Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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Really… I did not know that. Of course, that might have something to do with pretty much only using Vegas to create AVC video. But yeah, they clear seem to be blocking that option.
Oh… there it is. Never been a big deal, but I had not found this in the Quicktime Pro “Export” UI, either. But there it is: if I select either “Quicktime Video” or “MPEG-4”, and in the latter case select “Movie to Quicktime Movie”, the H.264 option is there.
So that’s probably the path of least resistance if you really need an AVC MOV (M-O-U-S-E). Render out to uncompressed or DNxHD (download from Avid’s web site) in Quicktime, feed this to Quicktime Pro (cheap), and Export from the Quicktime player to H.264.
-Dave
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[Ron Whitaker] “I’m rendering projects to .mov for a class and was wondering why Vegas doesn’t have the h264 codec when rendering to Quicktime .mov?”
It’s an Apple thing… I don’t understand.
Well, actually, I do. Quicktime is a media framework, much like Video for Windows or DirectShow. Vegas doesn’t have any pre-defined knowledge of the Quicktime CODECs, it simply calls up the Quicktime subsystem that you’ve installed on your PC. Apple, of course, created this, and they’re the guys responsible for the basic set of CODECs that ship in the free Quicktime install. Which doesn’t include H.264/AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10… whatever you want to call it.
It’s quite possible to install new CODECs under the Quicktime system on your PC, and these do become available to Vegas. I have both Avid’s DNxHD (SMPTE VC-3 compliant) and Cineform installed under Quicktime… Cineform also runs under VfW. But Apple doesn’t include H.264, ProRes, and perhaps other CODECs in the PC distribution of Quicktime. Even Quicktime Pro doesn’t support H.264 as a general output format; the dedicated Quicktime player will produce Apple-specific low resolution/bitrate H.264 conversions.
-Dave
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That’s not right. He’s got very high quality 480p, but it’s still just 480p. If you upload very good quality 1080/24p to YouTube (I’ve sent them 20Mb/s AVC in the past), they will render it using the excellent x264 AVC CODEC to 1080/24p at about 6Mb/s.
While this isn’t anything to write home about, it’s actually pretty close to the lowest bitrate setting on my Panasonic HMC40. AVC at 6Mb/s is going to suffer terribly on fast motion, but it’s going to look much better than anyone’s 480p when displayed on a good television… not to mention the fact that the 1080p doesn’t need to be upscaled, only the 480p does.
The bitrate is going to be a very big factor when it comes to the quality of upscaling, which he’s got to do here. When you upscale compressed video, you’re upscaling the compression artifacts, too. The Canon 480p should look better upscaled than regular DV-class video, as long as he’s not shooting overly fast motion video.
You also can’t judge strictly by bitrate. The AVC used on YouTube and in most camcorders is full IPB-Frame encoded AVC. And the YouTube compressor doesn’t have to try to compress it in realtime with a 3W power budget, so it can actually do a better job at the same bitrate, particularly for lower bitrates. Canon’s current camera models use only I and P Frames in the AVC compression, thus the 44Mb/s at full 1080p mode…. close to twice that of the typical AVCHD/AVCCAM/etc. full fledged camcorder. And many other company’s HDSLRs. Not to knock the quality .. I have a 60D myself, and it’s my go-to camera for any low-light shooting, period.
-Dave
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In short, no, you can’t really upscale a 480p clip to 720p and have it pass for 720p in a general way. A 480p clip contains 1/4 of the information of the same material at 720p.
But all is not necessarily lost. You will see the most difference between 480p and 720p on material with lots of high frequency information. The latest intricately rendered robot and spaceship film,a football game (either sort), etc. will look increasingly better as you increase the resolution. Some of that’s lost if you overcompress the video, but only so much — modern video compression is extremely good.
But there’s plenty of material that contains little really important high frequency information. You might notice an improvement watching the latest RomCom or Indy flick (assuming it wasn’t shot in SD) in 720p or 1080p vs, 480p, but it’s probably not profound. Now, intelligently upscale that 480p, and the difference is even less.
The good news is that you have very good quality 480p.. the Canon AVC encoding at 480/60p is better for most purposes than DV (it will suffer, as all interframe compression algorithms, on fast motion video, but less so at 60p). The worst giveaway of an upscaled low-resolution video are visibly upscaled compression artifacts… and you can’t really do much about those.
