[Dave Haynie]

N = total number of captures
1/N = weight of each capture in the final render

So, if I capture twice, N=2. I want each capture to contribute to 1/2 of the total image… I spoke of two different ways to do that. If I have three samples, that’s N=3… each will contribute 1/3 to the total of each frame.

For sync, I use audio primarily. Look for a good sync point — a clapboard, a cymbal crash, some other impulse. You have to zoom way in in Vegas to be able to align things on a frame-by-frame basis. There are tools like PluralEyes that can align video by audio, but that’s pretty much overkill for this exercise. Once you’re close and looking at single frames, you may be able to eyeball the video sync directly — look for a high motion event, with lots of change between the frames. But the audio’s probably necessary to get you close.

The one danger with tape is that it stretches. Hopefully, the analog to digital capture device is acting like a time-base corrector, giving you an honest frame by frame capture with nothing dropped.. not always the case, depends on the hardware.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If I want to composite video, there are of course a large number of options. But the goal here is a straight averaging of the video. You can set up compositing groups, but the simplest is just to add 1/N of each of N videos together.

If you have two captures, put them on two tracks, one over the other, then set the top track to 1/2 transparent. This effectively adds half of each together. Or start with three, and set the top two to 1/3 transparent.

Alternately, you can create a compositing group, and set each video in the group to a level of 1/N, then set the compositing operation to add. This, of course, lets you actually add to more than 100% brightness, whereas with the transparency method, you’ll always have your video at exactly 100%, the transparency of the top (N-1) layers is simply balancing the contribution of each layer to that total.

It’s simple to do a few short captures and play around with it. Again, if the noise is actually random, each video will have the same content but different noise. There could be damage to the tape that causes more patterned noise, but in general, you get random noise. Another application of this is low-light noise reduction. With video or still, take N shots of the same still scene in very low light. You’ll probably see sensor noise on each image, but when you average them, the noise itself largely cancels out (particularly with modern digital still cameras, the photo process itself already cancels out any patterned noise that might be present in the sensor).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Sony has a decent-enough upgrade policy — you can still skip a version upgrade and get the discount next time.

There may also be an element of maximizing a minimal impact. This is the kind of things that you do all the time, in any business that depends upon regular upgrades or subscriptions. They want to add the most overall value, to result in the most upgrades and/or new buys, but using only the available development team of course. So of course, there’s no guarantee that every new version has enough features to mandate an upgrade.

Take Vegas 10. I was pretty happy with Vegas 9, and don’t have any use right now for stereoscopic video. Improvements in AVC handling, I’m all for that, the audio improvements sure, but was that enough? But fixing the whole plug-in thing, that for me was a biggie — the old DirectShow filter as plug-in was never robust enough for some of the things out there, like the Boris tools, and it was very certainly holding Vegas back. So I jumped on that, and BCC was well… and whoops, there went the 2010 budget 🙂

So I had real GPU acceleration on my list for Vegas 11, and they seem to have that. Assuming it works, pretty much like it’s working in Adobe Premiere, that’s enough for me. And to get that working well, it IS a pretty big thing. They have to add GPU code to the compositing engine, to plug-ins, to the video decoders, maybe even improve the video encoder.

On that subject, I think the support they put into the AVC encoder was more of a learning experience than a big practical thing, to date. There may be some hard limits on how much acceleration you can build into an AVC decoder using the GPU, not sure about that. But on decode, it can be very powerful. Just on playback, I see CPU use go from 60% (all six cores) to 8% on an 1080/60p AVC playback. So think about that in compositing terms: if I did NOTHING more than use the GPU for decoding two AVC streams, simply dumping the uncompressed video into the compositing pipeline, I’d free up more than an hour’s worth of CPU time over the course of rendering an hour’s worth of video. That’s very, very non-trivial. And just one place to apply that acceleration.

And I expect to use Vegas 11 to help decide my next GPU upgrade.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “lol… are you sitting down?… Cuz’ now you know three… me! :-O

I bought an iPad 2 about a month ago and I was totally floored by its brilliant simplicity. I went to set up my email and it asked me for my userid and password and the next thing I saw was my email! (Imagine that!!!)”

