Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
-
While you can freely mix any kind of video resolution/media type/frame rate in Vegas, the end result can only be one of those. So if you render to 24p, Vegas is going to have to resample the 30p video to 24p. Same problem if you render at 30p.
If it were me, I’d re-shoot the comparison with the Canon T3i set at 30p, or the Sony set at 24p. That way, you can have a head-to-head comparison with the Sony.
-Dave
-
I have an 8TB Drobo as my “vault” drive. Not usually used for rendering, but very handy for storing all the things I might otherwise archive. This is a second-gen model, so it’s been in use for some years now.
Stephen’s right, they aren’t fast. Part of that’s the interface… this one is on Firewire 800. And if you haven’t tried to tweak a FW800 interface to actually run at 800Mb/s on Windows 7, you haven’t mastered the art of Stupid Windows Tricks. But that does at least push it nearly twice the speed you’ll see with USB.
Supposedly, the newer Drobos are a bit faster, and run on better interfaces, like GigE and SATA. In practice, every RAID with redundancy is going to write slower and seek slower. Some do read faster, but that’s very much not the point of the Drobo.
The actual point of the Drobo is data security. That’s not a substitute for a backup, but it can save you from having to restore data in the event of a drive failure. Curiously, I had one of those drive failures on Sunday… one 2TB drive failed. I dropped a new one in there on Monday, and it should be back up to RAID mode in a 2-3 days. But even now, nothing’s lost (newer models have the option of two drive redundancy).
For regular work, I use non-RAID SATA drives… large enough, and fast enough. Just be sure to run backups regularly. Also, I don’t run them into the ground… after a couple of years, I clone in a new drive and relegate the old ones (still good, of course) as project drive. I have a drive bay, which lets you use SATA drives like cartridges, and devote a whole drive to any major project, which then serves as a full project backup once the project is done. The project originals and results will also be on BD-R, and on the Drobo. Particularly in the post-tape days, you want everything in multiple locations ASAP.
-Dave
-
No idea what you’re talking about here. There is no option of “upgrading memory” in Vegas. Your PC is given the upgraded memory, and as long as the PC recognizes the upgrade, Windows will automatically use it. Vegas allocates memory as it needs it, up to the limits of the program.
There are some limits on some of the things you can set in Vegas, like RAM preview, but you really don’t want to setting a huge value for RAM preview on a system with such a small (well, you’re talking to a guy with a 16GB RAM system on 64-bit Windows 7) amount of memory. There’s nothing you need to adjust in Vegas to use additional amounts of memory at 2.5GB.
Given your memory size, you’re very likely running a 32-bit operating system. No conventional 32-bit application, including Vegas, will use more than 2GB of memory on its own. Not really a concern if you have only 2.5GB, since your operating system and other overhead will find plenty to do with the additional 512MB.
-Dave
-
[James Reeve] “So may I just clarify something? One can store anything on a DVD, even HD footage at very high resolution (eg. 1920×1080). The problem is that standard DVD players can’t play it, right?
“That is correct. A DVD is always a data disc. There are a few formats — specific collections of directories and files, which go on a DVD in such a way that appliance-type devices understand them. These including things like DVD-Video and DVD-Audio. Most Blu-ray players understand one additional format, the AVCHD DVD, which is “HD Video shot on camcorder”, at least originally (of course, it’s also used on memory cards today).
So as I mentioned, the video and audio formats for DVD players are fixed in stone. If you want to make a DVD that plays on a regular DVD player, that’s what you create: MPEG-2 at 720×480 or 352×480, or MPEG-1 352×240, 60i or 24p, or 720×576 or 352 x 576 in MPEG-2, 352×288 in MPEG-1, 50i. Those are representations of standard definition, and the only thing conventional DVD players will ever play as a standard. Period. Anything even slightly higher resolution is not a DVD standard.
This is exactly why the Blu-ray standard was created — we needed a disc format for HD. DVD is and always will be SD. No loopholes, period.
