[Dave Haynie]

PluralEyes uses audio to sync. If your video track doesn’t include audio, it can’t help.

On a multi-cam shoot, here’s what I do. I have a flash recorder somewhere, one or both of Tascam DR-1 or Zoom H4n, that’s on for the entire shoot. Given that, I can pretty much start and stop cameras at will, and still get a global sync of the whole event. I usually have a good mic as well on my A camera, and just the built-ins on the B, C, or HDSLR… that’s not audio I’m going to use, but it allows the automated synchronization to work.

That audio that I record just to use for synchronization… that’s what they mean by “recorded audio guide track”.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, a couple of things. Even as a Sony HVR-A1 owner, I would steer very clear of the Sony HXR NX70U. It seems to be nothing but trouble.

Your VX2000’s have legendary low-light performance that I don’t think you’ll find in any HD Camcorder… maybe some of the very new 1/3″ 3-Chippers like the Canon XF300, well out of your price range (and certainly mine). I’ve gone over to the dark side of HDSLR use for low-light work 🙂

But the HMC40 does a dandy job on sports video. I’ve shot dozens of High School soccer games with this camera, it’s very capable. Three 1/4″ sensors certainly do better in low light than the single 1/3″ sensor of the HVR-A1… some of that’s certainly just the fact that newer sensors are always quieter — the technology is improving regularly. I shoot sports at 720/60p… might be debatable over 1080/60i or 1080/30p for football. But you have the choice.

For you budget, you could add the HMC150 these days; that’s a slightly older model (still actually using CCDs!) in the same line, 3-chips at 1/3″. But you’ll maybe have cash left over for a cup of coffee from your $3K budget.

I’d probably go for the HMC40 today, again. The price has dropped a bit since I bought mine, so it seems a pretty sweet deal. You’ll probably want the XLR module; that’s another $200+, but I want top-notch sound.

I’m keeping an eye on the HD-SLR tech going into interchangeable lens camcorders, and suspect that’s where I go next… naturally, keeping the HMC40 and TM700 as well. I picked up a micro-four-thirds “pocket” camera at Christmas, so I seem to already be collecting a few lenses for this. But HDSLRs are not the answer themselves, particularly for sports. AVCHD on sold-state is pretty great for sports — no worries about changing tapes at half-time… or not having enough tape if you got into overtime. Much less the HDSLR issue of 10-30 minute artificial recording limits.

Here are a couple of games shot on the HMC40.. obviously, translated to YouTube quality… it does 720p, but I’m sure it’s downconverted to 30p or 24p. I always shoot from tripod. Not many night or stadium games last season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpdQ6jCN2kg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKBhLjkDCjE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkEoC804CYY

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, I’m one of ’em.

I had been a Sony guy for years, from analog to digital-on-tape to HD, with the HDV-A1. But as the world was moving to tapeless, Sony was (at least a few years ago) still selling tape, just with SD cards. Panasonic was lowering prices (tapeless SHOULD cost less, all things being equal) and pushing multiple formats (60p, 60i, 30p, 24p, etc). They were also pushing 3-chip into lower price-points.. another honest improvement over my Sony gear (though Canon and Sony’s higher rez sensors with pixel bucketing are also a big improvement over the A1 era). They took the very intelligent move of delivering better video at the price of sucky stills… even in the consumer market.

So I have the HMC40 and the TM700. I’m kind of angry at Panasonic recently, for changing the battery. My HMC40, TM700, and the used HDC-SD9 I bought for my daughter four years ago (she started High School in the local “Communications Academy”, she’s going to college next fall at Montclair State (NJ) for Broadcasting) all use the same battery (the HMC40 can take a double-size battery as well). Still better than the battery-of-the-month-club that you find with Sony and Canon, but still. I like a system… it’s annoying to need so many different batteries, particularly once you matrix that across older cameras you still may use, HDSLRs, EVILs, etc.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have the ATi/AMD Radeon 6970, which supports up to six monitors. Only two can be “legacy” (eg, HDMI/DVI), the rest have to be DisplayPort. This can be via Active DisplayPort adapter.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Angelo Mike] “Uh, so how do I implement your method of faking 4:2:2?”

