[Dave Haynie]

Could be that Movie Studio HD doesn’t properly support DVD at 24p.

For proper DVD support, you have to render 23.976 fps with pulldown… Vegas Pro calls this “23.976 + 2/3 pulldown”. Pure 23.976p or 24p works on Blu-ray, but will re-render in DVD Architect for DVD.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Apple can charge less for the NLE, because they seriously overcharge for the PC. That $2,000 isn’t quite enough to get you an iMac with 21.5″ screen with enough features for basic editing (eg, i7 quad, 8GB, 2TB HDD)… and I would honestly go bonkers doing any kind of real work on a single screen that small. If you want the 27″ screen, you’re already over $2500.

I paid only about $450 for my last PC upgrade, which included 8GB DRAM and an AMD 6-core processor… largely because I could keep every other piece of the system, I didn’t need to upgrade everything.

And what you really want for serious video work is a Mac Pro.. which starts at $2500, without the monitor. And neither will do Blu-ray… you still need to buy Adobe CS if you need to do BDs. And a drive.

It’s also interesting that, even after they announced FCP Pro X at $299 (via the Mac App Store only, and just FCP alone, none of the other tools in the usual Studio bundle: Soundtrack Pro, Motion, Color, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro), they’re still bundling Final Cut Express 4 for $199 with new Macs. At least Final Cut X is FINALLY 64-bit.. even Adobe there already. They’re also now supporting 4K editing, another thing Vegas has done for awhile. This is the first time since 2007 that FCP was available outside the bundle… I think that’s the real news.

Also, consider that currently at least, the App Store doesn’t have an upgrade option — you buy each version completely new, at the full list price. Apple’s move to the App Store is more than likely a permanent one; they’re taking FCP out of the traditional retail chain, and thus, Apple’s getting 100% of the profit on it, with zero materials cost, zero stocking issues, etc. So some of the savings pass on to the user, at least for the first buy. For the future… who knows? And given the unbundling, I do wonder if this is really much of a price drop at all, though certainly compelling to an editor lusting after FCP but not concerned about the other “Studio” components… it was $999 for the whole Studio package, now $299 just for FCP.

Interesting viewpoint from an FCP user here: https://www.mikejones.tv/journal/2011/4/13/new-fcp-x-is-really-not-so-new.html. He’s basically suggesting that FCP has finally caught up, and thus, he won’t have to dump it. May well be that the grass is always greener… well, somewhere else.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Cineform on a modern computer is pretty equivalent in editability to the DV format (a motion JPEG variation, not MPEG) back when DV was a commonly used format. The MPEG-2 of HDV and certainly, the AVC used by practically every computer media camcorder these days, are much more complex to decode.

With that said, I’m quite happy (finally!) with the performance of Vegas 10 and my AMD 1090T (six cores, 3.2GHz) based system on basic AVC editing. If it’s just a track or two, I have no immediate urge to convert to Cineform.

Sometimes, there are other reasons. For example, if there’s a great deal of image preprocessing (color grading, noise reduction), I may render out to Cineform early on, just to streamline editing down the road. But only if there’s enough complexity to warrant that.

And sure, your Cineform output will be ever so slightly lower in quality than your AVC, but it’s a challenge to really notice. One reason is that they’re very different technologies, so the compression artifacts don’t “beat” against each other, as you may see rendering AVC out to MPEG-2 or some such (AVC and MPEG-2 are DCT based compression algorithms, Cineform uses integer reversible wavelets with non-linear quantization). You’ll also find that, since Cineform encodes 4:2:2 color via interpolation from 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 input media. So with complex edits, you can actually get a better result.

Cineform did a little weird in Vegas 10. Prior to Vegas 10, Cineform was just a plain old Video for Windows CODEC. They had various updates, all worked with Vegas 9.

When Vegas 10 shipped, it added support for some direct interface to Cineform. And killed the previous VfW support. Unfortunately, there were bugs between Vegas 10 and the latest Cineform… at least on my system, any render out would crash Vegas. Until 10d, at least… now it’s finally happy again. This is the absolute wrong way to develop software — I have no problem with a private API being used if there’s some advantage, but [a] make it optional, and [b] don’t take away the capability I had in Vegas 9 with older versions of Cineform.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, a couple of things.

Vegas does a fine job of resizing images, and I use this extensively for my photo montages. I also render at 1080/24p usually, but since I shoot in RAW, I can render using 5-8Mpixel PSD or PNG files, no need for dealing with the additional artifacts of JPEG.

And for you DVD, do be sure to render at 24p in the proper DVD 24p format. If you don’t render to the proper format, DVD Architect will re-render, lowering quality substantially.

One main reason to use larger images is motion. SD television is actually pretty evil in quality, but the fact that it’s moving suits our visual systems better, so a little motion tends to make for a far better montage, even though it’s a bit of extra work. Here’s an example:

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Ensuring you’re progressive is fairly important, since interlacing, with or without motion, is going to look bad if you have any detail in your photos.

