[Dave Haynie]

It’s all about keeping the CPU busy. If you allocate two much memory, you get memory faults and paging in the virtual memory system. Each rendering thread is going to take memory, and of course, the RAM preview buffer is by all accounts a static allocation only ever used for RAM preview (you’d think, during rendering, this could be de-allocated or re-purposed, since it’s a big waste, but that’s not what Vegas does).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

MacOS PCs may be disadvantaged versus Windows PC, simply because Apple is anti-Blu-ray (they want your video sold on iTunes, only) and the MacOS is a relatively small market. They’re kind of anti-DVD these days, too, having pretty much eliminated the full featured DVD tools recently, replacing them with a very rudimentary DVD function in FCP X.

But there’s Blu-ray authoring and there’s Blu-ray authoring. There are many different solutions for BDMV (HDMV) authoring. Like DVD tools, most of these layer some kind of abstraction on the Blu-ray, so while you can’t necessarily access all features, they are true Blu-ray authoring tools. A BDMV is very much like a DVD, though certainly with more features.

On the Mac, you can use Adobe’s Encore to author BDMV projects. That’s not sold stand-alone, so you need the whole CS5 suite, but given the way FCP X has gone, many Mac users are crossgrading anyway. On Windows, as well as Adobe, there’s Rovi’s DVDit Pro HD and Sony’s DVD Architect.

DVD Architect supports BDMV basically just as high resolution DVD… there’s not much in the way of additional features, other than some DVD limits removed. But on the other hand, if you author a Blu-ray in DVD Architect, it’s usually take only a few minutes to save off a DVD version of that project. So for small production, that’s probably preferable to spending a week or two on an over-the-top Blu-ray.

On the other hand, to create extremely complex BDs, you have the option of authoring a BDJ (Blu-ray Disc Java) disc. I don’t know of any BDJ tools that won’t break the bank… Sony’s Blu-print costs more than any two of my cars (about $50,000)… Rovi’s Scenarist BD not far behind at $35,000.

There’s no guarantee that any given BD player will play a BDMV disc on BD-R or BD-RE, or one without AACS copy protection. In theory, unlike DVD, the copy protection is mandatory, and as usual, the Blu-ray spec did require support of BD-R or BD-RE in stand-alone players. A few may play another format, BDAV (a single video file on BD, no menus… some NLEs can burn BDAV directly from their timelines) but refuse to play BDMV. In short, SNAFU as usual.

With that said, Blu-ray is by far the best digital video format around, at least this week. Most online “HD” is really piss poor quality by comparison. Yeah, I know that the Apple spin on digital media is that less is ok, but NOW is important (eg, quality can suck as long as I get it now). Not a big fan of that… I work too hard to deliver top quality video.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You can always just drop some HD files on a DVD. No menus, unless you include some kind of application. It’s quite possible to hack something up in HTML that’ll launch your video file, then include some auto boot stuff to automatically run under Windows. And possibly a different set of these for MacOS or Linux or any other OS you want. And, needless to say, this will only play in a PC.

Another alternative is to author an AVCHD disc. AVCHD is the common format used for Flash memory and DVD camcorders, of course, but it’s actually a derivative of Blu-ray. The video has to be AVC (18Mb/s for less), the audio has to be AC-3. I haven’t run into any sophisticated authoring tools for AVCHD, though Nero’s disc burning suite contains a very rudimentary one. You can play around with the free MultiAVCHD application if you just want to get HD video on a DVD.

The advantage to this is that these will play on most Blu-ray players, as well as PCs with AVCHD or Blu-ray player software. For those that don’t, there’s of course an MPEG-2 transport stream file (m2ts) with the audio and video multiplexed, which most modern OSs play.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yup.. those are IPS, pretty nice. I didn’t mention the Adobe RGB color space in my long article. Adobe created their own color space largely to deal with photo printing. Most inkjet printers use CMYK (K = black) printing, and these days, several levels of C, M, even Y sometimes. The basic idea is that printers deliver a wider color space than the sRGB color space prevalent in much of the computer industry.

John’s monitors cover 98% of the Adobe RGB color space. Adobe RGB covers about 94% of the NTSC color space. Short answer here: very good color for a monitor.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

While quality tends to scale with price, it’s not always an absolute.

