, even through there shouldn’t be. In my experience, this goes away when you simply concatenate the files (I use the “cat” function in a Cygwin shell, but I the same thing can be done with Windows’ Copy function… see https://support.microsoft.com/KB/71161).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have noticed that the “unknown error” seems to trigger on higher bitrates. And these seems to be different for VBR vs. CBR, and maybe different for GPU vs. no GPU. I only got a few datapoints in Vegas 11, largely because a bunch of Main Concept presets I had (mostly MPEG-2, high bitrate, 4:2:0 color) just stopped working in Vegas 11.

MainConcept CODECs are, of course, private plug-ins. The Vegas 11 versions are obviously different, which is fine, but Sony did a poor job of qualifying them — there’s absolutely no way these should fail on any settings that worked for Vegas 10.

Despite the fact of these being plug-ins, there really should be a much better reporting system. Obviously the plug-in knows why it failed, but there’s no context passed back to Vegas. Even a simple log file would be better than nothing — better still a standard report format (something XML would be great) that Vegas can present to us for examination. I had to fix these totally by trial and error.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Jeff Schroeder] “So, I have a decent video card, a GTX 580 with 3GB. But, I have two 6-core Xeons, 12 real cores, hyper-threaded shows 24 cores. What exactly does the 16 core limit in Vegas mean to me? In resource monitor it is not unusual for Vegas to show 280+ working threads.”

I don’t know of any 16 core limit. There’s a limit on the setting for rendering threads at 16 right now, which does seem fairly arbitrary. The setting there defines how many individual rendering pipelines Vegas will run during a render. It’s really up to the OS to schedule these on your hardware.

With all the CPU horsepower, I rather imagine your GPU isn’t helping. I’m not sure how smart Vegas is about GPU load, but it’s at least technically possible that the GPU becomes a bottleneck, if you have a sufficiently fast CPU system. You have 2x as many real cores and 4x as many effective cores (depending on the workload) as I do… very different situation.

-Dave