I never would have guessed 🙂 On the other hand, if you’re a video pro who needs (needed?) access to FCP for work purposes, a Mac is the only PClone that does both FCP and Vegas. So that actually does make some sense.

Windows is a big mess, for sure. I believe some pieces of it are absolutely engineered to employ IT guys. I’ve worked with various versions of UNIX since 1975, I spend 11.5 years at Commodore working around an OS development team, and it’s hard to find another explanation. And of course, Microsoft with Outlook is trying to sell you their terribly complex and annoying email solution, rather than using a standard. So they have a vested interest in not making it easy.

Of course, I’m using “Becky!”, an email client I’ve been using since 1994, I think before Outlook existed, for my desktop mail, and it’s an easy set up. Ok, I did enter my email parameters, but then again, I am using my own hosted email server…. I’m not typical.

A better answer is Thunderbird, or Android. In both cases, I entered my email address, and the email client figured everything out. In fact, when I entered my GMail account on Android, it didn’t simply fetch my email, it synced up all my apps as well, over-the-air… something Apple’s going to get around to some day, I guess.

But in fact, both of the Mac-switch people I know are very non-technical people. So they probably get a big boost from Apple’s hand-holding, and don’t get annoyed that MacOS is pretty alien to anyone used to other OSs. The first GUI I used was in 1983, on an Apollo workstation with a four-button puck. Most UNIX GUIs used three buttons (and needed them) back in the day, AmigaOS, OS/2, and then Windows used two, and they both made perfect sense. When I’m down to Apple’s one, there’s trouble in there, like reaching over to chord with shift keys and things.

I can handle 24 buttons on my graphics tablet, I can handle six chorded strings on my guitar — I think any old human can do intelligent things with more than one mouse button without being totally confused. My mouse actually has about nine buttons and a scroll wheel… I’d probably get one of those jog shuttles full of buttons, if I didn’t already have a jog shuttle on my keyboard (Bella for Vegas… mixed reviews). Mice need to get more useful, not less. But I digress.. I could rant against Apple UI concepts all day. Like how I can run Windows, N versions of Linux or UNIX, even fire up BeOS/Haiku or AmigaOS (thanks to an emulator) and be fine, but none of that experience translates to MacOS. It’s fine if you’re Mac-only, and I’m sure they’ve designed the OS intentionally balkanized… they want it to be harder for Mac users to like Windows or some version of Linux.

And while I’m on the subject, I don’t like the direction Apple’s moving, or Ubuntu 11.x has already moved — making applications into Apps. I actually use windows all the time. Spread across my dual 1920×1200 monitors are 15 programs at the moment, including two instanced of Vegas 10, a couple of video conversion tools (re-muxing some weird MP4 I got with a new HD video capture card), Nero (BD backup burning), Evernote (song lyrics in progress), a couple of browsers, email client, Photoshop, Visio (some patent drawings for the day job), MorphMan (working on some animation, also for the day job), etc. I could not begin to be productive in an app-takes-whole-screen PC environment. It’s annoying enough on a tablet, but somewhat forgivable given the low resolution.

[John Rofrano] “Now to be fair, I wasn’t running Windows on my laptop before. I abandoned Windows long ago and I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for quite a while so I really switched from Linux to Mac OS X but after my experience with the iPad, I understood why Apple maintains strict control of both the hardware and the software. It’s the only way to guarantee the quality of the customer experience. The “swipe” gestures on the touchpad of the MacBook are simply brilliant. I don’t think I’ve clicked on a scroll bar in weeks (just a two finger swipe is all it takes to scroll).”

The mouse-wheel seems to have done the scroll thing for me for about a decade just dandy. So ok, Microsoft maybe got one thing right (Logitech mouse, but I do think MS added the wheel).

I have Windows 7 64, 4GB of DRAM, 1.2TB of HDD, dual Intel Core2 CPU, and a 1680×1050 screen on my laptop… and it’s fairly annoying for any real work (video or CAD). When I used it for Work, I had several different versions of Linux on tap via VirtualBox, but kept Windows native — I need the graphics performance for video or CAD, you lose at least some of that in a VM (just how much depends on the VM).

