Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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[fred williamson] “GTX 460 vs GTX 550
Which is the better of two? They are both similar in price.”On paper and video games, the GTX 460 will have the edge. Not sure precisely how this translated to OpenCL/CUDA performance, but you could probably look that up somewhere.
[fred williamson] “SSD
I will buy 1 SSD for Windows 7 64 and 1 large HDD for other files. Would it be best to install Vegas to the SSD and keep project files on the HDD? Or should everything be on the same SSD for this setup?”It’s fine to use the SSD as your system drive. Point your swap space at the HDD to minimize wear on the SSD, and use the HDD for large files… most of the time. You’ll find, if you get to large projects, that too many files on a single drive will slow down rendering. SSDs are fairly immune to this (seek delays… no actual seeking, though there’s still overhead jumping from file to file), but you’re not going to get a video-PC-sized-SSD and still claim “Budget PC” (I built a PC from spare parts (memory, HDD) and $200 in new parts (MB, CPU, case, flash drive, SATA cartridge bays, etc) a month ago… that’s a “Budget” PC.. and for the lab, not video per se).
[fred williamson] “2500K vs 2600K cpu
The difference is about $100 but will Vegas 11 benefit and is the performance gain worth it to go with the 2600K? Overclock in the future is an option, but I will leave it stock for now.
“I don’t recommend overclocking. It can lead to unreliability and shorter CPU life (due to increased electromigration at temperature) unless you also spend big on a proper cooling system. I don’t usually buy past the “commodity curve” (eg, when you get twice the performance for twice the money, you’re buying “commodity”)… Intel’s $1000 processor today will be $200 in six months (well, it can happen… I paid $200 one winter for a CPU that had been $1000 the previous summer). With that said, Vegas loves CPU, and the best investment in Vegas performance is still a better CPU, at least until you get to the crazy price level. There’s some evidence, too, that a faster CPU will need a faster GPU to really make GPU use worthwhile.
[fred williamson] “What would be the biggest bottleneck in the above setup? “
So, I ran this through a power consumption estimator.. you should too. I got a total of 440W for the stuff you have in there now, which is fine on a well designed 550W supply. Standard practice is for a supply to be 20% over spec — I never accepted an OEM supply for any of my Amigas that didn’t meet that in testing. But you’ll find plenty of cheap-ass supplies that don’t hold up. Antec has been a good company, at least in my experience.
But basically, you don’t have room to grow with that supply. A modern supply will also usually hit peak efficiency at 50-60% load, so you don’t want to go too crazy. You’re not going to add another GPU right away (your MB seems to support several, but Vegas only uses one at a time right now), but you did mention overclocking. That 108W TPU for your i5 will jump up as you overclock; power consumption rises geometrically with frequency; it’s also going up with voltage increases you typically apply to get the faster clocking functional.
I do believe it’s more important to chose a quality PSU vendor than an overkill supply.
-Dave
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You’re not going to be able to edit Blu-ray video losslessly… it always compressed, and will have to be re-compressed for re-authoring. But if it’s not copy protected, you can use numerous programs for ripping… or just find the MTS files and drag them into Vegas.
Maybe. Blu-ray is a superset of AVCHD 1.0 (AVCHD was actually created, for consumer video recording on DVD or BD, from the BD specs). So many Blu-ray videos are encoded in AVC video and AC-3 audio. The differences possible here: AVCHD 1.0 is limited to 24Mb/s; Blu-ray can a bit over 38Mb/s. The AC-3 on AVCHD is either stereo or 5.1 channel; BD can support 7.1 channel AC-3 as well.
Then the craziness sets in… that’s just one set of possible media stream types. Video can also be MPEG-2 or VC-1 (aka, the standardized Windows Media video format)… Vegas shouldn’t have any trouble with MPEG-2, and it certainly can edit VC-1 (in theory, it’s easier than AVC, but there’s far more work being done to improve AVC). And there there are audio formats, nearly a dozen.
A good ripping tool would help with some of these odd formats, offering you the option of transcoding audio.
The other issue to consider… while a simple re-encoding shouldn’t affect video quality all that much, it might here. Vegas doesn’t support higher AVC bitrates, and of course, if you’re editing a professionally produced commercial video (which you probably shouldn’t be, but just throwing this out), that video will have been mastered by an encoding engineer… the quality of the AVC is hand-tweaked. The AVC I get on my Blu-rays is very close to the quality I see out of my camera. But a high quality Blu-ray is potentially better than all consumer and most lower-end pro camcorders. You will reduce the quality of that, re-encoding that. If this is a self-made Blu-ray from a client asking for changes or something, quality should be no problem.
-Dave
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Same here… I have used dozens of cameras with Vegas, helped hundreds of people using it, and never run across something it wouldn’t edit.
One thing that everyone getting into video needs to understand well is how multimedia frameworks function, and it sounds like our friend Graham is still a little shaky on this.
There’s no such things as a Quicktime video or an AVI video. Quicktime (MOV) and AVI are file wrappers… they’re standards for bundling other things together. So are .mts, .m2ts, and .mp4 files, though as those all come out of the MPEG people, they usually (not always) contain things defined by the Motion Picture Experts Group.
