[Dave Haynie]

It is your computer. And Vegas.

I did benchmarks on playing a 1080/60p file, twice the CPU power you’d need for most AVCHD decoding. I have an AMD 1090T system, 6 cores at 3.2GHz each, 8GB memory, and a nVidia GeForce 8800GT graphics card (fairly old).

I have run various programs, software-only, doing full screen decoding (on one of two 1200p monitors), and I see 50-65% CPU use. And I have a really, really fast computer, as computers go (sure, it’s no i7x6).

When I play the same video in Windows Media Player, I’m under 10% CPU. That’s because I’m running 64-bit Windows 7, and Microsoft’s own AVC CODEC is using GPU acceleration, via Microsoft’s own DXVA 2.0 interface. When I run Splash Lite, which accesses nVidia’s GPU acceleration API directly, I see more like 6% CPU.

The reason this is a Vegas problem is simple: if my PC takes 60% or so CPU to decode 1080/60p AVC in realtime in the player, it’s not going to be much different for rendering or display. If you just did the decode using the GPU, the rendering (on screen or to file) would get a big boost in performance.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m not a Mac user (nor do I play one on TV). But Apple apparently was a little piece-meal on SDXC updates. So the iMac version of MacOS 10.6.4, at least those released after July 2010, fully supported SDXC. But for most other Macs, you need MacOS 10.6.5.

Some of this is the file system. Originally, the defined file system for SDXC was exFAT (aka FAT64). These things are defined as part of the card standard, the purpose being interoperability between devices (obviously, you can put any file system you like on a memory card). But the SD people seem to be allowing FAT32 on it, sometimes. However, if you formatted it in your camera, could be FAT64, might not be. Fun stuff, eh?

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I ran into the same problem back in the early DVD days. Clients wanted the best quality, I wanted to deliver the best quality. The easy solution: I provided the DVD player, and charged them for it. I made this clear: the DVD package included a DVD player guaranteed to work with the DVDs I create. They could opt out if they did not need this, but (particularly in the old days) I could not guarantee compatibility (though I did offer a DVD sample on request, so the customer could check out compatibility).

BD players are certainly at the point where an entry-level player can be provided as part of your HD package, with a rebate if they opt out. Heck, I’ve given BD players as birthday presents to several family members, just so I don’t have to send them lower quality video, even for “just family” stuff.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I totally concur. One curse that comes from knowing PCs is that I’m constantly being asked to fix PCs… the good part, of course, is that I can offer advice to a large group. The single largest problem I’ve seen over the years are power supplies.

And John’s spot on.. the PC business is so competitive these days, everyone’s scrambling for cost reductions. The PSU is an obvious target for a PC, because studies show that users rarely upgrade their systems. It’s certainly dishonest to ship a PC that doesn’t support the maximum power requirements for every slot and port on the thing… doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And these days, even that’s not enough, since thanks to the sideband power connectors (cables run directly to PCI and PCIe cards), there’s no actual maximum per port.

Any engineer building a system will do a power budget — take the worst case power consumption for every device in the system together, add in the max for any other open slot, and then multiply by 1.25 (I would never put together a PC with less than a 25% over-design on the power supply, just on principle).

And of course, you can also buy a system today that’s perfectly well designed. But give it a year or two, upgrade the CPU, upgrade the graphics card, and that new tech may be sucking down more power than you could have years back.

The industry hasn’t helped here. The original PCI bus had a simple indicator for any card to indicate at least one of four zones of power consumption, but this was rarely if ever supported by manufacturers. And with nearly everything auto-configured these days, your PC could have a really good idea of the power demands versus the actual PSU. But no one in the PC biz championed this, so it’s still kind of the wild west, when it comes to even figuring out power consumption.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Other than a very few OLED devices, when companies say “LED” monitor these days, they mean LCD with LED backlight. Usually, this also means some kind of dynamic LED backlighting.

A normal LCD is like a shutter — it can transmit light or block it, but it’s only do good at blocking it. Thus, the typical 1000:1 or so contrast ratio of an LCD display, versus 15,000:1 from a CRT. Common cheap LCDs also have a limited color capacity, often only a functional 6 bits per pixel (for TN displays; MVA and IPS, and the many other variations, generally address this problem).

So anyway, the LED idea is pretty cool. Early dynamic LED/LCD displays used multiple LEDs lighting at the edge of the display. By modulating the LED as well as the LCD, they could increase the effective dynamic range of the display. More recently, backlit LED/LCD displays use individual displays for increasingly smaller blocks of pixels. So they can extend the dynamic range increasingly further.

It’s a real improvement, particularly good for video rather than computer displays, which is why TVs have been using this for a few years, and it’s only now showing up in monitors (well, and the fact that monitors are increasingly just using television panels). Just keep in mind you’re still primarily an LCD display.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

So far, I agree. It’s even rendering Cineform without crashing… a problem for me since Vegas 10, despite some special Cineform APIs that Vegas 10 apparently uses. The Same versions of Cineform, upgrades and all, have continued to work just dandy in Vegas 9, using the usual Windows interface.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Scott Francis] “Been here before, but now it is looking as though I am going to get an AVCHD camera or two, I will be editing multiple cams that are HDV and AVCHD. I want to convert AVCHD to a better format for editing, but not loose ANY quality. Is HDV good to convert to?”

You can’t. Any time you recompress to anything, you technically lose some quality. And going from AVCHD to HDV, you will absolutely lose quality, since properly encoded AVCHD is a higher quality format.

You can, however, convert with very minimal loss. And, based on what you’re doing, that conversion can result in less loss of quality out to the final render.

