Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
-
I keep an Epson Photo 1400 for most photo and high quality printing work, and the CD/DVD/BD printing is excellent. Prior to that, I used a cheap Epson R300.. also pretty hard to complain about the result.
Before that, and Epson 960 — nice printer, but apparently not too successful, so the ink got pricey. The 960 had great pro features: roll feeder with auto cutter, etc. But, like me now, most serious users go to the 13″ printers.
The only other printer I’ve used with CD printing capability was one model from HP. I got this to replace a broken “everyday” HP printer, figuring the CD/DVD/BD printing might be ok for casual work. Not so… at least via the included software, I couldn’t get it to print with full coverage on any disc. The Epson PrintCD software can even do hub printing. The HP had other issues… it’s gone now (I’m using a Canon all-in-one with duplex printing for the “everyday” printer).
NEVER use a label. At best, they look unprofessional. At worse, the melt off on hot days, and can unbalance a DVD or BD to the point where it’s a compatibility issues. Slot-based players (PS3, cars) may also catch on a label. I did labels long, long ago (over 10 years back), but once DVD came along, I found them a serious problem for anything done commercially (at the time, I was selling a few hundred copies per year of a film of mine on DVD). I even tried mylar labels, hub-only labels, etc. Direct printing is the right answer.
-Dave
-
MP4 isn’t a video format, it’s a file wrapper (like .avi, .mov, .ts, etc)… but it’s usually an MPEG-4 Part 10 stream — aka AVC. That’s the most CPU intensive video we typically render, decode, or edit. See what kind of CPU power a single stream takes to decode on your machine… you might be surprised. And you might be more productive transcoding the MP4 to something else, before any editing. One option supported and rendered by Vegas is MXF/MPEG-2 format.
-Dave
-
CPU throttling on laptops, or even desktops, under power management isn’t done for heat, except in the case of a poor design. Not that there aren’t bad thermal designs. But even at that, they’re dropping the CPU speed, so the device is still going to max out… just not as max as you’d like. And the CPU is still the bottleneck if it read 100%, still not the bottleneck if you’re not at 100% CPU.
Now sure, all modern CPUs have a power-down-to-protect option, simply because, without this, most desktop processors (at least) can thermally self-destruct in the event of a cooling system failure. You can run a more sophisticated CPU monitor to keep track of this behavior.
And certainly, for a laptop, you want to do rendering on AC power, with the power management turned off. That won’t prevent any self-preservation power down, but it will prevent power savings power down.
It’s different with an i7. While most CPUs are speced at their peak power, the i7 is speced at an average power rating. For example, the 1.6GHz i7 used in some laptops will clock up to 2.4GHz, more or less, as demanded. The actual speed depends on both cooling and the number of cores actually being taxed at the time.
-Dave
-
This could be normal, but it depends a great deal on the specifics of the project.
If you have 1920×1080 video, you probably have AVC source files. How well does your PC play even a single AVC file? Now you have to decode, composite, apply effects, and render out… that’ll put a strain on any PC, but if you’re running a slower system, expect things to take longer.
The complexity of the effects is also a huge thing. Running a de-noiser (like Neat Video), for example, can take many, many times longer than either rendering anything else… I usually pre-render the video cleanup, if it’s needed.
I did a project a few years ago that took about five hours to render two minutes worth of video, and this on a Quad Core2 9550 processor (since upgraded to an AMD 1090T six core). Ok, sure, I had two main video layers and about 50 animation layers. but my point is basic: you pay for each thing you do in CPU time. If you do complex things, you’ll eventually want a faster PC.
The one thing to check: run the Task Manager, look at the Performance Monitor, and ensure that your CPU is running close to 100% when rendering. If it is, you’re going as fast as you can. If not, you have some other bottleneck… could be hard disc, for example — too much thrashing will slow down a system. Though that’s more likely on a faster machine.
-Dave
-
[Petr Berger] “I had manytimes problem opening mp4 files in Sony Vegas 10… Vegas sometimes crashes when opening mp4 files.”