The things that go into these files are, obviously, your audio and video streams. Technically, an AVI or MOV file can contain nearly anything… including video or audio types that Windows, Quicktime, or Vegas didn’t come with. There’s no reason to expect Vegas to edit video formats that are totally unknown to your PC. The piece that your PC needs has been dubbed a CODEC (CODer-DECoder), and there are standards for installing new ones under Video for Windows (AVI), DirectShow (AVI) and Quicktime (MOV). If you camera comes with a weird video format, it should ideally come with this CODEC as well, though some actually come with a conversion program instead, and don’t allow direct editing of their video.
So when you say you convert Quicktime to AVI, that’s nearly a content free statement. Rather, saying something like “I converted a Canon EOS 60D Quicktime to Cineform AVI” or at least something that fully describes the input and output format would help us in helping you.
Many cameras use the Quicktime file format; as I mentioned before, some of that’s history. Quicktime actually offered a standardized Motion JPEG, MJPEG was supported under Video for Windows as well, but Microsoft never dictated a standard, so a camera maker couldn’t deliver a video file that would “just work”.
Quicktime continues to be used, again, somewhat out of habit. Standards like AVCHD have caught on from the camcorder world, but still camera companies like Nikon have stuck with Quicktime in most cases. Canon uses this as well. AVI is not a good home for more advanced CODECs like AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264, but it’s just dandy under Quicktime (the MPEG-4 file wrapper, .mp4, was derived from the Quicktime file wrapper). Canon’s using a video format that’s AVC, but quite different than AVCHD (44Mb/s, I and P frames only, no B frames), but it’s well supported under Quicktime, at least fairly recent Quicktime.
And very easy to edit in Vegas Pro anyway, and I believe the current versions of Vegas Movie Studio HD and Platinum. There’s no reason to expect a 2-3 year old program to edit video from a brand new camera… even if it does, it’s very likely the current version of the program will do a much better job.
It’s also a very good idea to mention the camera you’re talking about when asking for technical help. It’s quite possible there’s a known bug, glitch, or weirdness in your camera that’s well known. It’s also quite possible we’ll all bust your chops for buying a $5,000 camera and balking at spending $50 on software… but sharing information is still the best way to get useful information back.
-Dave
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There is no standard support for 1080/60p in any Blu-ray profile. However, the AVCHD 2.0 specification officially accepts 1080/60p pretty much just as implemented on the Panny TM700. I would of course test it anyway, but if you’re buying a new player, look for the AVCHD logo. Naturally, the network players like Boxee and Roku, while tapping the AVC decoder “organ bank” created by Blu-ray and cable/satellite STBs, do not follow specific media standards, so 1080/60o support is a growing thing there, too.
-Dave
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I’ve actually looked for information on this, and haven’t found much conclusive, but I believe that there are problems with SDXC and some card readers.
I have several Windows 7 PCs.. home office, home lab, remote office. I never actually noticed the problem at the home office… I put my 60D directly on USB, and it never had a problem with the 64GB SDXC card that’s my main 60D card. But I think the 60D defaults to Media Transfer Protocol, one of those, which more like a network protocol than a low-level disc access like SDXC. So the file system doesn’t really matter. The 60D may have other connect options buried in a menu somewhere… I know my Olympus E-PM1 pops up about five mode options when I first hook it to USB. This isn’t actually a bad thing; in a modern OS like Windows 7, connecting via the higher level modes allow a more robust interface… Windows knows it’s a 60D, it can read the battery level, it checks on software updates (unlikely to help much, knowing how good Microsoft isn’t at collecting driver updates, but you never know)… but I still want the card to be readable on its own.
On the PC at my Philly office, never had a problem reading the card. And on my lab PC, same deal — the card reads fine. Both of these are built-in readers, the one in Philly came from Gateway, the one in the office is a USB 2.0 driven built-in drive, fairly new.
On my home office desktop, though, I have a Delkin DDREADER-38, which certainly isn’t new, but worked fine up until this. When I insert the SDXC card, the PC recognizes it in some way, but offers to format it… so it is clearly confused. This PC is running the same Windows 7 as the two others, and I have formatted exFAT on HDDs (actually as the best common format for video between Windows and MacOS right now), so I know that’s not the issues. Has to be the card reader… but why?
Just as a sanity check, I put the 64GB card into my Panasonic TM700, formatted it, and tried to read it on the Delkin reader. Nope… same result. I’m guessing answering “yes” to the “Do you want to format” would make bad things happen (on a totally unrelated hardware project here, I just trashed two 8GB SDHC cards… a client hired monkeys to design their computer board, and the totally boggered the SD interface), not anxious to get experimental with one of my best cards.
-Dave
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A CODEC Pack is never a good idea on anyone’s PC. Not that most video professionals don’t already know these aren’t safe for editing machine use, but they’re generally bad news.