Today, I mostly use it for the occasional big field recording thing (anything that’s too big for the Zoom H4n), like a whole band recording session. I’m pretty happy with the tablet for basic stuff: reading email, light web surfing (if I’m not jugging more than 10 or so web pages), etc. It also does the eBook thing pretty well, but I have one of the only tablets that’s readable in bright sunlight (Notion Ink Adam with a Pixel Qi display)

[John Rofrano] ” I do believe we are living in the dawn of the “post-pc” era, where smart devices are the norm and laptops and desktops will only be used for special purposes. Only time will tell.”

We may be entering a “post-PC” era (do keep in mind, a Mac IS a PC), but not a post-pc era. While not IBM-compatibles like my PC and your Mac, our phones and tablets are very certainly personal computers, and will remain so. Yeah, they’re taking a different approach to an extent, but only so much. I can still fire up a bash shell on my tablet if I like — works better when I plug in a USB keyboard, of course… same as with any long typing session. Touch without tacticle feedback is never as good as with… keyboards live because they’re very good at what they do. But I’m willing to make them optional in return for a book-sized computer that runs all day (ok, your iPad2 is more a modern magazine, my Adam … well, maybe “Vogue”, or a copy of BYTE from the 80s, far as the thickness goes).

The key here is simple: computers have really outpaced people. The average computer of 2000 didn’t make all us video folks happy, I needed more for CAD, more for photography, more for music once we started replacing whole racks of gear with plug-ins. Hardcore gamers, too, only want more. But the average web browsing, text editing, simple-game-playing user was pretty happy with an AD2000 PC. And this year’s crop of tablets, nominally an ARM Cortex A9 dual core at 1GHz, 512MB of DRAM, and at least 8-16GB of “disc” space, completely out-specs the average PC of 2000, if it’s technically just barely a match for the average PC Netbook today in raw performance. Make the OS more efficient — and this means more efficient than Windows, and you’re there. After all, most of the tablet/phone OSs, Android, iOS, and even WebOS, are running on top of some version of UNIX… the same thing powering servers, supercomputers, TiVos and DTV boxes around the world. While not born on the personal computer, the PC was the main engine of evolution for UNIX, and particularly Linux, in recent times. So basically, we’re even running PC OSs on these things. Still computers, even more personal.

And Apple’s catching up to this idea — that maybe these are stand alone, rather than needing a tether to some PC somewhere. Android did that right from the start. But I won’t be editing video on either, any time soon…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Tyson Onaga] “Now Vegas doesn’t support a Render at 1080-30p. Vegas has 1080-60i, 50i, and 24p.”

Vegas will render at practically any frame rate, 29.97p included. There may not be a preset for it in your choice of output format, but that’s what the “Custom” button is for. Presets are really only there to match other standard formats, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. And to save time, to help you get the same result repeatedly, etc. But it’s the stuff under the “Custom” button that’s the real rendering engine control panel.

1080/30p isn’t a popular item because there’s nothing really out there that supports it — it’s not a Blu-ray format, not a DVD format, etc. Maybe a possibility online… I have a few 1080/30p presets I created for one thing or another at some point in the past.

And to answer your other question, yes, you can output 1080/30p at 1080/60i an it’ll look proper. Many if not most modern televisions will, in fact, output it as 1080/30p, in fact.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

It is “that time of year”, at least based on the Vegas 10 release.

They definitely have a schedule, and like many companies, once per year or so makes sense. But particularly for Pro-Level SW, since most of the sales are upgrades, this is likely to remain a regular thing.

Lots of reasons for that, other than just the cash. On the surface, it’s the fact that everyone else does it, so you have to as well, just to remain relevant. I mentioned some months ago that I thought 2011 was the critical year for full GPU acceleration in NLEs, and it looks like Vegas isn’t going to disappoint here. If they don’t do it, they’re falling behind, critically so in terms of raw performance

Another big reason is simply modern software development methodologies such as Agile/Scrum… the goal becomes a series of attainable milestones, not some grand vision that could easily slip by months or even years.