I don’t have specific models to recommend, but some caveats. For one, realize that most of the lower cost monitors are built from digital television LCD panels. The advantage is obvious: you’re going to edit video on the same kind of device that people will view it on.

The disadvantages not so obvious… these things are kind of bad for video. The good news is that all modern panels are plenty fast enough even for 60p video; many are actually refreshed at 120p or even 240p (I’m kind of skeptical on 240p being a real refresh rate rather than a marketing refresh rate). The average panel is based on TN (twisted nematic) LCD technology, which is, unfortunately, the worst kind. The native contrast ratio of the panel may only be in the 800:1 to 1000:1 range, you may find a real color range of only 6 bits per pixel, and colors may vary greatly from one panel to the next, or even over time and temperature.

You can tell the monitor panel was designed for television if the resolution is 1920×1080. There’s a story here. When HDTV was being created, all the specs being agreed upon, there were two powerful camps involved: the film industry and the computer industry. The film people wanted a 2:1 aspect ratio set as the HDTV standard; the computer industry, happy enough with 4:3 as it was, wanted 16:10. So they agreed on 16:9 as the compromise for HDTV, since even back then, everyone talked about “digital convergence”. Naturally, the PC industry went right on to make 16:10 displays anyway.. for awhile. Eventually, though, the economic weight of consumer electronics had everyone go to the 16:9 format for all cheap displays, simply because the PC and the TV display had pretty much become the same thing. This is slightly annoying, though, if you had 1600×1200 screens in the analog world… one reason I bought early enough to get 1920×1200 for my displays.

You can pretty easily spot a TN display… the display fades or complete disappears as you try to view it from off-center. The other display technologies I’ll mention can pretty much be viewed on-edge without losing brightness. This is actually not that big of a deal when you’re talking about monitors, since you nearly always view straight on, but it’s something to mention.

Some of that’s mitigated, for video, by “dynamic contrast”… the monitor isn’t just varying the LCD pixels, but zone-based backlighting (so-called LED monitors), where the backlight is also used dynamically, in concert with the LCD pixels. This is actually pretty good for video, totally useless for computer-type information displays.

I strongly recommend MVA/PVA (or one of the other variations of “Vertical Alignment” panels), or IPS (and the other variations of in-plance switching panels). There are just other ways of making an LCD panel, but they have superior characteristics. MVA and its ilk delivers at 8-bit color, and that color is far more stable. You can look up detailed reviews on most monitors, and a good review will give that monitor’s gamut as a precentage of the sRGB (standard computer color space) or NTSC color space covered.

Note: the NTSC color space is NOT the gamut of NTSC broadcast television.. it’s an estimate of the range all colors seen by the average human… it’s the widest color space typically quoted. sRGB covers about 72% of the NTSC color space, most CRTs and TVs cover about 70% of the NTSC color space (for more than you could possibly want to know about color in film and video, go here: https://www.theasc.com/magazine/jan05/conundrum/page1.html).

Probably the overall best is IPS, and as a result, it’s kind of squeezed MVA out of the market (I’m sitting in front of two 1920×1280 MVA monitors — love ’em). When I bought my monitors, IPS displays in this size were usually around $800, and they had this weird motion effect that made them, IMHO, unusable for video (it’s the Photo editing world that first pushed for IPS, since you can actually get IPS monitors with deep, better-than-CRT color gamut and resolution… for a price). They seem to have fixed that, and the prices have fallen.

And you can trust your eyes, too… kind of. No one’s going to have their monitors calibrated in the average store, but you can at least play around with the settings. Bring some reference images, some video, etc. and ensure that the display looks good, before you buy.

As for specific models, recommendations are hard, because what we like on-screen can be pretty personal. Some people get angry over one thing I don’t care about.. for example, the Westinghouse monitors I have got bad reviews because the controls are terrible. And they are some of the worst-designed controls ever… but how often do I need them? But if that were important to you, you’d hate these monitors. I bought for the MVA panel, and the fact I could hook HDMI, YPrPb, Y/C, or CVBS directly to the monitors… every camcorder I had ever owned could be directly connected, several even at once 🙂

I’d at least take a look at the ASUS ML249H. That’s an MVA panel, only 1920×1080, with dynamic LED backlighting, and you can find these for $199. LG and Viewsonic both have IPS displays in the $200-$300 range… I might check out the LG IPS231P too. In general, you can get a better color gamut with LED backlight rather than CCFL, not to mention the potential for dynamic backlighting on video and other natural images.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Looked up your camera… it does 1080/50p. That is an advanced format, and pretty gnarly to decode. To put reference on it, I have an AMD 1090T system, that’s a 6-core CPU at 3.2GHz. I can play back 1080/60p on some players, but even at 60-70% of all six CPU cores, the VLC player can’t keep up. You can’t even come close to decoding that, in realtime, on a 2-core system, not even on many 4-core systems, using only the CPU.