Going to a high bitrate format such as MPEG-2/MXF, Cineform, or DNxHD will result in a very small loss in quality — possibly not even visible. Cineform in particular is a good format, because the nature of the compression is entirely different (wavelet vs. DCT) than any of the MPEG family (including AVC and MPEG-2), so you don’t “stack” compression artifacts.

The reason this can produce better video on output is that, in the conversion process, you can upconvert 4:2:0 video from the camcorder to 4:2:2. That adds no information, of course, but it can prevent color issues as you manipulate video. Not really an issue if you’re just doing simple cut edits (of course, if you’re doing that, why convert at all?), but with heavy manipulation or compositing, it can be a win.

[Scott Francis] “My concern is I am in 1920×1080 (24Mbps) video with square pixels…is going to rectangular gonna mess with the quality?”

Most HD delivery is in square pixels these days, so it “messes” with the quality in the same way a better camera or higher bit rate “messes” with quality. In short, you MAY get a higher quality result from the AVCHD camera than the HDVs, that’s actually visible in the final product. I’ve had that happen before, and just lived with it. If it’s a big problem, you could in theory transcode your AVCHD to HDV, thus “crapifying” it down to HDV levels.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Nigel O'Neill] “I agree with all that is said about Neat Video being the culprit, but is Neat Video really necessary? I shot a wedding reception at night recently and was advised by the client that they did not want any bright on camera lighting, so I had to dim down my LEDs. The resulting footage was grainy due to excessive camera gain which was visible on the timeline. “

I shot a wedding a year ago, in a dark night club. They did not want much in the way of on-camera lighting either, so yeah, I had some pretty serious “grain” noise. You can overcorrect with Neat Video, but its like any other tool.

I’ve been working with LPs this week… digitizing a bunch of my Mom’s old 78s and 33s, custom cut discs from the 40’s and 50’s. Very noisy, not in terribly good shape, etc. It’s possibly to apply so much noise reduction on the recording that there’s no sign it came from an LP… but you destroy the music in the process. With a light touch, the result is a day vs. night improvement. Same with video noise reduction.

Going from HD to SD does something of the same thing as Neat… you’re averaging adjacent pixels, so higher frequency noise is gone. A blur on the background will do some of the same things. The Neat filter just does it more intelligently. My final product looks a bit fuzzy for HD on the Blu-ray print, pretty normal on the DVD print, but in both cases a big improvement over the raw video.

Next time… HDSLR!

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Kevin Brady] “Hate the crashes. I am working video I shot in Costa Rica in January with a Canon SX30IS point and shoot. The video itself looks amazingly good to be out of such a sad camera. We were trying to pack light on this trip so I left the big glass and tripods at home. Thinking the little camera would be ok. Much to my surprise the video was pretty good but the stills were sad. The thing does not focus well at all. “

That’s a 12Mpixel camera with a crazy long zoom, it’s not going to be the sharpest tack in the box, but it’ll blow away the Instamatic my Mom used to take on vacation.

Video is 720/30p at around 3.5Mb/s.. that’s not Blu-ray quality, but it’s perfectly acceptable for YouTube these days (they actually stream 720p at about 2Mb/s).

The crashes… that’s a trickier thing. It’s been over a year since I’ve seen a video file-related crash. But Vegas (and more other NLEs) isn’t good with errors or other unexpected things in the video file. I had the Sanyo Xacti FH-1 as a pocket camcorder for awhile (position now occupied by my TM700), and it shot crazy good video for the price. It recorded AVC in an MP4 wrapper, and unfortunately, had bugs in the department… negative timecodes, which made Vegas crazy. I fixed this by re-muxing the video (strip out the AVC and AAC elemental streams, then create a new MP4 multiplex using the freeware “Yamb” program (Yet Another MPEG-4 Builder, or some-such). It’s worth a try.. chances are, there’s something in the Canon format that’s on the evil side.

You’d think not, but evidence suggests that the still camera and camcorder people within any company might as well be at separate companies. It’s taken ages for still cameras to deliver proper video autofocus — every camcorder company understood the details of getting this right decades ago.

[Kevin Brady] “This Sony software is only 32 bit so it really does not seem to care that I have lots of memory and lots of cores to work with. I get out of memory messages just trying to edit. I am able to render pretty well though. The results look pretty decent other than now my sound does not quite match the movement.
“

I don’t think you need more memory or 64-bit just to do simple edits 720p AVC video. You don’t need to reset a program to “clear the memory” unless both the application and your version of Windows have severe problems. If you’re seeing repeated out-of-memory errors, it could be a bug in the program. Or the CODEC, if Canon installs their own rather than using the Windows 7 default. This is not the behavior with Vegas Pro.

If “Studio” isn’t using multiple cores (no ideas here, you’d think it would), that alone might be justification for an upgrade, though I totally understand that $600 is more than most people want to spend on hobby software (or $489.95, which is the basic upgrade price from Vegas Studio HD). And you might find it cheaper on eBay (hint, hint). If it’s just for a hobby, you can technically get a friendly educator to buy it for you with the educational discount (my wife’s a teacher, and would never approve of my spending money on software enough to help out here — this also gets you a version that’s not licensed for professional work, so consider that).

Another option: find a cheap older version of Vegas Pro and upgrade. That’s how I got into Photoshop… my Dad and I found a version of Photoshop 3 for $50 at a computer show, totally legit. That plus the Photoshop 4 upgrade was far cheaper than the whole thing. Much more work, but cheaper.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Scala was designed to do very hardcore Digital Signage work. I haven’t used it in well over ten years, but I can imagine they have some of the same lock-ins as any older program. Once you have a dedicated user base for a program, you can’t just go changing the UI, even if it’s on some level an improvement. As tens of thousands of original Premiere users demonstrate, we humans do ultimately adjust to an evil UI. And may, at least in the short term, prefer that to something much better but alien.

-Dave