Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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I don’t use Macs, but I have helped Mac users add Windows to their systems.
The good news is that all Macs today (all x86 Macs) are bog-standard Intel PCs. The main difference is that they run Apple’s version of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), rather than the old PC BIOS or the Open Firmware HAL from the PowerPC days. You can run Windows on x86 Macs using BootCamp, which includes a boot manager, partitioning and formatting utility, and Windows drivers for standard Apple hardware. The actual boot functions are already built in (if you have a very old Mac, you may need a BIOS update) via classic BIOS emulation in EFI.
Once you partition a disc, install Windows (current BootCamp 4.0 only supports Windows 7, which is what you should be running for Vegas Pro 11 anyway), and boot, you’re on a PC in every meaningful way… just one made by Apple. Of course, if you play to run in Windows mode most of the time, you might question why you’re paying twice as much for slower hardware… but hey, some people like pretty casework.
It’s technically possible to run both at once, via a virtual machine environment such as VirtualBox or Parallels. This allows you to run a Virtual PC on your Mac desktop when you need Vegas, but you’re going to take some performance hits. Generally, things like GPU emulation are a bit weak, though Parallels claims to have support for 3D games, but I don’t know if it would support OpenCL acceleration.
some of the GPUs in current Macs will work fine , though none of the Macs ship with terribly powerful GPUs by today’s standards…. the Mac Pro is old, and the iMacs are really laptop PCs built for desktop use. The Radeon HD 5870 in the higher-end Mac Pro was a fast card in 2009, and it does support OpenCL, which is a useful thing to have for accelerated video editing and rendering in Vegas. The Radeon HD 6970M sounds better, but it’s the laptop/mobile version, so it’s actually delivering less than half the performance of a desktop Radeon HD 6970.
Of course, if OpenCL isn’t virtualized and you intended to run using a VM, this is probably not an issue. But you won’t be getting the most out of Vegas. I have used VMs quite extensively for work since the 1990s, and in general I have the host OS as the one that really needs performance (usually Windows, for video/multimedia/CAD) and the Virtual OS for things that are less critical (software development). I did once build a dual boot system that could run either native or in a VM, but it was a big pain and didn’t work well. In general, you need to treat each environment as a separate computer, even if you do master the art of mapping a physical disc partition to a virtual one for the VM (much easier under VMWare back then than VirtualBox today).
-Dave
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There are several things you can do with animation, and Vegas can be pretty powerful, but it’s not always the whole piece. Basically, Vegas can work in layers, allowing you control over which elements appear over/under the others. If you use graphics or video with alpha layer, you can build overlays that allow some things to show up underneath…. this is typically RAW video (which you might create in a smaller Vegas project), PNG or GIF stills, or small GIF animations.
There are any number of programs that can create small GIF animations. In your original linked video, that would be a good way, for example, to create the walking guy. You can find animated clipart, make your own using a drawing program, etc.
Here’s one I did with most of the animation being done just with animated GIFs and pan/zoom controls in Vegas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNmfm-BAwzs
(the “second copy” of me required masking).
The things Vegas does for you, like generating frames for moving objects, is called “tweening” in animation. I think technically, stop motion animation is when you bring in real-world elements: I set up my camera, put a subject in front, take a shot, change the subject a little, take another shot, repeat until frothy. If you’re moving drawings around, that’s pretty much just animation — not that the technical term matters all that much.
For drawing alone, you might find a program like Inkscape better than the GIMP/Photoshop for animating an object, simply because a structured drawing is easier to tweak. You might also check out Pencil (https://www.pencil-animation.org), which is pretty nice for working in bitmaps or vectors, and as well, is specifically designed as a animation tool.
I’ve done some “whiteboard” animation, where I’m actually drawing things on a whiteboard, in some cases very stop-motion style (eg, shoot, draw, shoot, draw). I other cases, I can get a similar effect by taking the complete drawing into Photoshop (or any other editor), and then selectively erasing bits of the drawing, saving each off as a PNG (or whatever you like to work with). Then, you bring in each in as a frame or two, in reverse order, and it looks like the object is building/growing. Panning with motion blur can make things move, etc. Here are a couple, which use alpha channel between layers, but not much in the way of masking (the second one has some live video turned into animation that was masked a bit, and some BCC7 plug-ins for lighting effects, but the rest is pretty basic stuff that still looks pretty decent):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCrUrOQkJSw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzh1f4OjVYI
-Dave
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[Dave Lozinski] “1) when I turned off GPU acceleration and had the dynamic ram preview setting at 9000MB, Vegas got up to about 40% before it started to slow down. It still slowed down though. :(“
Yeah… it’s pretty typical, so far, to see CPU drop when the GPU is well used. In my experience (6 core AMD 1090T CPU and Radeon 6970 GPU), it’s still well worth the GPU being enabled.