Simply put, if you render to a 4:2:2 format, you’re going to get a 4:2:2 video. That’s just as much a part of the video format as the resolution or compression; any NLE rendering to 4:2:2 will deliver 4:2:2; any NLE rendering to 4:4:4 will deliver 4:4:4, etc.

The only question is whether you can control the up-conversion or not. Vegas doesn’t provide any way I know of to direct how a color interpolation would be done. Most NLE work is going to be done in 4:4:4 upscaled color anyway, far as I know, just as most audio DAW work will be done in floating point or 48-bit fixed point or some other format that’s much better than the typical storage format.

Why would it matter? If the end product is a 4:2:2 output, you may benefit some from an intelligent interpolation. If the video’s going back to 4:2:0 at some point (eg, for DVD or other consumer video output), you might not want to do anything too clever. The encoder, of course, has no idea where the video came from, what kind of processing was done, etc. So it’s going to naturally bucket and average color pixels back to 4:2:0… if you got too clever on the upconversion, it might wind up looking worse. Because of this, I suspect the NLEs are going to be pretty tame about how they map color decimation into internal format.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Separate files are always separate events.

There are two things you can do in Vegas to deal with separate files. One is simply group them (select them all, hit the “g” key or “Add Group” from the menus). Another one: drop all files, sequentially, into a project. Save the project. Load the .veg file for that project into your main project — all one “clip” now.

The more important thing to know is just how your camera breaks files up when recording. If the camera’s always breaking things on a GOP boundary, both techniques are all you need. But if the camera’s breaking files on a byte broundary, you can wind up with broken GOPs when you just drop them together on a timeline. This is what my Panasonic AVC cameras do, as previously mentioned here. So I physically merge the files into one large >4GB file, which will work when the camera’s breaking the stream, but not if it’s fully closing one stream and opening another at the break.

But the nice thing is, I wind up with a single file for each continuous shot, regardless of length… almost as if my camcorders had been rooted in the better features of early 90s filesystems, rather than those of the simplest of the earlies 80s (eg, support for >4GB file systems).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

No… what it means is that the additional color samples are interpolated. Like this… here’s you 4:2:0 sampling. That means 1/2 pixel rate for sampling, both vertically and horizontally. Each S (CrCb sample) is derived from the average of four pixels on encode, and applied to four pixels on decode, in a 2×2 block… to make it simple in text, I put the “S” at the top left of the block it applies to.

1: S x S x S x S x S
2: x x x x x x x x x
3: S x S x S x S x S
4: x x x x x x x x x

In moving to 4:2:2, you expect color sampling at half the horizontal rate, but the full vertical rate… in my sketch, each sample applies to two pixels. Here’s the interpolated 4:2:2 sampling

1: S x S x S x S x S
2: s x s x s x s x s
3: S x S x S x S x S
4: s x s x s x s x s

But of course, you don’t have samples at that grain, so you have to make some. You could just fake it: set s = S for the same block. That gets you 4:2:2, but it has no more actual color resolution than 4:2:0. Or we can interpolate: s(n) = (S(n-1)+S(n+1))/2. This will create color samples from the block above and below. That’s new information, but it’s not necessarily any more accurate. In a very smooth gradation of color, this might actually guess well. But on the other hand, the S(n-1) sample is averaged from the color that used to be as s(n). The S(n+1) sample might be close, or it might hit some kind of boundary, making the interpolation actually worse than the original. Ideally, a smart algorithm can use a combination of the two, or even information from the prior and next frame, to better fill in the missing information. Not that it’s commonly done, but it’s certainly possible.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but V11 has got to the point where it’s more stable in my use than V10 was. Of course, V10 broke more things for me than anything other than V8.1, which of course wasn’t really sold as a finished thing, so much as a 64-bit preview.