The second worst giveaway of an upscaled low-resolution video is pixelization. If you simply blow up your video, it’ll look chunky when sitting next to real 720p video. But as any old Blu-ray player can show you today, there are more intelligent upscaling algorithms that deliver video that’s generally accepted as better than the original 480p. Obviously, it can’t create the 3/4 of the information that’s missing from a real 720p shot, but it can use algorithms to enhance your 480p in a way that’s comparable to 720p. These upscalers typically combine a smooth upscaler with an edge enhancement algorihm.
There’s a decent UpRez plug-in in Boris Continuum Complete… and in fact, there’s a video with our own John Rofrano showing it off here:
https://www.borisfx.com/videos/BCCVegas/Uprez.php.-Dave
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I completely agree.
Microsoft has a cyclical habit of doing extremely self-serving Windows releases, annoying users, then switching momentarily back to something more user-oriented. Once that’s again successful, they’re back to the “just for Microsoft” thing.
Look at Windows ME (or, as most techies called it, Windows 98ME). There was absolutely no good reason for this OS’s existence, and many reasons Microsoft shouldn’t have done it. For one, the old MS-DOS-based Windows was such a kludge by then, they broke two things for every one bug fixed or feature added. But MS makes lots of money selling a new OS with new hardware, roughly every three years. The “unified” consumer/pro Windows wasn’t ready, so they put out ME. The problem wasn’t so much that it was Windows 98SE with some bug fixes, but that just about everything they tried to do to make it seem fresh and new just make it flakey.
XP, of course, was that unified OS, and that in itself was very useful to end-users. They did a visual tweak to the look at feel, but lots of improvements under the hood. Professionals could now play games if they desired (or programs that used the DirectX stuff that would never be put into Win2K), consumers got an OS with a stable foundation. All good.
Vista swung back.. the main reason for it: it was time for a new OS. Since they didn’t really have a great number of things to offer consumers, they put in a bunch of things that would make the platform seem attractive. They filled it up with DRM so Hollywood, Inc. wouldn’t be frightned off… no concern for the performance effects that had on unprotected stuff. They rather arbitrarily changed around the user interface… I actually liked some of the visual design decisions, but not the huge list of bugs and performance problems. They promised real 64-bit support, but that was very slow and limited.
And then Windows 7, to pretty much get the ideas of Vista right. And a few things consumers actually could use: fully supported 64-bit OS, networking improvements, performance improvements, lots of polish, nothing in yer face, and at least some real attention given to stability. They also got the security stuff better… not as good as something like Ubuntu Linux, but Vista’s security model was so invasive, most people just ignored the dozen dialogs you had to ok to install a program.
And now it’s Windows 8, and this is all for Microsoft. They’re actually kind of in a panic. Just as they more or less slept though the Web revolution and had to use their might in an “Embrace and Extend” move (fairly successfully at their peak), they’re not realizing that mobile computing is likely to have a large impact on the desktop. Like, it won’t be long before the average consumer won’t need a desktop PC at all. And they’re nowhere in mobile; they actually lost market share in 2011.
So they flipped the old Microsoft strategy around: Windows 8 is “Extend to Embrace”… in short, they’re going to push as much of the mobile interface onto regular desktop users (and the accompanying locked-in App Store, etc… just like Apple), in an effort to popularize Microsoft’s vision for Mobile.
At beast, this has no direct effect at all on the Vegas we all know. Vegas is a Win32/64 program; Win32/64 is little changed in Windows 8, far as we know. Their big push is this all-new set of APIs, WinRT, which live under the Metro interface (that tiles and doesn’t-fit-the-screen stuff they first debuted on the Zune). Metro is a completely new OS, essentially, designed for phones, tablets, and touchscreen devices.
Here’s the thing: the touchscreen is a COMPROMISE. No one gives up a mouse or puck or graphics tablet for a touchscreen on the desktop. The touchscreen and touch-based UIs are useful enough for media consumption when you’re using a pocket or small book sized device. I’d read email and occasionally write it on my Galaxy Nexus “phone” or Notion Ink Adam tablet, but if I was doing any significant writing, I’d bust out a keyboard. Maybe a mouse … and yeah, you can actually drive the Nexus via Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, though it’s kind of silly unless it’s also connected to a monitor. The touchscreen is an inferior interface — there’s nothing it does better as in interface. System-wise, it’s much easier to take with.
