Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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You list one primary hard drive only. I’d put it there, otherwise, it’s going to be a DVD or CD somewhere, not too useful 🙂
But seriously.. your main drive is the proper place for applications. Though it’s not terribly critical, it can still make a small difference. Every hard drive (not SSDs, which of course, are not hard drives) is kind of like a muscle car… very fast in a straightaway (one large file), not so good on twisty mountain switchbacks (many files).
The idea of keeping your data and programs separate goes back to the days of digital audio. When you load an application, you don’t necessarily get the whole application in memory. Some of it may be a kind of “software virtual memory”, where DLLs (libraries) are only getting loaded when needed — only when you run that plug-in or whatever. Others are real virtual memory… your application may have chunks that are not actually loaded, but just entered in the system memory tables… the OS will load them automatically, only when used. And of course, particularly in the days before everyone had enough memory, your application might toss some code or data out of main memory in order to fit something else in.
In short, in the old days, you might expect some odd and random disc activity from your C: drive at any time. And in particular, when working digital audio, you were already dealing with multiple small files in any multitracking situation. And perhaps realtime recording as well… I can grab 16 tracks at once with my audio device, but if something slows the PC down enough to glitch even one track, the take is trash.
Most of these things are not a huge problem in digital video, since you rarely do anything that’s of the nature of a performance, other than maybe capturing DV via Firewire. But Vegas, or another program, might well be hitting your C: drive while you’re doing work, and that will have some effect on performance, even a small one. So keeping data on a second drive certainly has its place.
You’ll also find that, once you add enough assets to a single project from that data drive, things slow down. At that point, you can get more performance directing the render to your C: drive, or even a relatively slow USB drive. The bottom line for rendering performance momitoring is looking at your CPU… even on a fast computer, CPU ought to be the bottleneck. If you see your performance monitor around 95%-100% CPU, Vegas is going as fast as it can. If not, you have somehow made your render I/O bound (Vegas is waiting on a hard drive or something) rather than CPU bound. That can usually be fixed.
-Dave
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[Kelly Griffin] “When I got my new Vegas setup I took it as a good time to also change my final output monitoring from my Sony PVM (CRT) monitor to a very nice LG LED LCD monitor; my thinking was that (A) I don’t think CRTs are even SOLD anymore, and (B) I might as well see what people at home see.”
That’s a good argument for previewing on a television. But you may find differences between television and monitor anyway, just as you’ll find difference between different televisions. As well, you’re hopefully working on a color corrected monitor for any serious work, while the vast majority of people with televisions don’t even do a proper set up of the display (at the very least, any new TV should be calibrated using a calibration DVD or similar).
[Kelly Griffin] “Anyway, I get a beautiful picture on my LED LCD monitor, but I’m working on some SD spots using 1920×1080, 24p footage. Some of it looks just fine, other parts, especially a fair amount of motion, looks as if it’s aliased or reverse field order or something. I thought I understood, maybe incorrectly, that LCDs don’t even see fields, so I don’t even know if that’s what I’m seeing.”
LCD devices “see” fields, but they de-interlace them. They have to… an LCD display is a progressive device, no possibility of actually displaying interlaced video.
But you can get weird artifacts, depending on how you’re hooked to the display. For one, consider this. A normal computer display is showing a section of computer video memory on your display. That computer video memory is displayed at whatever sync rate you have set up in your display preferences, with a digital monitor usually something negotiated with the display. So now, you start a video. That video player is dumping the decoded video, frame by frame, into your PC’s display buffer… but that rate of update doesn’t necessarily have any relation to the outgoing display rate. And at this point, it’s your display program (Windows Media Player, Vegas, etc) that’s doing the de-interlacing, not even the monitor hardware. Even without perfect sync to display, there are better and worse ways of doing this.
Some display programs will actually drive your monitor directly from the video, at least within limits. I believe this is what’s supposed to happen when you use “Video Preview on External Monitor” function in Vegas. If this is really doing that, then you’d see 60i or 24p video actually going to your monitor in those modes, rather than 60p or whatever. When you set this up in the video preferences, you can also have Vegas do the de-interlacing for you, depending on the kind of device you’re sending to. I used this in the old days to send video to analog monitors and DV camcorder screens, with good results.
If you have interlaced video input, you are going to see some kind of de-interlacing artifacts on a progressive display. One of the classic example is “mice teeth”, which is a pretty obvious interlacing effect you’ll see when there’s a great deal of movement from field to field. You can also get even stranger interlacing effects by resizing interlaced clips with an algorithm that’s not interlacing-savvy. Vegas wants to de-interlace before resizing… if you resize an interlaced clip without selecting a de-interlacing method in your project preferences, you can get some evil video. There’s a pretty explanation (with images) of interlacing effects here:
https://www.100fps.com/De-interlacing algorithms trade off resolution to fix the interlacing artifacts. There are several options in Vegas, and others not in Vegas… working in digital video, I’ve written a few myself over the years.
Of course, if you’re trying to keep your video 60i for Blu-ray or DVD, you may not actually want it de-interlaced. That may hold true for simple manipulations, but once you start resizing, you want to deinterlace.
And of course, such video is going to be deinterlaced by a progressive display, either as a matter of course of being written into PC screen memory as a window on your screen, or by your LCD or DLP (neither of which can support interlacing) display’s digital television chip (same thing that upscales 480p or 720p to 1080p on a full HD TV).
