[Dave Haynie]

Older Cineform files work just fine in Vegas 10, once you update the Cineform CODEC. The file format hasn’t changed, and if anything (as is typical with these sort of things), newer versions may produce better results. But the datastream format is fixed (well, hopefully).

Vegas 10 added an interface to directly communicate with the Cineform private APIs, rather than use VfW/DirectShow as they had in the past. Presumably Vegas gains something from this. But unfortunately, they didn’t make this a clean upgrade — no falling back to the old APIs if the new ones aren’t there. Bad policy.

The other big peeve I had with Vegas 10 was that, even after I spent that extra $100 to upgrade Cineform, Vegas crashed on any HD Cineform render, every time, same place, regardless of the file format. Unacceptable. They fixed that one, at least, in 10d. It was Vegas’s problem; 9e or whatever I have here as Vegas 9 worked with both old and new versions of Cineform, read and write.

In general, software upgrades should follow the Hippocratic Corpus and “Primum non nocere”… first, do no harm. Vegas 10 failed on this with Cineform on several levels. But, as long as you can afford the upgrade, it seems to be fixed.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You can’t burn an HD video in the DVD-Video format on DVD. But there are other data formats to use. The best supported is the AVCHD format; virtually every Blu-ray player will support AVCHD on DVD5 or DVD9.

The most immediate problem is that you can’t make an AVCHD using DVD Architect. DVD Architect will burn a full Blu-ray to DVD if it’s short enough, but most DVD players will not play a BDMV composition on DVD. No idea why, but they will not.

There are limits on AVCHD. For one, the video has to be in AVC… you probably want that anyway, but Blu-ray allows VC-1 or MPEG-2 as well (DVDA only supports AVC and VC-1). To be in spec, AVC for AVCHD discs must be rendered at 18Mb/s or less… Blu-ray supports something like 40Mb/s. This should not be an issue, particularly given a camera that records at a peak of 24Mb/s. But it’s something to know, and potentially a quality issue, should you start with higher quality material.

Like DVD, AVCHD requires the UDF 2.5 or 2.6 file system, unlike the 1.x file system used on DVD. Not a big issue, but this does mean that DVD players and older PCs can’t read AVCHD discs (not that DVD players know what to do with AVC video files, anyway).

There’s a handy open source program called MultiAVCHD that can build AVCHD disc structures from properly rendered AVC and AC-3 files.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Actually, DVD is 720×576 PAL, 720×480 NTSC, max, whether 4:3 or 16:9. You might do well to start a PAL project at 1024×576 if you’re dealing with the world of square pixels and HD, since few modern video formats support rectangular pixels. But the resulting MPEG-2 to disc will always be 720×576@50i for PAL.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Sweet! As a videographer and a guitar player, I’m not sure which of the two has me drooling more…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah.. I used to have Windows-managed volume sets (their name for RAID). In XP, they offered RAID0 at one spec level, RAID1 at another. These days, you get no filesystem-level RAID for Home, levels 0/1 for Pro, and up to 5 for server.

The problem with this is that only Windows understands those RAID volumes. That makes things really evil if you need to examine that volume in another OS, or even from a disc recovery tool auto-booted from a CD. It’s a much better idea, for a “software” RAID, to handle this at the BIOS level, so everything that boots on the PC will see the same volume, not just Windows.

And I’m kind of against RAID for video work anyway. There’s no question that, for a single video stream, a RAID drive (well, RAID0 or RAID1) can nearly double that single-stream throughput. On the other hand, put all your assets on a RAID, and you have lots of activity. The killer for NLE performance from disc is nearly always seek times, not streaming perfornance. In short, while you might see 100MB/s from a single data stream, if you have 10 assets in a project, you won’t see 10MB/s per asset.. you might not even see 5MB/s per asset.

The deal with the HDD is simple.. it’s a muscle car. It’s very fast in a straight line — one file. When you have a half dozen or more, all loading into your NLE at one time, the fast loads will eventually be dwarfed by the track-to-rack seek times.

A RAID is worse for this, since every seek’s effective time is the greater of the seek times for the N drives. For very large transfers, that’s not a problem, since you have slightly slower seeks, but effectively Nx larger tracks. But eventually, the seek times takes over, and a RAID will prove slower than if you strategically spread assets across multiple independent drives.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Right.

Microsoft in the past was fairly draconic about the definition of “same computer”. These days, a little less so.

With that, some honesty from the other side. Back in 1994, I did a consulting project for a company in Germany. They wanted PCBs done in a specific PC CAD tool, and I only had an Amiga 3000 (I was one of the main hardware engineers on that computer). So they sent me a PC.

My PC today has not a single component in common with that first PC. On the other hand, there’s a clear line of upgrades going back to 1994.. I never started completely over. I would upgrade a motherboard, power supply, case, graphic card, HDDs, etc. but never all at once. It’s kind of understandable that, through all of that, Microsoft would like to have a way to claim there’s a new computer in there. But ultimately, that kind of behavior is fringe enough for them to not care about it. Win7 seems to have gone more that way… when my Intel Q9550-based main board died last fall, it was a no-brainer to get the same system working on the AMD 1090T replacement. Much easier than back in the XP days, if not quite as easy as Win2K or NT.