Could Vegas get worse? It certainly has got worse; it was at one point in time the most stable piece of software I used on any platform. Not any longer, not by far. On the other, there have been other so-called “professional” programs that were so buggy, they should have qualified as fraud. One was ULead’s Media Studio Pro — so buggy it was virtually impossible to load DV files and edit without fatal crashes. They put out one small bug fix in more than two years.. clearly, they were not supporting it.

But the winner was Pinnacle Impression, a DVD authoring program. This was a $350 program, back in the early days of DVD, which I gather had formerly been from Minerva and sold for thousands. Apparently, Pinnacle bought only the code, not the team, and processed to destroy it. Or maybe it was that buggy from the start. You had to spend about a week to learn which features actually worked, which crashed, and which just corrupted your project file, so that next time, it just wouldn’t load. I used this for two major projects, it did pay for itself ultimately, but never again, even though it did permit things I don’t think you can still accomplish in DVDA. Not at all easy — DVDA lets you bang out a DVD interface fast, and then do the same for a BD version. But it inserts its own abstraction over the DVD mechanisms to accomplish that; Impression was much more “to the metal”.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Gilles Gagnon] “Do you hot-swap yours with success? or do you always turn off you PC to switch HD?”

The SATA connection is designed to electrically allow hot-swap, and you find this well supported on RAID boxes. It’s easy to see…the GND pins are longer than the signal pins.

OS support is another story. Windows typically sets up any SATA drive as built-in, whether its internal SATA or eSATA. It’s pretty easy to un-mount a drive and remove it safely, but you can’t get the new drive recognized without the driver knowing that it’s a removable drive.

Sometimes you can get Windows 7 to support this. In the BIOS, the typical internal SATA port is configured in PATA-emulation mode, while the eSATA is often pre-defined to be in AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode. You probably need to set AHCI mode (in the BIOS, for those removable SATA drives) to maybe get Windows to support then as known-to-be-removable, and possibly indicate that the specific port is eSATA (the only actual difference will be the fact that it’s removable)… if you BIOS supports this. That allows you to remove them using the “Remove Hardware” tool, and more importantly, Windows will re-scan the drive at runtime if one is added, rather than only at boot time as with a fixed drive. This doesn’t always seem to work, though. On some PCs, the SATA vs. eSATA is locked into the BIOS based on port.

On a live system, though, switching the BIOS to ACHI may be an issue. Here’s a registry tweak to get Windows to re-evaluate the IDE vs. ACHI settings on reboot. In theory, anyway… you may or may not have the ACHI driver installed if you didn’t install Windows with it.
https://tweaks.com/windows/44119/improve-sata-hard-disk-performance-convert-from-ide-to-ahci/

AHCI isn’t a bad thing anyway, if your drivers and Windows version support it. AHCI enables SCSI-like command queuing and other performance improvements.

If this doesn’t work, and you need full hot-swap without rebooting, I’d go with USB3.0 these days (and yeah, I have USB 3.0 on both PCs, and a couple devices, but no HDDs yet, only USB 2.0 units).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

“Good” is a big relative… some people will be happy with a $100 mic, some will not be happy with a $5,000 mic. One thing you can be sure of… the worst mic you’re likely to use is the one you have already — the TM900’s built-ins (which are most likely very similar to built-ins in my TM700).

You’re limited by your budget and your lack of XLR connectors — I do most of my audio with my HMC40 and a Rode NTG-1 mic ($250), usually in combination with an off-camera recorder (Zoom H4n, often with other external mics), which is not too shabby, handles very high SLPs (138dB or so.. though you’ll need a 20-30dB pad on your camera to use it recording very loud content), etc. Rode also makes my new favorite stage/vocal mic, the M1. So while I don’t use it, I can recommend you checking out the Rode VideoMic ($150). This is designed for cameras with 3.5mm jacks, has a decent rep for this kind of mic, it runs from a standard 9V battery, and lots of DSLR shooters use it. If you’re going to spend only $150 on a camera mic, you can’t do much better.

I have a wired lav I use for interview situations, but no wireless … kind of odd, given my collection of over 20 mics. But I haven’t found a wireless mic I really like at a good price.

-Dave