-Dave
-
If you need AnyDVD to play a Blu-ray that you burned on the same PC (that seems to be what you’re saying), that’s total insanity on that PC. All AnyDVD does it remove copy protection, which you can’t apply anyway using Vegas to burn BDs. I have made dozens of BDs, fully authored BDMVs, and never had any problem with them in any player I’ve tried.
PCs aside, the CD manufacturers really did have a ton of warning about BD-R and BD-RE before they went to market. In fact, both formats actually existed, more or less, long before the final Blu-ray spec existed. The same basic disc (different logical layer) is used in Sony’s disc-based XDCAM camcorders. Prototypes of the disc were being shown and discussed with manufacturers as far back as 2000. And they also had a BD-RE recording in a Japanese satellite box, on sales to consumers in 2003, the Sony BDZ-S77 (no pre-recorded disc, no copy protection, no support for AVC or many other media types, but it was a Blu-ray disc). It also used a custom Blu-ray file system, BDFS, rather than UDF 2.5, which was part of the first full standard in 2006.
What you’re probably thinking of is BDAV vs. BDMV support. The original 2002 BD-RE format only defined BDAV, which is a linear A/V file without menus… that’s the format you get if you burn a BD directly from the Vegas timeline. The full Blu-ray 1.0 spec also defined BDMV, which is the Blu-ray with menus, etc. spec. The original BD-R and BD-RE specs didn’t including BDMV… though of course, you can write any format on a BDMV. But it’s certainly possible for a very early player to not have considered that a BDMV structure might be on a BD-R or BD-RE, even though BD-R and BD-RE were well defined before Blu-ray launched in 2006.
It’s not the Blu-ray spec that was missing, but the BD-R and BD-RE specs. You have to go to the third revision of BD-RE or second revision of the BD-R spec to find BDMV use fully documented. These specs were released in September of 2006, three months after the official Blu-ray launch.
This is different than Blu-ray player profiles. There have been several changes/additions to the Blu-ray specs since launch. Profile 1.0, the “Grace Period” profile is what launched in June of 2006… called Grace Period because it had to be phased out. Profile 1.1, “Bonus View” is currently the minimum spec.. this added picture-in-picture support and certain local memory requirements. Profile 2.0 upped the local memory minimums and also required internet connectivity. Profile 3.0 is a standard to enable audio-only players for music-only Blu-rays. Unlike DVD-Audio, Blu-ray audio isn’t a totally different thing… any Blu-ray player can play an audio disc. Profile 5.0 is the “3D” spec, also mandates pretty much everything in 2.0, and as well a double-speed drive.
And they’re still evolving it. The BDXL disc is out.. that’s 100GB or 128GB (BD-RE 4.0 spec, BD-R 3.0 spec), but it doesn’t work in existing drives. Yet. Sony’s got a new encoding scheme that puts 33GB per layer on any Blu-ray, and they claim it’s only a firmware upgrade… great, if you have supported upgrade-able firmware. Which is why I chose a PS3 as my BD player… they’ve already update it to 1.1, 2.0, and 5.0 specs.
-Dave
-
Blu-ray drives/players should play DVDs. But do keep in mind, it’s not a required part of the Blu-ray spec. As with the CD and DVD formats, they’re kept as separate specs.
Sometimes the incompatibility is for CD-R/DVD-R or RW only. Some early DVD players, and in particular, computer drives, did the CD support on the cheap. They were built with just the red laser, which worked for regular CDs. But the organic dyes used in CD-R didn’t work.
I heard tell of some BD-R drives that tried the same game with DVD support, but I don’t know for a fact if these made it to market or not. My Philips BD-R drive has never had a problem with DVD or DVD-R.
And of course, the same issues can technically apply to any reader… PCs or STBs alike.
Of course, in the CD to DVD transition, many early DVD players had other, even stupider issues. There was a software bug in the early Philips reference platform, which got copied into a considerable number of DVD players, that affected DVD-RW and sometimes DVD-R, depending on how good or bad the player was. Normal DVDs have about 80% reflectance. DVD-R is supposed to be 40-50% or so, while DVD-RW is more like 25% maximum. But the inner layer on a DVD9 is also around 25% reflectance, maybe even a bit lower.
