[Dave Haynie]

I’ve seen the Sony AVC CODEC vanish once or twice, without installing or re-installing anything. It just didn’t show up. There’s some random bug in the new file dialog.

I found that re-starting Vegas solved my problem. And honestly, I still have Vegas 9 installed, and find no possible reason to un-install Vegas 10 at this point in time. Not that it should matter…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Nothing’s perfect.

HDDs are pretty reliable in the intermediate term, and I use ’em extensively for projects — set up a working drive for a new project, pop it out when the project’s over, and it’s the project archive.

Real-world HDDs last at lest five years in continuous use, if they don’t have defects. I’ve returned three or four due to defects, however, and it’s not as if I’m buying 20 per month. Just sitting there, they may last a very long time. Then again, the mechanical bits can bind up, due to stiction or corrosion.

Flash devices don’t have the mechanical issues, but they’re not usually large enough. And the stored charge in a flash cell is only likely good for about 10 years.

Generic DVDs are a terrible idea, because they’re usually just not made that well. The dye compounds can break down, particularly organic dye. They fade quickly in sunlight — hopefully not an archival issue. The reflective layer of most DVDs is silver, which tarnishes. The glues that hold the two poly-carbonate discs together, and protect all the good stuff inside, can fail. And of course, the disc itself can be scratched.

On the other hand, archival quality DVDs _might_ last 200 years or more. They’re kind of expensive, but there’s a new technology coming Real Soon Now that might actually cost less and last longer, called M-Disc: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/92286-m-disc-is-a-dvd-made-out-of-stone-that-lasts-1000-years. You might need new firmware for your DVD drive, or a new DVD drive.

And don’t write off Blu-ray. The original BD-R formulation, known as HTL BD-R (all TDK discs, some others), is not dye-based like CD or DVD, it’s “phase-change” based. The write-once layer is actually two layers, a layer of silicon and a layer of some magical copper alloy. When the laser writes a bit, it melts this, the materials mix, and that makes a physically different dot that can’t fade or reverse itself, and doesn’t fade in light. Blu-ray discs also have a very hard coating, much harder than polycarbonate, so they’re not easily scratched. However, there are now BD-Rs using metal azo dyes, and I’m sure some folks are working on organic dyes, so what used to be universally true about BD no longer is. Of course, BD-Rs have some of the same other physical vulnerabilities as DVD or CD.

The best bet: don’t trust any one thing. And if you have archival discs, either keep making them, or check to see if the old ones still work.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I do it old-skool. When I copy over from my SDHC/SDXC cards, I open a Cygwin shell, then run something like:

cd /cygdrive/d/Video/NewProject
cat /cygdrive/e/PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/00000.MTS /cygdrive/e/PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/00001.MTS > new_original.mts

Something like that. When most cameras break up files at the 4GB boundary, they do it at exactly the 4GB boundary. That means you really do have to concatenate the files, as they can be broken up in the middle of a GOP and Transport Stream Packet.

You do this in a Windows shell, something like:

cd d:videoNewProject
copy /b e:PRIVATEAVCHDBDMVSTREAM

[Dave Haynie]

That was probably me 🙂

Ok, the let’s say we’re going to take two samples. First thing, you record both samples, however you do that. The key here is that, every time you record from an analog tape source, the random noise is different. An old, failing tape make have some fixed noise built-in, where the media is degrading, but the chroma noise and other undesirables you see from a clean tape are generally random.

So, you have two captures. Drop them in as two tracks in Vegas. Set the top track to 50% transparent. You’re almost certain to have two different starting points, so try to line them up. Looking for a unique audio event is the best way — same idea as aligning video from multiple camera shoots.

Now, if you have the top layer at 50%, and the video lines up, you’ll notice the resulting preview looks normal, but less noisy. That’s the simple idea. Since random noise is random, the noise from each layer comes through at 50% brightness. But the good parts add up, so they’re visible at 100% brightness.

You can get the same effect by creating a compositing pair between the two, lowering the brightness of each by 50%, then adding them, but that’s more complex (and you need to work in 32-bit pixels to ensure you don’t clip when doing this kind of image manipulation).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You may have found a bug in multicam… I sincerely doubt Sony did this on purpose or anything. I was always mixed about Sony’s multicam implementation anyway, though it has improved over the years.

It should go without saying, but you absolutely must get the latest graphics driver for your card before judging its performance on Vegas 11 or any other GPGPU stuff. These things have been evolving rapidly over the years. For example, if you have an ATi/AMD card more than a year or two old, you might have the deprecated “Close to the Metal” Streams API, and an incomplete OpenCL implementation.

As for XP vs. Vista/Windows 7, the choice is usually based on the available APIs. Microsoft builds OS functions, C++ frameworks, etc. that developers use. And these are continuously improved. And sometimes, they’re not back-ported to the older OS. Windows XP was released over 10 years ago, the last major update was in 2008… one would hope that technology advanced just a bit since then.

I dropped XP in 2009 for Windows 7, largely to get 64-bit support. Sure, XP existed in a 64-bit version, but that was largely unsupported. Microsoft drives those things: their certification program tells developers what they have to support and what’s optional. 64-bit was optional for Windows XP, mandatory for Vista. I like 64-bit for video. I absolutely need it for photo editing — just try a 30-40 photo panoramic merge of 18Mpixel RAW photos without at least 8GB of RAM (I have 16GB). Things explode.

And of course, while it’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep customers happy, it’s also in their interest to both spend their money when it’ll make them the most money. That often means supporting new things only on new OSs. Similarly, developers like Sony move to these new things, either for better device support, easier and more reliable coding work, or even totally new functions.