But it’s also kind of the latest fad, and so Microsoft is pushing it on the desktop. They’re also de-evolving the UI, thinking in terms of using the whole screen for an app… again, that’s a compromise for a 3.5″ – 4.5″ screen… totally inappropriate for my dual 1900×1200 24″ monitors. As touch would be, even these were touchscreen monitors. Using a good mouse, most of your wrist motions are small-motor motions, very precise, and at least hopefully well supported by your desk, your squishy mousing armwrest, whatever. Reaching across a full screen is nearly all large motor… inaccurate, and if you did this all day, tiring. Very different than that same UI on pocket-sized screen.
And Apple’s already doing the same things. I though they were doing it a bit better, but I just read a critique on Gizmodo on Apple’s latest “Mountain Lion” release. It’s generally pretty hard to find any publisher-pundit coming down too hard on Apple, because they all use and love Apple systems. But when you hear things like this:
I’ve been using Mountain Lion for more than a week now, and I got the same feeling I got from Lion: Scott Forstall—Apple’s own Doctor Moreau—is still pushing for an ungodly desktop/iPad hybrid. This is not the future; it’s a patched up genetic experiment anchored in Apple’s past and present successes.
Well… that’s pretty strong, at least this side of “PC World”. And Apple actually has a real case for this: as much as they seem to be somewhere between de-emphasizing the pro user and dropping her entirely, they’re actually kind of booming in the Mac business, thanks to the iOS coattail effect. So making over MacOS in the image of iOS isn’t a horrible idea given their business, as long as you don’t start inflicting table/phone compromises where they’re not needed.
It may also be the only way Apple keeps MacOS around. This is also what worries Microsoft. Apple’s always been an interesting competitor… no matter what they did, nearly from the dawn of the Mac, they could barely break the 5% point, and never made it to 10% of the PC business, even for an afternoon. But in 4Q2011, Apple sold more iOS devices than every Mac ever sold. Ever… all the way back to 1984. You can imagine what Microsoft might be thinking… particularly when there were even more Android devices sold in that same quarter.
-Dave
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Legally, they have to license the music. Particularly if these are commercial videos, not just something a kid made in their bedroom. You’ll find there’s some tolerance for this on YouTube, but it depends very much on the music and on its use. And that’s pretty much only because of the nature of YouTube… they’re not responsible for the content. Put copyrighted music up on the bus company’s own web site without licensing, and they very well might get sued.
I did a video for a company last year, they wanted music that was “something like” a few songs mentioned, plus the “Happy Birthday” song. I wrote them up something that worked — they liked it, it didn’t steal heavily from any copyrighted material (the “Happy Birthday” part is pretty close, but they was kind of non-negotiable).
My understanding of the fair use laws is that any use directly for commercial purposes (ad, film) needs a license, probably the one known as a synchronization license. The fair use exceptions are things like use of a song or film clip as part of a review, certain background music in a new story or documentary, that kind of thing. The idea of 15 or 30 seconds being “Fair Use” for anything is a myth. This is a good resource: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/
-Dave
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Where does the backing track come from? Your PC or Keyboard? That would be the problem with what you’re doing. Particularly if it’s on the PC, the Microsoft Sound Mapper has a tendency to merge everything together.
Windows 7 and maybe Vista make this more difficult for you. In XP, you could fire up the Windows mixer (usually the speaker icon on your toolbar), select “Recording”, and you would see all of the possible inputs to the Microsoft Sound Mixer for recording purposes. Uncheck everything but your sound card’s input channel, and you get a clean recording.
Fortunately, as long as you’re recording in Vegas, this is not really a problem. The Windows mixer is, as it sounds, a mixer.. it was designed to let you control multiple inputs going to the recording application, and multiple outputs going to your audio output(s) (this latter is actually nicer in Windows 7, as it allows any application using the Windows mixer to show up as a channel in the mixer). But just like the real world, you can “unplug” your sound device from the mixer, “unplug” the Vegas recording input from that mixer, and hook ’em up directly.
Go to Preferences in Vegas, find the “Audio Device” tab. You’ll probably see the “Audio device type” set as “Microsoft Sound Mapper”, and the Default audio recording device the same. Go to the “Audio device type”, and look at the pulldown menu. You’ll see “Microsoft Sound Mapper” which is the aforementioned sound mixer, and “Direct Sound Surround Mapper”, which is the idea, only using Microsoft’s Direct Sound API. You should also see “Windows Classic Wave Driver”, and, if you have any more advanced drivers for your sound device, you’ll see them mentioned as well… for example, I have “Behringer USB Audio” (a fairly stupid audio device I’m using for headphone monitoring) and “US-1800” (Tascam multi-track recording interface). If your sound device is shown there, select it, and you should be good to go.