So anyway, this bug had the player just kick into double-layer mode if it was a low reflectance DVD. So it failed on DVD-RW, and possible DVD-R, for really stupid reasons. Though curiously, my *1998* Pioneer DVD player worked just dandy with DVD-R and RW. Pioneer was one of the early developers of DVD, and didn’t use the Philips reference code.
These days, of course, you can easily get a BD player that supports regular software updates. Convincing most CE companies to actually keep supporting something they’ve already shipped is another story.
-Dave
-
Sure sounds like the error message is due to your selecting a Blu-ray on DVD option, rather than real Blu-ray disc. That doesn’t make sense, since you’d never fit 90 minutes of MPEG-2 in HD on a DVD, but that’s what the message says to me.
While Vegas doesn’t follow the AVCHD disc spec for its Blu-ray on DVD mode, it’s close. Part of that is restricting all video to under 18Mb/s, since a Blu-ray drive is only guaranteed to be a 2x DVD drive… so, you want about twice the 9Mb/s DVD rate as a maximum speed.
Of course, DVDA only re-compresses assets it thinks it needs to. You have set an 18Mb/s cap, which should be fine for DVD if you want the recompression (at least under the AVCHD standard… except of course, AVCHD doesn’t actually support MPEG-2, only AVC, for high def on a standard DVD), but it makes more sense to create the proper video in the first place. And if you’re burning to a real BD, you can handle the 25Mb/s, 28Mb/s, or up to around 50Mb/s.
As for the warning about 28Mb/s on a “25Mb/s” stream… you probably chose the Blu-ray 25Mb/s template, right. That should be creating variable bitrate video… that’s what you want on any DVD or Blu-ray, to optimize performance, rather than the fixed rates you’re used to from HDV and other tape formats, in that case you’re matching directly to tape speed, so the video must exactly match.
-Dave
-
[Stephen Mann] “For the OP, here is the link to the Boris recommended video cards:
https://www.borisfx.com/sony/bccsvp/Graphics-Cards.php“Oh, hey… I didn’t look at those closely, either. But that list is like years and years out of date. The top end nVidia card on the list is the 8800. My 8800GT was one of the later in the series, and it came out in 2007. You’d kind of hope they would update this at least yearly.
I’m not certain you can still buy any card on that list.-Dave
-
[Stephen Mann] “Personally, and this is just me, I avoid ATI because of driver issues that I have personally experienced.
“I’ve flip-flopped a few times. Way back when, you had to get a Matrox card if you ran a hires screen… nVidia, ATi, and some of the earlier companies just had crap video DACs, in the days of analog.
Then we got to the start of 3D acceleration. I had a nVidia RIVA128 card, their second generation, and it was good. For awhile. But again, DAC issues.. and it got worse.
Replaced that with an ATi, and I did ATi for a generation or two more, because they had finally done high quality output. But, like you, I ran into insurmountable driver issues… I think they had problems with memory over a GB or two, and this spanned at least two generations of cards. So I went to nVidia, where I remain.
And my 8800GT is getting long in the tooth — very hot for the performance it delivers, there are much better graphics cards for not all that much money. But I don’t have a specific direction for myself, so it’s hard to recommend a specific board to others. But certainly, for me, a list from Boris for BCC7 would be a great place to start.
[Stephen Mann] “[Dave Haynie] “The main reason Sony hasn’t integrated this for other kinds of acceleration, I believe, is that it’s a very big job. You’re not just re-designing the video decoding, rendering engine, and other internals around GPGPU, you’re adding this to any non-trivial plug-in, or the effect is muted.”
I’ve essentially been saying this for a while. As I see it, the architecture of Vegas would take more time to prepare a frame for the display GPU to finish processing than just doing it all in the CPU in the first place. If it were easy, SCS would have done it a long time ago.”