After looking at your results, I did a test of my own. I’m not convinced Vegas knows what to do with crazy amounts of Preview RAM, at least during rendering, but I tried an experiment. I had a bunch of video segments, each about 50min, to render to AVC using Sony’s default Blu-ray 16Mb/s preset. I ran one with 128MB of preview, one with 1GB of preview, and one with 8GB of preview… like you, I have a 16GB system.
So … the curious thing is that it wasn’t at all curious. I did try no preview, and I had done tests in the past suggesting that’s a bad idea for anything complex. Maybe the fast it was basically just a straight conversion, no plug-ins, nothing interesting, colored the result. But I got the same rendering time for each one, just under two hours, with CPU and GPU both kept busy. This is with the very latest build of Vegas 11.. I’m pretty sure I’m seeing higher GPU peaks than I had in the past for a straight conversion (about 50%).
Anyway, each render ran just under 2hrs. That might be useful for you to compare, just where your performance is relative to mine. But it sure does sound like there is something very weird going on in your system. I do agree about your former suggestion in memory.. I NEVER saw an HD render go much about 6GB of committed memory in the past.
I upgraded to 16GB for other reasons (still photo work) this last summer, and like you, I kind of wanted Vegas to do something useful with that memory during a render. But some time back, I did a bunch of benchmarks and found 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB to deliver identical results, so I left it at 1GB… it’s not uncommon for me to have Vegas rendering while I’m doing other work, so I didn’t want to suck up all that free RAM. At a different point, I found things got slower when the preview was set to zero.
That made some sense. I came to digital video by way of digital audio, and back in the early days, every DAW had a way to set up some metric for track buffering, since the practical number-of-tracks versus the playback latency is inherently a trade-off. I never did anything live with Vegas, but later on, started messing around with this kind of stuff, and was kind of surprised that it didn’t really have any means of tweaking the buffering.
Or even optimizing it.. you would think that the Sony development team knows their system well enough to know what makes rendering faster or slower. And that’s information we’d all like to have. For DAW stuff, it was nearly universal that the first thing a new program install does it profile you system to optimize it. I’ve done much of that kind of thing with Vegas over the years, and I know what I’m doing, but I don’t always have access to the things that would allow deeper optimization. And yeah, if I could gain another 10% performance, I could spend a day or a few nights playing with it. It’s pretty clear Vegas left to its own can wind up in a pretty awful performance configuration.
-Dave
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For testing, as John mentioned, you can buy a few BD-RE. Some folks recall that DVD-RW was sometimes a compatibility issue back in the DVD days. That was largely because it was kind of an afterthought… the DVD Forum was promoting DVD-RAM, a better but not DVD-ROM compatible format. The upstart DVD+ people produced a DVD+RW format, which was compatible yet still worked well for video recorders (for that week that recording on DVD for consumers seemed a better idea than recording on hard disc).
Anyway, on to AVCHD. You can actually burn “Blu-ray on DVD” using DVD Architect with Vegas Pro.. I don’t know about Vegas Platinum. It’s easy.. in the “Properties” menu, set “Disc format” to Blu-ray Disc, and “Target Media Size” to 4.7GB (single layer DVD) or 8.5GB (dual layer DVD).
That may work. It may fail. That actually builds a Blu-ray structure for a DVD, which you may burn to a DVD. Some players will play it, many won’t.
AVCHD isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s far better supported. AVCHD was derived from Blu-ray, but today it lives as a stand-alone format. It was specifically designed to support HD video on those silly DVD (and ever-so-slightly-less-silly Blu-ray) camcorders. And of course, it was pretty much adopted for all flash media camcorders.
The first thing you need for AVCHD support is AVC formatted video at 18Mb/s or less. The AVCHD specs require a 2x DVD player, nothing more, so anything higher bitrate will fail. You also want to grab yourself a copy of “multiAVCHD”, an open source tool that knows pretty much everything about AVCHD, including how to create AVCHD complaint discs. Because of the fact that this was largely promoted for consumer camcorder use, I believe it’s more widely supported in Blu-ray players.
Naturally, if it’s just for test discs, you can try a Blu-ray formatted DVD and see if plays on your Blu-ray player. It did not play on the PS3, 2+ years ago when I first tried it, and thus learned the whole tale I relate to you here.