Otherwise, select Windows Classic Wave Driver. You should hopefully see your sound card show up in the default outputs, and most importantly, as the “Default audio recording device”. That’s the direct connection of which I spoke.
At this point, you should be recording just the input from your keyboard’s audio outputs. That’s not MIDI, that’s audio. You can logically think of your keyboard as two components: a controller (the keyboard) and a synthesizer. When you hit a key, that can generate a MIDI event, which is available at the MIDI port if you set the keyboard up for that. And you’ll get another MIDI event when you release the key, maybe even some for sustain effects, depending on the keyboard. All MIDI does is describe in a common language when your fingers are doing on that keyboard… it’s not sound. This data (probably not actually MIDI data within the keyboard, but you can think of it that way) is also routed to the synthesizer in your keyboard, which interprets that key-pounding as musical notes. That’s the sound that comes out of your keyboard’s audio outs, and presumably, the thing you want to record.
If, for some reason, your backing music actually originates on the keyboard, you need to stop that, or stop routing to the main keyboard outputs (many keyboards have a secondary audio output set). But I suspect you’re playing along with sounds from the computer… which should be fine, as long as you understand how to keep them from looping back to your PC’s recorder.
-Dave
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[David Weeks] “I used my camera and USB cord and I was able to transfer the video to my computer.
I did not try to transfer directly to FCP, I assumed that it wouldn’t work.
You never know… it is a Quicktime format. It’s AVC, and I know from my Daughter’s Mac that FCP is pretty evil on AVC, but does at least make the attempt to open it. It does load directly into Sony Vegas.
[David Weeks]
I have a card reader that is about 2 years old ad it probably cannot read the ‘XC card. I am going to purchase another reader and see if that is the problem. But at least if nothing else it worked using the 60D.
“That’s the part I don’t completely understand either, with yours or my Delkin unit. SDXC is electrically identical to SDHC. The reason they made it a “new” specification was primarily to force everyone to use exFAT rather than FAT32… a development that would be far more welcome if Canon entered the 1990s and allowed more than 4GB video recording (I have a 60D, too).
But there’s some HW difference with some of these units. I do wonder if there was some real difference between SD and SDXC that was optional in SDHC, and many a number of these readers were really just generic SD units with updated firmware.
I got tired of having to hook up my 60D or go into the lab to read my 64GB card directly, so I bought a new Transcend reader. It won’t read any of the ancient card formats, but it does SD/SDHC/SDXC, CF, and some flavor of memory stick… pretty much all you need in 2012. Also supports USB 3.0, so it may eventually be faster. I tried it up against the Delkin, and it was ever-so-slightly faster… and of course, did support the SDXC card, which is class 10, but pulled off 22.3MB/s reads, 20.9MB/s writes. A Class 10 SDHC 32GB card was nearly as fast, while a Class 4 read at 19.5MB/s, but wrote at only 9.57MB/s… overkill for a Class 4, of course.
-Dave
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Not a fan of the laptop-like Apple short-to-no travel, optically flat type.
I have a Bella DV, Vegas edition. Mechnically it’s great, rugged, mildly ergonomic, and includes a built-in jog wheel, and a whole second set of function/hot keys I never use. On the downside, the cursor keys are horrible, and the key legends are paint-on, like a cheap keyboard, not molded in or at least laser etched. So I have nine or ten keys I can’t read. Not a big deal typing… assuming one can touch-type. But it defeats the purpose of buying a made-for-Vegas keyboard.
On the other hand, the stick-ons last about a week, in my experience.
As for price.. you do get what you pay for. You can get a keyboard for $10, $25, $50, or $100+. They aren’t the same keyboard. If you’re happy with the cheap one, and don’t care about the Vegas legends, no need to pay this much. Then again, consider how much time you spend in front of this PC. This is my main PC, used for video, electronics CAD, photography, programming, even wasting time on COW 🙂 I cringe at the price of a good keyboard once; I cringe at the use of a bad keyboard every day.
-Dave
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Blu-ray uses pure 23.976 progressive video, no pulldown encoding needed. It actually supports pure 24p as well, though I’m not sure DVD Architect would allow this.
-Dave