Well, you know, you pick up candy on the street, you never really know where it’s been. You might need to wash it off, at the least.
But I have actually run into a few problems with Vegas. Basically, Vegas is optimized (well, it is.. not that it couldn’t be better) for decoding correct MP4 files. So if there’s a bug of some kind, whether its a glitch or other anomaly, Vegas might crash — it’s not wasting the time to do the checks necessary to properly handle such errors.
I first ran into this with the Sanyo Xacti FH1, a pocket camcorder that shot native to MP4 files. I eventually figured out it was producing negative timecodes, which Vegas choked on.
The fix was fairly simple: I used the freeware MP4Box tool, via the YAMB (Yet Another MP3Box User Interface) GUI, to demux and remux the MP4. Once so treated, Vegas handled the video just fine. That’s faster than re-coding, and it doesn’t affect quality at all, of course. Check out YAMB here: https://yamb.unite-video.com/
-Dave
-
And keep in mind, OpenGL and CUDA are two very different things. OpenGL is a graphic language (thus, the GL)… good for 3D graphic rendering and other graphics operations. Since that’s much of what BCC plug-ins do, it’s pretty well suited to this task. OpenGL has been around a very long time… it originated at Silicon Graphics in 1992, but has long since come under the management of an industry SIG (see https://www.opengl.org).
CUDA is a different thing, an API for GPGPU Computing (General Purpose GPU). This means accelerating pretty much anything, just as coding for FPU or MMX/SSE has. Rather than work in terms of grapics primitives as OpenGL does, it works in actual mathematics.
As John pointed out, OpenGL is, well, open, while CUDA is a proprietary nVidia thing. The similarly named OpenCL is an open standard for GPGPU computing, and the only GPGPU platform supported by both nVidia and AMD/ATi. Boris is not using any GPGPU computing, at least not yet. But since graphics cards were actually meant to, well, render graphics, OpenGL may be all they really need, at least for most effects.
-Dave
-
[Jack McGee] “1) Am I selling myself short? or would you say this is a valid method in which I am getting Blu-ray format without the need for blu-ray disc?”
Depends a great deal on the camera you’re using. If my “mini-HD” camera, you mean a digital still camera with video mode, or a “Flip” style camcorder, you’re probably doing ok. Most of these shoot in lower bitrate modes.
The one thing here: shooting at 720/30p and upconverting to 1440×1080/50i, you’re screwing with the frame rate. So there’s going to be some quality loss there, even with the uprezzing. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I’d do with 720/30p video… Blu-ray supports 1080/60i, 1080/50i, 1080/24p, 720/60p, 720/50p, and 720/24p, but no 720/30p. One important step when buying a camcorder is knowing what you plan to do with the video afterwards. Maybe you have a better supported resolution option? Anyway, your best bets would be 720/60p or 1080/60i, for quality, if you have no other choices.
Last I heard anyway, it was nearly impossible to sell a DVD player in the UK without NTSC support of some kind (real NTSC and/or PAL60 output). It’s certainly likely that similar support is found on Blu-ray players. It’s an easy enough test.
As for being a valid method… Vegas or DVD Architect will certainly allow you to burn a Blu-ray file system onto a DVD. Just about any bitrate will play on modern computers, which all have fast DVD drives. For DVD players, no dice, they won’t play Blu-ray formats of any kind. For Blu-ray players, you have to issues. One is that BD players are not guaranteed to have better than 2x DVD support, so you’re limited to 18Mb/s on a DVD. Sure, it may work on some players, but not on others.
The second is more complex: Blu-ray on DVD is not very well supported by players, either. You really want the very similar AVCHD format, which is supported by nearly every BD player, but not by Vegas. You can find a free tool called MultiAVCHD which does this properly here: https://multiavchd.deanbg.com/
[Jack McGee] “4) I also have a HiDef Sony MiniDV camera which does 1080i – what template settings should I use for this to get a valid HD result?”