But we’re likely to get asked this stuff. Just as if you’re a computer expert, the “civilians” expect you to know pretty much everything about every computer, the fact that I know how to shoot video and deliver a nicely produced result leads friends and family to assume I know pretty much everything about video.
Anyway, if you’re trying to help your Mom or Uncle Bob or whoever watch some weird video, try VLC first. The VLC player has support for practically every video CODEC known to mankind, but it’s all done privately — they don’t get installed as VfW or DirectShow or Quicktime CODECs. So they stay out of the way of things that actually need to produce video.
-Dave
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John beat me to it… but yeah, $150-$200 is a low-cost tripod. Below that, you’re talking “cheap ass” tripod, something that’s going to break at the worst possible time, something you can’t get parts for when something does break, etc.
I have of these; actually, the earlier legs that the 190X replaced (they changed from screw-locks to tab locks), and the 190C, which is a slightly pricier carbon fiber version of basically the same tripod. The great thing about a “real” tripod like Manfrotto’s is that it’s a component system. I actually started years ago with a microfluid head, the equivalent of today’s 128RC Micro Fluid Head. You can get additional RC2 plates and mounts… so I have the same plates on my camcorders (this is large enough for my Panny HMC-40, it’s fine for a GL2, though not as nice as the 501HD or 701HD head and plate system), my DSLRs, etc. I have the same plate system on my Glidecam 2000, I have a Manfrotto monopod that takes the plate, a flash bracket that takes it, even a very compact non-Manfrotto travel pod that uses the RC2 plates (thanks to the adapters). I also have 460MG head for still camera work (also works for fixed video cameras).
In short, it’s a real system, and you can start at about $200 with the aluminum legs and the 128RC head. You probably wouldn’t be happy for long with a typical “Mall Camera Store” tripod, and even if you were, when it’s time to grow, there’s nowhere to go with that pod.
-Dave
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AMD has a native CPU implementation of OpenCL for the x86… that’s certainly what you’re seeing there. It’s useful for OpenCL software that wouldn’t run otherwise.
On the other hand, if you’re seeing longer rendering times with the enabled, but only see 25% CPU load when it’s disabled, you have problems beyond OpenCL. You should see something in excess of 90% CPU load when rendering, unless you have explicitly told Vegas not to use all CPU cores.
All rendering will find a bottleneck — the weakest link in your rendering chain. The CPU should be your system’s bottleneck. When you line up everything else that’s reasonable to have in a modern PC, the CPU is the one that’s going to be too slow. Watch out for single-threaded plugins, or a single drive being used for all rendering (you want the drive to operate at streaming speeds, but with too much media, it tends to do lots of seeking — seeks on HDDs are 100x slower than streaming).
-Dave
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There are several schools of thought.
One, of course, is the default: my PC is maxxed out on RAM, so I’ll just live with it until it’s time to upgrade. These days, of course, you can have a slightly different scenario — my OS is maxxed out on RAM… if you have Windows 32-bit and 4GB. Which may actually mean only about 3GB really available to play with — you get a small memory upgrade just going to 64-bit Windows.
There’s the common rule-of-thumb you’ll hear around here, 2GB per processor core. This works fairly well for Vegas, it’s overkill for some apps and insufficient for others. Photo work, for example, can be very, very memory intensive at times, but less processor intensive than video.
For HD in Vegas 9/10/11 on 64-bit Windows and a six core CPU, I have never run into a practical limit with 8GB of RAM. No paging, no other low memory issues. But some of that’s workflow… if I were using a different mix of apps all at once (say, Vegas and After Effects up at the same time), maybe I’d benefit from more RAM. I did upgrade to 16GB last summer, but that was for photo work (merging 25-50 18Mpixel photos to a panorama in RAW or 48-bit color… does eat memory).
For SD work, I was pretty happy with 1GB memory, though of course, that was like Vegas 6 or 7, so that’s less easy to compare to today’s Vegas.
You guys are right on about the Vegas “wake up” effect. When you de-focus Vegas and it’s otherwise not doing something, it releases locks on the assets you’re using. That’s intentional. If it didn’t do that, you wouldn’t be able to, say, jump to Photoshop to adjust a still or Forge to edit audio. When you re-focus Vegas, it’s going to grab those back, checking for changes in the process. In a big project with lots of assets, yeah, that’s going to take time. You’ll speed your project up (in general, but here specifically) moving some of those assets to separate hard drives.
-Dave
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It really depends on what you’re trying to do. In short, Vegas can do pretty much anything you’d want to do in video; “slideshow” programs may create something much faster, but they’re not as powerful.
I have some example: here’s a “slideshow” (except for the end) I did for my company. This was rushed… I had less than a day to figure out what to do with fairly little actual content, and also create and record some custom music for it. Vegas was absolutely the right tool for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYoszzMuaJE”
Here’s another I did from a large collection of photographs. This took more than a day, but it’s the only way to build a really creative slide show. An automated program can drop in a random transition between photos, but it’s not going to know the best way to pan through an image, how to line up features from one to another to make the transition more interesting, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGf7xjWc4E
-Dave
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