The other possible weirdness here: Sony’s officially supporting the new AVCHD 2.0 format with this new camcorder. My Panasonic TM700 did this video type and bitrate well over a year ago, but it didn’t formalize the AVCHD 2.0 specs. I’m not sure what, if anything, actually changed in the AVCHD 2.0 bitstream, but it’s at least technically possible that Vegas is choking on it. I have not seen any indication that Sony’s addressed AVCHD 2.0 per se in Vegas 10, and Vegas 9 was EOLed before the spec was released. Using the YAMB conversion I suggested will also fix that possibility. VLC can also do non-destructive media container conversion for you.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

What program from 2011? You said you can’t use Vegas 10 (released in 2010, in fact), but were struggling to get Vegas 7 to work. That’s the premise of your post, here… if you’re actually using Vegas 10 now, maybe you have a different set of problems. Maybe not.

I can attest that I have editing 100’s of hours of AVCHD and other AVC encapsulations in Vegas 9 and Vegas 10, and they’re perfectly usable programs. On a good desktop PC (or very good laptop), you probably won’t run into speed limitations on basic editing of 1080/24p, 1080/60i, or 720/60p video. Some new camcorders do shoot 1080/60p.. you should expect that to be difficult to edit directly on any PC in any program that doesn’t use proxy editing.

If the program (either Vegas 10 or Vegas 7) is crashing on your video, it absolutely could be a bug in the program or the camcorder’s output. Yeah, you’d rather hope that Sony tested on Sony, I can’t answer for that. What I can absolutely verify is that some manufacturers have released corrupted bitsreams in the past. My second AVC camcorder, back when I was still playing around with the format, was a Sanyo Xacti FH-1. This was a tiny, cheap, AVC camcorder that was oddly the first in the country to do 1080/60p for consumers. They didn’t use AVCHD (AVC in a Blu-ray-style disc structure and MPEG-2 transport stream wrapper), they used the MPEG-4 wrapper instead. And buggered it up with negative time codes. Which crashed Vegas 9, every time.

And that’s not a big in Vegas. It’s nice if you NLE doesn’t crash on errors, better still if it indicated where the bug is in the file, but IMHO, only if that doesn’t slow down normal operation. When there is a big in the format, the behavior of any NLE is random — no good way to predict it.

The way I worked around this was originally Cineform. But at one point, I was editing two or more soccer games a week, and didn’t really have much editing to do… so the time to convert to Cineform was annoying, not to mention the dramatic size of 2.5-4 hours of Cineform every week. I knew, from the time code error message (from another tool) that the error was in the MPEG-4 wrapper, so I re-multiplexed the video. And that worked just dandy… Vegas then took the MPEG-4 without a care.

You could try that. It’s not likely to help much in Vegas 7, but for Vegas 9 or 10, it does work around some camcorder bugs. Download the free program YAMB (https://yamb.unite-video.com), install, and try converting a .m2ts file to a .mp4 file… should probably work ok. If that makes your AVC files hold together in Vegas, you have very likely just confirmed a bug in the camera’s bitstream creation software. Re-muxing doesn’t change your video at all, it just strips to an AVC elemental stream, then puts it back together in a different A/V multiplex.

Once I determined this was the problem with the Sanyo, I just used YAMB to import (copy) from the SDHC card… no much different than a straight copy.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

There’s always one bottleneck in any render. The value of looking for 95-100% CPU is because the CPU ought to be your bottleneck. At least, as long as you’re using normal video files (not some crazy number of RAW files or something that really demand a high-end SAN on Infiniband or some-such), with or without plug-ins, the act of rendering something like HDV or AVC to any output format is, at best, going to show a CPU bottleneck. On any CPU ever made.