MS’s original idea was that they could kind of define the crossover, based on some notion of rate-of-change of your PC within a certain timeframe. But they rarely enforced it — if you got rejected for changing too many things, and called MS on it, they would pretty much ok it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Performance depends a great deal on what you’re doing. And how you have your system set up.

You have an i7, which is good… but you also have the slowest i7. In the past, Intel specified processor speed based on the peak possible, and used their clock scaling technology to power down when load dropped. In the case of the i7, they spec a lower average speed (1.6GHz in your case), but boost the clock when power demands are present, AND when the power savings policy of the device allows. In short, before you do anything, make sure you have the laptop on AC power, and have the power management policies set to 11 for AC operation. That’s how you get the fastest performance out of that puppy.

Without knowing more, it’s hard to say anything specific. Your laptop is plenty of horsepower for editing basic MPEG-2 or AVC video in hires. Most of the slowdowns come from multiple layers of video and plug-in effects… a deep enough stack of plug-ins and layers can bring ANY PC screaming to it’s knees. I have done 2 minute videos that take hours to render and can’t really be previewed in realtime (not without pre-rendering, anyway).

Sometimes, the solution is to render in phases. For example, I use Neat Video de-noising sometimes on video shot under too dark conditions… it does a nice job. It’s also going to slow down preview to pretty useless levels — there’s just that much computation to do. So I do the noise correction before the regular editing.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Keelan Balderson] “I need somebody to put my mind at ease. Will the following custom built PC allow me to work with HD video in Sony Vegas, using a second monitor for full screen preview?

Intel Sandybridge i7-2600K Unlocked Core i7 Quad-Core Processor (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache, Socket 1155)”

That’s a pretty decent rig for HD editing. I always recommend at least four cores, at least 8GB of DRAM, and you have it. The i7 is the fastest core at a given clock speed these days, too, so that’s another plus.

The graphics card you have listed is fine. GPGPU computing (General Purpose GPU) has been a growing movement these days, but there’s no great answer if Vegas is your target. Vegas 10 delivers a small but real improvement using a GPU to accelerate Sony AVC rendering — it’s not obvious that a higher end GPU adds much to this. The GPU is also useful if you’re using a modern plug-in set like Boris Continuum, which benefit from OpenGL rendering accelerated by GPU. My advice is what you’re doing — buy a decent card today, and upgrade to a better one only when it’s going to make a big difference.

The issue of hard drives is really an issue of maximizing data throughput. There’s a belief in the industry that you should leave your C: drive for programs, which used to be very critical, due to virtual memory page swapping. Today, you probably have enough RAM to avoid any swapping during a render, so this is less true.

However, the fastest rendering you can do occurs when the CPU is running as close to 100% as you can get. Rendering is still CPU (and maybe GPU) intensive. But keeping that CPU well fed means ensuring your hard drives can keep up the speed. When you load too many assets from the same drive at the same time, the drive will “thrash”, as the heads jump all over the place, and your render will slow down. The most obvious way to help here is, as you state, rendering with read-only assets on one drive, writing out to another.

However, if you have a very complex project, you may want to spread some assets to the C: drive as well, even if you’re rendering to it. Or render out to a USB drive or even a flash dongle… the bit rate is not the bottleneck for a render, seek time is when you have many, many assets on a single drive. I’ll admit to having built two minute music videos with over 40 separate video layers, some of which took over four hours to render those two minutes. I’m not suggesting this is a regular thing… but the system you’re looking at can handle that sort of load. In fact, my video would render faster on it than it did on my old Q9550 system…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The Canon HDSLRs, and many modern camcorders, use some form of AVC video compression. This is not well supported in older versions of Vegas, or for that matter, older versions of any NLE.

If they’re saying “Apple PAL DV”, that means rendering to a Quicktime wrapper using the Apple DV CODEC. That’s pretty easy to do, but I suspect the problem is the fairly ancient Vegas 7’s dealings with the AVC format.

You can download a functional demo of Vegas 10, which does AVC just dandy, and that can be installed in parallel with Vegas 7. That’s the thing to try today.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

DVD only supports MPEG-1 at 352×240… yes, this is terrible compared to MPEG-2 at 720×480 (assuming NTSC numbers). No matter what bitrate you specify, it’d going to look bad on DVD.

You really need to adjust the bitrate you’re using to render MPEG-2. Can you render your final project to some intermediate, high quality output format, and let DVD Architect encode it? This isn’t the best way to work in the Vegas Pro workflow, since I can adjust the bitrate for MPEG-2. But I can load in any number of non-MPEG file types in DVD Architect, then use the “Fit to Disc” function to get the proper MPEG-2 (CBR-only) bitrate.

If you can’t do this, the simple answer is, get better tools — you can’t get the result you want with the software you’re using.

-Dave