-Dave
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Ethically, I have done work “on the side”, but I keep it fully independent. I’ve been professionally employed as an Engineer (recently done video, animation, and photography for the same employer, but that wasn’t the original job). The company’s market is wireless networking devices, and I’ve done both hardware and software.
I wouldn’t get into a job I found while working for the company. Period. Again, that’s my ethics, not any law I know about. As far as independent jobs, I would not take on a job that’s primarily related to wireless and/or networking. Some other area of software or electronics, no problem.
Legally, your time is your own when not on the clock. If you take on extra work, with your own equipment, you’re usually in the clear. Even if you use company equipment in the off hours, you may be. Keep in mind that these laws vary a bit by state. But it’s been fairly well documented that many famous startup companies began with after hours access to other folks equipment (Apple, for example). But it never hurts to be overly cautious.
Also, if you did sign an employment contract, read it. If it forbids certain after hours activities, it may well be over-restrictive, but you did sign it. You might wind up in court if you violate this. You certainly risk your day job.
And ethics are in the eye of the beholder. If you boss catches you “stealing” a potential client, particularly if you’re not under contract (which means you’re an at-will employee, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment), you probably get canned.
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. I have gone drinking with lawyers, and I do occasionally write patents.
-Dave
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That’s basically it. The Preview RAM is a static allocation… Vegas grabs that RAM and holds on to it. The main use is RAM preview during editing, but it also seems to be used as buffer memory during rendering. It would kind of be a crime if it wasn’t.
A couple of problems occur. You’re more sensitive to memory-related slowdowns during rendering, and the rendering algorithms have to everything you see during editing, and then some. So you might think you’re ok with N MB set aside during editing, but you run short during editing.
“Run Short” of memory is a very bad thing. The render doesn’t fail, but Windows’ virtual memory system kicks in. Code may be dumped from memory and reloaded as needed, data may be paged to the swap file on your disc. Even with today’s fastest hard drives, paged memory is thousands of times slower than real memory. What I found was that too much preview RAM and you’ll get VM thrashing… memory, memory all around, and not a drop to drink.
You probably don’t want to drop the preview buffer entirely, though. For hard drives to hit their peak speed, they need to do reasonably large loads. It seems that Vegas is counting on this memory for some amount of buffering during rendering. With no memory, it’s forced to do more small reads. You’ll see rendering performance drop noticably, and CPU percentage drop way down, too, as the render speed gets dominated by hard drive access. Not likely an issue on single projects, but put something complex into Vegas, and you’ll see it.
-Dave
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[John Rofrano] “Hey Andy, yea the permissions thing is really messed up. I am shocked that Microsoft can’t get this right. It works in Linux, it works in Mac OS X, but Microsoft can’t seem to make an OS where everyone doesn’t have to be an admin. It’s sad really.”
There’s an old saying some of my UNIX friends have: “Those who fail to learn from UNIX are doomed to recreate UNIX. Badly”. Of course, Linux is a UNIX clone, and MacOS, pretty much too (originally based on CMU’s Mach kernel and BSD UNIX). Programs can inherent room permissions, or even be set to execute with root permission. So you don’t get 10 requests for password popping up when trying to do just one “thing”, far as you’re concerned, even when it involves a bunch of “sub-things” the user’s not supposed to know about.
Windows since NT has some pretty good ideas deep down. They got some things, like fully symmetric multiprocessing and multithreading totally correct, long before UNIX did (though some of that same stuff was kind of the point of CMU’s Mach). But Dave Cutler and crew were VAX/VMS guys, and didn’t steal the stuff they should have from UNIX.
Microsoft never seems able to fix these sort of very glaring design flaws. They still do automatic configuration (Plug-and-play) wrong; that’s something we did totally correctly on the Amiga. Fortunately, new tech forced them to fix it a little, but you still get really stupid behavior, like a new driver install if you happen to plug that USB device into a different port from time to time. But at least it doesn’t likely demand a reboot… Windows 9x wasn’t doing much more than setting software switches in the registry to replace the hardware switches (address, IRQ, DMA, etc) that had been voted out of existence. It actually needed to reboot to adjust to most driver changes.
-Dave
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[John Rofrano] “[Dave Haynie] “Touch interfaces are put on highly mobile devices because they’re small and I’m travelling. Neither of these things are true when I’m at my desk, with my real Bella keyboard (Vegas edition), high precision mouse, and pen-based graphics tablet. I have no use for a substantially inferior interface device (eg, my fingers), nor a UI optimized to make that bad UI device usable.”