If you don’t see 90-100% CPU, there’s something in the system that can probably be fixed, for free. The only way to go faster when you see nearly 100% CPU is, as you say, a faster CPU. But once you add that faster CPU, you should still see near 100% CPU.

The reason is simple: every other thing in the system will only be a bottleneck if not optimized. For example, hard disc. Typical video runs 24Mb/s for AVC, 25Mb/s for HDV or DV, 28Mb/s for AVCHD 2.0 compliant 1080/60p, 35-50Mb/s for some pro or digital still camera formats, 100Mb/s for Cineform, 144Mb/s for DNxHD, and, well, you probably don’t run into higher bitrates on a regular basis.

A plain old fairly modern hard drive ought to deliver at least 50MB/s, and probably more like 100MB/s… that’s an order of magnitude faster than your video input. You get into trouble if you’re reading too many files at once from the same drive — not because the drive’s too slow per se, but because the drive is thrashing (unfortunately, Vegas doesn’t let you set disc buffer sizes to help minimize this). Easy solution: use other drives. Your USB 2.0 drives, your C: drive, etc. Direct output to a flash drive, even. Pretty easy to solve… and yeah, I ran into this myself, with only one stream of HDV, but many, many 6-8Mpixel photos, on a project many moons ago. Shuffling assets between two drives, and rendering to my desktop, solved the problem completely.

Adding plug-ins only increases the appetite for CPU. The only big problem is that you have to watch for the occasional plug-in that might be single threaded.

Video decoding can also be very CPU intensive… a very fast modern PC is lucky to be able to decode two or three AVCHD streams in realtime. Naturally, when a video editor is rendering, that’s just one piece of the whole compositing puzzle. So actually, additional AVC layers in general may slow down your overall render, but push it even more toward the CPU bottleneck. You can probably speed things up a bit rendering out AVCHD files to some intermediate format (at least until you make HDD the bottleneck), or rendering out pieces of a project as subprojects. I’ve had a few 1-3 minute animations that technically take hours each to fully render, but the top level will rendering under 1/2 hour (most of that’s due to compositing layers — the CPU is pegged, even with a few short raw video tracks here and there).

Modern Intel CPUs have hyperthreading — each CPU core can appear to the system as two CPUs, with the provision that each pair is going to be locked to the same thread. Ideally, this makes things faster. And you might expect that with video rendering, given that much of the inner loop for things like AVC and MPEG output fit entirely in cache, with both register sets in a pair can access without thrashing. Data, on the other hand, has to move faster. Overloading a CPU due to cache thrashing in hyperthreading mode probably still looks like the CPU being pegged — if I had that kind of CPU (Intel i7 these days for sure), I’d do some benchmarks with Vegas to see which mode really produces the faster render.

And there’s some indication that a slow GPU can become a bottleneck for Sony AVC output. If so, this is easily fixed by editing the output preset to run on the CPU only, not the GPU.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

That’s a real good point — the web is here. And, unlike 15 years ago when I first built a web site for a wedding I had shot, the average person these days looks at video online regularly. I had a same-day edit of the ceremony from the last wedding I shot online a few hours after the wedding ended.

So one can’t simply presume that the photos are of paramount importance, video relegated to a soon-to-be dusty DVD/BD that no one will see. And the ultimate arbiter of this is the couple. This is something to discretely bring up with them, when discussimg their goals for the finished video.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If your overall CPU usage drops much below 90-95%, you have a problem. Make sure you’re looking at total system performance, since Vegas breaks things up into different processes during render, not just threads.

I can believe Premiere CS5.5 might be a bit faster. In an AVCHD to DV/MPEG-2 render, assuming no effetcs, the most CPU intensive part of the rendering pipeline will be the AVCHD decode. And the latest Premiere is probably using the GPU to do that decode, Vegas is not.

But such a low CPU use should be a big red flag. And while it’s true that a faster CPU will be faster for siure, its not true that 20% of a faster CPU will be faster than 90-100% of what you have right now.

I would double check that I’m not using any plug-ins, first of all. Try a braand new Vegas session, drop in your AVCHD and render to DVD, changing nothing. Make sure you have Vegas set to use multiple rendering threads, and that you have enough RAM for this — no disc thrashing for VM, etc. Make sure your’re rendering to the normal MainConcept MPEG CODEC, and no possible other weirdness, from CODEC packs or other evils that might mess with Vegas.

-Dave