For text rendering… well, it IS going to be pixelated. Your best best is to render with anti-aliasing, which will blur the edges using transparency, and thus reduce some of the pixelization. But also render for SD TV. While it’s quite possible to put 80 characters across a 640×480 old-timey VGA screen, that’s assuming 8×8 character cells. For proper video, use a large enough font, and of course the anti-aliasing (if you’re not happy with either of Vegas’s text generators, you should be able to render text with anti-aliasing and alpha channel, to PNG or PSD for example, in The GIMP… I know you can do so in Photoshop).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If you’re trying to build it all into one disc, you have a bit of a question here for sure. Given that you seem to only have 720p HD material, as well as quite a bit of HD material, the easy answer is that if you want just one format, make it 720/60p. You really want 720/30p, but that’s not a supported Blu-ray format. Sources converted to NTSC/DV from film may be encoded as 480/60i, but there’s certainly no actual interlacing going on there, so they should look fine in progressive.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Gregoriades] “I want to buy a new “still” camera, which will also take Hi-definition movies (for amateur work.) But it gets confusing with all the various formats that “Hi-def” exists.”

That’s correct — it can be confusing. There are a few different actual media formats, and a few different containers. And lots of variations within each of those.

[John Gregoriades] “Let me make it simple to answer, if I can: I do not need a description of what each “subtype” does – only which will work seamlessly with Vegas 8 or Vegas 9 or…. without any pre-conversion etc.?”

There’s no simple answer. Each version of Vegas has improved support for the various video types. It’s not simply “will it edit”, but “will it edit usefully”. You can usually edit AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10, H.264… same thing) in Vegas 9, maybe even Vegas 8. But not always. And not always usefully… AVC is very complex to decode, and you may find it not terribly editable prior to Vegas 10, which improved decode performance considerably.

Part of that is the specifics of these specifications. While the various MPEG standards are standards, they’re pretty wide standards. MPEG is really intended as more of a standards generator: MPEG-2 was used in more specific forms to deliver HDV, ATSC television, part of Blu-ray, DVD, etc. AVC is more limited in scope in Blu-ray and AVCHD, once again.

[John Gregoriades] “A Nikon D5100 spec gives format: MPEG4, 1920×1080 (30,25,24 fps.)
A Canon Eos 500D spec gives: H.264 1920×1080 (20fps) or 1280×720 (30fps)
A Canon SX30 iS spec gives format: Motion JPEG 1280×720 (30fps.)
I’d rather go for the Nikon D5100 but only IF it will work directly with Vegas, which I like because it is very “stable”.”

The Nikon D5100, the EOS 500D (550D, and 600D as well), and most HDSLRs record in AVC. Both of these record in “.mov” format, which is Apple’s Quicktime wrapper. A few other cameras may use the “.mp4” wrapper, which is the official MPEG-4 spec for a media wrapper, but also derived from and very similar to Quicktime.

Video cameras tend to record in AVCHD, which is a spec derived from Blu-ray. This was originally designed to be used HD recording on DVD, and extends out to modest bitrates used on camcorders, up to 24Mb/s. This mandates AVC video and AC-3 audio recording. Most HDSLRs don’t use AVCHD, largely because they’re recording at higher bitrates, which can yield a higher quality image. Panasonics use AVCHD or AVCHDLite (a subset of AVCHD, limited to 720p), which may offer some enhanced compatibility, at the expense of encoding quality. In Vegas 10, the higher bitrate stuff (I use a Canon 60D as well as two AVCHD based Panasonic camcorders) works just dandy.

Motion JPEG is a more primitive format, somewhat similar to DV… each frame is basically just a JPEG photo. This is usually also stored in a Quicktime wrapper. A few cameras have used AVI instead, but there were some early standards for Motion JPEG in Quicktime, not so in AVI.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Sounds like some WMV weirdness. Did you try rendering the whole project to AVC/MP4 or MPEG-2/HDV or MXF?

There is no requirement to crapify your audio. I did WMV/HD discs for as couple of years, and never had an issue with playback on a PC. Now, if you’re rendering to DVD-Video (not just DVD ROM), you’re naturally going to need to render to a supported format (AC-3, PCM, MPEG Layer 2). If you have a DVD player that claims to play WMV, good luck — just find a set of settings that work and don’t change, because most of these are only going to support a narrow range of possible settings.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If the customer asked me to shoot them going table to table, I would. No, I wouldn’t dream of using that in the main finished reception video, but I’d have it in there as a “DVD Extra”. Sure, they’re likely to forget they even asked, but eventually, you’ll have someone who really, really wanted to see that nonsense. Claiming to shoot it, but not shooting it, is pretty damn risky.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m one guy with at least two cameras. So I have at least one camera on and shooting. Sometimes it’s an alternate prespective, sometimes I need to do a little ping-ponging between cameras. All use the same Bogen/Manfrotto mount, which I also have on the Glidecam 2000, so it’s easy to move cameras on and off stabilization devices.

The key I found to make this all work — I record audio for the whole thing, in MP3 on one of my flash audio recorders (Tascam DR-1, Zoom H4n). This gives me good background audio if I need it, but primarily, it make it super easy for PluralEyes to sync up all the video.

Before I did this, one of the main reasons to “just keep it running” was to make the integration of 2-3 cameras worth of video happen fast… storage less of an issue than “all that sync-up work”. I’ve been doing this now for over a year, and it’s lead to me capturing less video, but more useful video. So the workflow actually speeds up.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If exclusively for CD/DVD/BD printing, the cheap Epsons are just dandy. In fact, Epson is a bit better here anyway, even if other companies did good disc printing, simply because their inks seem a bit more proof against moisture than Canon, HP, or (if you must) Lexmark or Kodak. The 1400 is a great printer, but a waste of money if you’re not going to do 13″ x N printing. And it’s a big mofo… I had smaller printers on my computer desk, but a few years back, built a dedicated cabinet for printers (I have three).

-Dave