That’s demonstrably untrue. Take AVC decoding, for example. Using the GPU in the frame buffer, my system can decode 14 AVC frames in less time than it takes to decode two on the CPU alone. And there are existence proofs — Adobe, in particular, it already doing this. And there’s nothing in Premiere Pro that would suggest it’s otherwise limited because of this, versus Vegas.
No, it’s not easy. But I also disagree about the assertion that “it would have been done long ago”. GPGPU as a general purpose thing has only really become viable in 2011. Some companies saw this coming, but even with those out, Adobe and Grass Valley at least, they’re CUDA based. They’ll eventually have to re-work it for OpenCL. And those are applications release in the first half of 2011, which means they planned for this in early 2010. That was about the first time any major NLE company could have really started thinking about this as a viable next move.
And Sony looked at it, for sure… thus, the ever-so-slightly accelerated AVC rendering on GPGPU equipped systems. But they decided 3D support, another very large project, was more important. For new NLE features, while there are certainly multiple programmers at each company, there’s always going to be a priority list.
I’m not claiming Vegas 11 will have general GPU acceleration. I am absolutely certain it can be done, and will provide similar performance enhancements as those seen in Premiere Pro. I also believe that Sony will be at a significant competitive disadvantage if they don’t extend Vegas to use more GPGPU computing. And on the other hand, given their use of OpenCL in 10e (the first use of OpenCL on the PC platform in an NLE that I know of), they could actually be leading on this. I think it’s highly unlikely that they spent the effort to learn CUDA, then OpenCL, and apply it only for the slight gains they’re showing the current OpenCL encoder.
Even for rendering, Sony’s only taken baby steps here. MainConcept’s performance charts on their (separate) CUDA and OpenCL AVC encoders are showing a better than 3x performance boost, over CPU-only. See here: https://www.mainconcept.com/fileadmin/user_upload/download/product_sheets/CUDA-Sheets_06-2010.pdf and here: https://www.mainconcept.com/fileadmin/user_upload/download/product_sheets/ATI_Speed_Results.pdf. Now, sure, you’d expect that just maybe, a company concerned just with encoding might do a little better than Sony, with many irons in the fire. But this is a place to look, to see the kind of results from programmers who have really studied the GPGPU model.
-Dave
-
Yeah, I did the whole series of things. I made SVCDs and, after about a week of that, Super SVCDs (my early Pioneer DVD player handled pretty much anything you could throw at it), before I could afford a DVD drive and media.
Before Blu-ray, I had a red-laser DVD player that did either DivX-HD or WMV/HD discs. However, it auto-recognized the WMV/HD disc, and supported hybrid WMV/HD and DVD discs (it would actually pop up with a menu, asking which one you wanted to play).
A WMV/HD disc was authored in Windows Media 9 and Window Audio, which is no problem. However, the menus and all were done in HTML and JavaScript… and there was no authoring tool available. And the docs were sketchy. So I did a bunch of these, but didn’t get too crazy with the user interface.
By comparison to any of these, AVCHD is well supported. Probably not 100% across Blu-ray players, but then again, neither are BD-Rs. You will find some Blu-ray players that refuse to play BD-R/BDMV discs. AVCHD has very good support because it’s a camcorder format, and of course, because many of the major BD brands are made by camcorder companies (Sony, Panasonic). Well, or the Chinese, who usually try to support whatever format pirates^H^H^H^H^H^H individual are likely to want for their own use (yeah, Chinese piracy is a big problem).
You can find a list here: https://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers?DVDname=&Submit=Search&Search=Search&bd=1&orderby=Name&hits=50. Unfortunately, many of the players listed haven’t been tested with BD-R media, and they’re not yet testing AVCHD-on-DVD compatibility yet. Nothing wrong with BD-R if you need the space… I have done a number of long videos (weddings, plays) on BD, with great success. But I don’t have a worry about AVCHD for smaller things… short videos, high definition music discs (I do legal downloads of better-than-CD quality music from HD Tracks, and put this on AVCHD discs at 96/24 or 192/24).
-Dave