Standard HDV (not called MiniDV anymore) records in 1440×1080/50i or 1440×1080/60i, at least if you have a Sony camera (there was also a 720/30p mode, but not as well supported), in MPEG-2. You can render this to AVC at the same resolution and frame rate for Blu-ray compatibiltiy. It has to be in AVC for AVCHD discs, but also to fit well on a DVD9.
-Dave
-
[Davd Keator] “Since you are now in the world of GPU rendering as well. If you are using the Sony AVC and have GPU engaged & your video card is a crappy old 9800 or something, you are wasting resources by your processor cores waiting for the GPU…”
Most of these things are easy to check. Given that the GPU is at best a slight improvement in performance, render without it, see what happens. If you have an i7, try it without hyperthreading. On the other hand, I don’t know of any of these actually slowing a system down that much. I use a six core AMD 1090T (3.2GHz) system, and I get pretty damn close to 100% CPU use, all six cores, with or without GPU rendering selected. My GPU is a nVidia 8800GT, nothing state of the art.
The one big exception to that is when the HDD starts to become a problem. While most assets don’t come close to the performance limits on an HDD, or so you’d think, when you have many assets on a single drive, you’ll start to thrash the disc — too many seeks to keep the drive going at peak, which ensures the CPU is always going to be waiting. That’s the one thing I’ve seen clobber performance to the extent you’re seeing. It’ll obviously be worse if you have larger video formats, eg, multiple Cineform or DNxHD will see this sooner than multiple AVCHD or MPEG-2, and of course, external drives are usually slower, versus internal.
RAIDs can also be slower, depending. A RAID is inherently slower on seeks — the seek occurs as the slowest of all drives involved. Single-steam, you never see this, because the virtual sectors are Nx as large. But if you’re doing smaller seeks (which is not so controllable in Vegas), you’ll hit that extra bottleneck.
I often use two or more drives for input on large projects, and usually render output to the C: drive or an external USB or Firewire drive, not something that’s hosting any assets.
[Davd Keator] “Through my experiences: 2 gigs per core are needed for vegas, 6 cores means 12 gigs…”
That’s a generally started rule of thumb for systems in general. But demands are actually much lower for a single program with multithreading versus multiple programs multi-processing. The difference is simple: in the multithreading case, each processor is likely to be running the same code. And by design — the inner rendering engine should be designed to run entirely from cache, L1 if possible, L2/L3 otherwise. Each thread will run the same code, that’s the bottleneck. As well, I suspect most of the Vegas rendering code was worked out some years ago — if you have a 6x processor, you have larger caches by far than they had in mind.
In terms of all memory used, I have 8GB on my 6 core system, and have never seen more than 6GB committed memory, running Vegas and, generally, several other programs. Not that memory’s too expensive to have more, but that’s certainly not the difference between 100% rendering and 20% rendering efficiency.
-Dave
-
If you want that kind of canned music, you’re going to pay or take lower quality. There are a few archives of public domain music, such as https://www.musopen.com/music and https://www.openmusicarchive.org. You’ll have to spend some time searching for appropriate music.
Or do what I usually do — make your own. It depends on your style, of course… I’m generally using acoustic guitar for background music. And I’m not doing 20 weddings a year or anything, either — not that you couldn’t re-use such music when it fits the scene.
For more exciting background music, I use Acid. Keep in mind that the video is the centerpiece here — the music needs to act in support of that, it doesn’t ever want to be the central focus. Which means, it has to be of good quality, but it doesn’t have to be terribly innovative.
And also consider, that same canned music you buy is showing up on everyone else’s wedding videos. Same reason I don’t use canned graphics… I take a still camera, with a macro lens, and use elements from the wedding for stills and titles in the video or BD/DVD.
-Dave
-
Also, you can’t compare installed vs. distribution sizes. The distribution download is always compressed. The actual numbers: Vegas 10c = 199,426kB, 10d = 201,868kB (64-bit version).
-Dave