Well said Dave. I took a look a Windows 8 beta and concluded that Microsoft obviously doesn’t get this. I recently switched from Windows to a Mac and the change was like night and day.”I don’t think Microsoft has every really “got” user interface, certainly not the way Apple has. It’s just not really in their DNA.
With that said, I’m not sure how much of Windows 8 comes from things they think are good ideas, and how much comes from a dark place full of fear. Microsoft seems to have peaked too soon in mobile, and like so many Microsoft things, once they did well (pretty much beat Palm), they stopped thinking about it.
They woke up recently to a world in which iOS and Android devices aren’t simply PC accessories, as the Palms and the WinCE PDAs once were, but personal computers in their own right. And Microsoft is year behind taking on that same market. I think the point of pushing the touch interface onto the desktop is to force feed that to desktop users, so they’ll see the Microsoft mobile devices as a reasonable alternative to iOS and Android.
Now, if you think about it the other way, you get Apple. Apple’s more or less bailed on their pro markets (the Mac Pro is aging, and there are rumors Apple’s going to scrap it entirely and just count on “appliance” computers like iMacs and laptops), but their consumer market is growing. In fact, it’s the only segment of the desktop PC market growing significantly, and it’s entirely the “iOS coattails” effect. So from Apple’s point of view, they can take what’s good about iOS and put that on the desktop, in a way that makes iOS users even more likely to jump to Apple. As the Mac represents 20% of Apple’s market now, this is absolutely the right thing for them to do. UI wise, there are various things I’ve never liked about MacOS, going back to the late 80s. But I’ve always found it slick and self-consistent.
[John Rofrano] ” I understand now why they won’t allow their OS on other hardware. The software and hardware integration on a Apple’s devices could only be pulled off by a single company controlling the quality. “
Having actually designed personal computers, I kind of reject the “integrated hardware/software” argument. Apple’s shipping pretty bog standard PCs in pretty casework. Some of what they do is simple enough: Apple’s always been into hardware minimialism, and they still do that — everything you need it build in, nothing extra, and that’s all you get. That’s why iMacs use laptop motherboards… they come with nearly all the drivers you’ll ever run, like a laptop. And most of their laptops and iMacs have fewer functions, fewer ports, etc… less stuff to go wrong. And they’ll use that same chipset on laptops and desktops… very few different models per year.
Any PC company could do the same. Some do, but others have this PC of the month thing… models change all the time, different hardware in them, code probably written from outside vendors, not understood by the PC supplier. So they never have the level of understanding of their system. But that IS a policy decision, not some magic thing… Apple’s in general OEMing the same hardware everyone else does.
Microsoft’s problem is one of distance, but also of the position they assume in the market. Microsoft has a copy of every device that goes through WHQL up there in Redmond, but they don’t necessarily know the hardware well enough to fix a bug, much less write the driver. And they don’t adopt the position that it’s their problem… they certified the driver as a service to the customer (and a way to control hardware developers), but they don’t take responsibility for fixing it. Similarly, if I bug a PC from HP, let’s say, it’s HP delivering my support, bug fixes, etc. Not Microsoft’s problem, officially… up to the PC vendor to be like Apple, or not.
-Dave
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ProRes is a proprietary Apple format. If you’re not encoding on a Macintosh, you’re not creating ProRes. Period.
The basic workflow I’d follow: go to Avid, and get DNxHD plug-ins for both PC and Mac. Rendering out whatever standard format you’re working in to Quicktime DNxHD (it’s very high quality). Copy those files, and the Mac DNxHD plug-in, to a portable drive… I like EXFAT, since all current Macs support EXFAT without objection (NTFS still seems to be a question).
Now, go find a Mac. If the owner of said Mac is not quite happy with your borrowing their object of desire (much less installing any non-Apple software on them), it’s a known truth that Mac fans are easily distracted by bright, shiny objects. Once said Mac owner is suitably distracted (I find chocolate also works… the nearest Mac is my daughter’s), install the DNxHD CODEC, and then convert to ProRes. Apple offers some guidelines for turning your industry-standard video into something only Mac people can use, right here:
https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/professionalformatsandworkflows/index.html#chapter=10%26section=3%26tasks=true(and yeah, actually, even DNxHD is an official industry standard.. SMPTE VC-3, in fact).
-Dave
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30p is not a supported Blu-ray frame rate. If I had material originally in 30p (curiously, at this very moment, I do), I would render it to 1080/60i for delivery on Blu-ray. Most modern projectors are going to upconvert this to 1080/60p anyway (many, such as lightvalve or DLP projectors have to, since they can’t actually generate interlaced video).
-Dave