I do hope the big featured BLU-RAY on the page isn’t just Sony being Sony about BD, but maybe a real DVDA upgrade.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Al Bergstein] “Lastly, the world of video editing, because of Apple’s dominance, is very Mac centric. Do not dismiss getting a Mac, if you want to break into this field, but to professionally edit on a Mac, you really need a MacPro, the most expensive machine out there. The other machines are not really able to keep up, (I own a state of the art 2009 laptop, and it is dismally slow at rendering or transcoding),though the latest top of the line Mac laptops can do the job, but those too, are very expensive. And never, ever be dismissive about the Mac to these folks, they are a religious cult that cannot be swayed in their belief that Apple is superior to Windows in every conceivable way. Many of them have never used Windows 7, but why should I be surprised…(G).”

I might wait on that a bit, at least before dropping five-grand or more on a MacPro. Specifically, where in the world is Apple actually going with this all. A year ago, everything Al said here was not only true, from the MacHead prespective, but in general, yeah — the whole Apple ecosystem was very much a leading one in pro video, a must-have in some circles.

But this latest set of moves suggests things may be changing. They haven’t updated the MacPro in over a year. Will there be another MacPro? At present, Apple’s pro market has been slowly shrinking, while their consumer market is growing, fast, as iMacs and iBooks enjoy the iOS coat-tail effect (I personally know two individuals who traded in their PCs for Apple Mac PCs, once they fell in love with the iPhone).

They’ve turned FCP Pro from a dated but professional application into a prosumer (at best) app with a few features (64-bit, better multithreading, 4K support) that FCP 7 users really want, everyone on pretty much every other platform already has, and heck, stuff that was in Vegas back in 2008 and 2009.

And they’ve also, apparently, killed the other suite tools: Color, DVD Studio Pro (which was never updated for Blu-ray, if that’s important to you), and SoundTrack Pro. Motion and Compressor live on, as separate apps, for now.

Of some concern to larger scale FCP houses, Apple’s also discontinued Final Cut Server and some other pro-level tools.

Another thing: these are only available in the Mac App Store. And in a very consumery way. Most professional applications are sold primarily as upgrades for existing users, not so much new users. There are no upgrades in the App Store, at least not to date. So at least at this point, it looks as if every FCP seat will be full price going forward. FCP X is officially the upgrade not only for Final Cut Pro 7, but Final Cut Express… and may favor the latter’s typical use more than the former’s.

And, as everyone knows, Apple’s in transition, with SJ taking a step back from daily leadership. My suspicion — this was planned some time ago, in order to make everything as smooth as possible, and this step back from the pro market is very intentional, not some last minute stumble by Jobs to be corrected by the new guy. But only time will tell.

Of course, it’s ALWAYS best to wait on buying into technology into you absolutely need it. If an FCP rig is needed today for real work reasons, buy it — assuming that work is sufficient to pay it down with in the year (Section 179 for taxes, etc). If not, doesn’t hurt to wait… particularly since it’s entirely unknown just where Apple’s going. And if they really are leaving the pro market behind, since Apple’s the only official Mac PC vendor, hardware will be left behind, regardless of the existing Apple-friendly video industry.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

What Stephen said… and also, check your memory use during this. Most causes for flakey behavior are resource edge conditions: Vegas running out of disc space or memory, but not realizing it.

I agree that 150 text events isn’t much of a big deal, but it could depend on the number of fonts and other things Vegas has decided it must keep open, in RAM, all at once. Also, check your RAM Preview setting… that could contribute, since that memory is statically allocated and not available for other things during editing.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

AVC in an AVI wrapper is usually a bad idea for editing, anyway. If it were my problem, I’d drop the original into VLC or YAMB, re-mux to an MPEG-4 or MPEG-2 TS file wrapper, and try that in Vegas. If it’s ordinary everyday AVC, that should be just dandy.

One caveat — MPEG-2 TS and MPEG-4 are handled very differently in Vegas (and most other systems). So I’d check the audio, and re-mux to MP4 if I see AAC audio there, or to TS if I see AC-3 audio there. I don’t think Vegas will get the audio right if, for example, you try a TS file/stream with AAC audio in it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

In fact, Vegas won’t allow you to overwrite any file that’s actually in your project… I ran into this the other day.

It sure sounds like Quicktime is messed on this PC. Try re-installing it, see what happens.

-Dave