For example, part of my current day job is with Connectify. Their main product is a computer program that turns a Windows PC into a hotspot. It is absolutely necessary to have Windows 7 to get a real Access Point. You can get Ad-Hoc mode with Windows Vista or XP, but we can’t even support anything before XP SP3, due to other improvements in the OS (not sure of the details there).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I see the same problem. I’m 64… never even installed 32-bit Vegas 10, much less Vegas 11.

And here’s the weird part: I _almost_ don’t see BCC7. If I look under OFX or BCC 3D Objects in the Plug-In Chooser, I see five BCC plug-ins: Extruded EPS, Spline, Text, Layer Deformer, and Type on Text. That’s it. Everything else is not visible.

And as well, no problem with others: NewBlue, Neat Video, and FBnm plug-ins are where they ought to be.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ditto. And that’s just the start… now I have to figure which graphics card upgrade I buy. And my smartphone (O.G. Droid) started losing its mind yesterday… that needs to be upgraded. In the grand scheme of things, the Vegas $135 Vegas deal is a great one.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

HDMI on the HMC40 is output-only. There’s no line input of any kind for video.

I have an HMC40, a TM700, a few older Sonys, etc… I guess awhile back, you might have had Firewire as an input option, but that’s about it.

I use a Hauppauge “Colossus” PCIe x1 card on my main PC for HD video capture, as needed. It does support HDMI input, as well as YPrPb analog input. However, this is probably not going to help you grab HD output from a DVR. Not sure about TiVo per se, but most video from cable/satellite is secure, and will only output to HDCP-compliant devices, to prevent just this sort of digital copying.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

While it’s true that an HDSLR will shoot excellent video as well as photos, it is still largely a photo device from the workflow point of view. There are many things that aren’t quite tuned for video.

For example, on the D7000, you can’t change your aperture while shooting video… I can, with my Canon 60D. This is largely because Canon reacted to user feedback, like enabling manual controls for video, in the early days of the 5D Mk II, and added them as they went along.

Auto-focus is another issue. If you don’t use it, no worries. But both of these cameras get it wrong. Canon knowns they get it wrong… autofocus in video works like it does in stills — you press the shutter release to force a focus. Nikon has it free running, like you’d expect of a video camera. The problem — and this is true of nearly every still camera that added video — is that they still use a still camera focusing algorithm. When you’re shooting a still, the object is the fastest possible focus. So the camera will rapidly seek up and down to find the focus. In video, what you want is a fairly slow autofocus, that doesn’t make minute adjustments that’ll be visible in the video.

And then there’s audio. No HDSLR has good microphones. I could extend that to claim that no camcorder has good built-in mics, and that would be true. Only, they’re just worse in the HDSLRs. And of course, you can’t even connect a professional mic direcly to any HDSLR, you need an interface for XLR + Phantom power, like one of the Beachtek adapters. Or a secondary recorder… the Zoom H4n is kind of the standard for HDSLR use these days, largely because it’s not much more expensive than a Beachtek adapter, records audio at 96/24, takes two XLR mics, provides phantom power (though honestly, if you’re doing much shooting, you need external power to keep it going), and can pass audio through to the HDSLR’s audio input.

Video rates vary quite a bit, too… most consumer/prosumer camcorders shoot AVC at 24Mb/s peak. The D7000 offers something similar, around 22Mb/s, and also a 12Mb/s mode; the 60D shoots at 44Mb/s. However, both simply stop recording after the file size hits 4GB (even on an SDXC card, which is not subject to the 4GB limits).. meaning the Canon gives me a maximum of 10-12 minutes, while you’ll get about 20-something minutes on the Nikon, before you have to re-start the shoot. For some kinds of video, that’s a deal-breaker (I shoot lots of soccer — I use my “real” Panasonic HMC40 camcorder for that).

Anyway, enough of that. If you’re trying to shoot video that looks like film, yeah, 24p is the way to go. You want to shoot 24p (probably 23.976), not resample or convert from 30p. You may also want to adjust the color curve of the camera to something more film-like, though that’s possible in editing, too. And where possible, you’d like to shoot at a fixed shutter speed, maybe even thinking in terms of “degress of shutter” as one would for a film camera (eg, 1/48th second at 24p is a 180-degree shutter). What we accept as a proper film look is tied to amount of motion blur you’re going to capture. So bring ND filters.

Also, read the COW print article on “Film Fading to Black” https://magazine.creativecow.net/issue/film-fading-to-black. Make one wonder if the look of film will last, or if it’s maybe going to fade away as well.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, they’re using Autotune as an effect there. Autotune is a phase vocoder, a function first built in 1966… back when you had to actually build them in hardware.

The original point of Autotune was to add small correction to vocals, so that singers (particularly mediocre singers) could be adjusted in pitch. Of course, this was supposed to be kept secret…

The plug-in as an effect was first popularized in Cher’s 1998 song “Believe”. It had some popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s, know back then as “The Cher Effect”. It died down for awhile, but was resurrected by rapper turned R&B singer T-Pain, which pretty much uses it everywhere.

And of course, let’s not forget the Gregory Brothers’ “Auto-Tune the News”: https://autotunethenews.com.

In short, this effect is all over the place, very distinctive and annoyingly overused. The plug-in is not THAT expensive, there’s a time-limited download, you can find some phase vocoder VST freebies if you look around, though probably not as easy to use as Auto-Tune.

-Dave