-Dave
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[Libor Jendele] “[John Rofrano] Vegas Pro supports Sony AVC rendering up to 20Mbps.
Is that right? Later in this thread it is mentioned that Vegas Pro can handle video with up to 50Mbips, (XDCAM HD422). I don’t know difference between video format used by XDCAM cameras and HDR CX700. Hence may I ask again: What is the closest match of Vegas Pro (AVCHD) rendering quality to the Sony PS and FX shooting settings (see above)? I don’t mind to use template user settings, as advocated by [Danny Hays]. Is it really just 20Mbits as you said?”Rendering vs. reading. Vegas can deal with multiple high bitrates coming in… I have done projects with 144Mb/s DNxHD and 100-133Mb/s Cineform just dandy. Not to mention RAW formats, which work, but probably slow you down unless you’re using a pretty hot RAID (my RAID is for long-term storage, not speed, being on FW800 rather than eSATA or something).
On the way out, the maximum bitrate is determined by the CODEC you’re using. This can be just about any rate imaginable, but for a specific CODEC, there can be a limit (eg, the limit isn’t Vegas, it’s the CODEC).
-Dave
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The bitrate is actually less of an issue than the frame rate. I have seen no additional measureable overhead editing 1080/24p at 35Mb/s or so from my 60D, 24Mb/s from my HMC40, or 17Mb/s from my TM700.
With a very large number of tracks, the additional bit rate might start to have a slowing effect. But your modern single SATA drive is usually good for 50MB/s or so, which is 1/8th the rate of that 50Mb/s video you’re thinking about. Chances are, hard drive seeks will slow you down with multiple tracks on the same drive before you hit any hard limit on that drive.
On the other hand, increasing the frame rate pretty much linearly increases the CPU load. So 1080/60p editing from the TM700 really does use about twice the CPU as 30p or 60i from another camera. On my 6 core system, with Vegas 10, 1080/60i or 1080/30p has finally got the point where I really don’t think about using Cineform, at least for a simple project (when do something with 20-40 video tracks, that’s different). The CPU is still very much the bottleneck in editing, not the hard drive.
-Dave
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The 5.1 channel AC-3 you get with AVCHD and other similar (Panasonic TM700 at 60p) camcorders imports just dandy into Vegas and most other NLEs.
DTS, on the other hand, pretty much only exists on copy protected commercial media. The software for creating it is pretty expensive, and it’s generally not supported as an editable format on ANY NLE, as there is absolutely no need to do so for legit work.
-Dave
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It was definitely a problem with the Sanyo… I re-multiplexed the MP4, and they loaded just dandy into Vegas 9. Of course, it’s not that big of a deal for an NLE to do various kinds of bounds checking on the files being read. But it’s also the case that too much unnecessary checks will slow the system down for no obvious good reason.
-Dave
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I didn’t know that was even possible. Did you check to see if you have a DVD Architect serial number? All of Sony’s software, far as I know, sets itself up as a 30-Day demo until authorized… that’s how they can offer the same basic files as demo and as full version.
If you bought online, check the email with the serials from Sony. If you bought the boxed version, there should be separate codes for DVDA and Vegas. Unless this was some weird kind of bundle… I don’t think Sony sells Vegas 9 Pro without DVDA.
-Dave
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Ditto. I actually left tape behind when I was shooting my daughters soccer matches, usually 2-3 per week. That was some crazy time spent on video capture, wear on the pricey tape heads, etc. Not to mention that, in going tapeless, I also got 720/60p (even 1080/60p on one camera), which is far better suited to sports videography than 1080/60i from my HDV Sony.
I don’t do enough paid jobs to have found tape much of a burden prior to this, but having left it behind, I don’t miss it one bit. I shot a wedding last in year in San Francisco. When I got back to where I was staying, I took the SD card from my “A” camera, popped it into the laptop, a few quick edits, and I had the wedding ceremony up on YouTube that very night. I could have done that with tape, but at that time of night, I would easily have been asleep before I finished. And clearly, if a same-day edit had been a priority, the memory card saves me even more time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8qFgciwIU
And yeah, this was my HMC40 shooting in near total darkness. Another reason I added a DSLR this year.
-Dave
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Yup. NXCAM is AVCHD with special sauce. NXCAM is to Sony what AVCCAM is to Panasonic.
The primary point of calling it something else is that you get to change the rules, but probably for the better. For example, NXCAM is basically AVCHD, but it also allows for uncompressed audio… the AVCHD spec seems to require AC3 audio (it shouldn’t… AVCHD is derived from Blu-ray, which allows both compressed and uncompressed formats. In a sense, NXCAM is fixing this).
In short, at least so far, it works just dandy with Vegas… as well as any other AVCHD format (if you’re using an older PC, my values of “dandy” won’t fit your workflow).
-Dave
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And I should add… much of this is TOTALLY out of the NLE developer’s control. Sony can say they support AVI by hooking Vegas in to using the Direct Show and Video-for-Windows multimedia framework. And the same with Quicktime, supporting the Quicktime framework.
But once done, there’s absolutely no way to control how well those interface works. We’ve already seen, here on the COW/Vegas, people complaining about poor 64-bit performance.. which turns out to be just a crappy 64-bit implementation of some CODEC or another. Neither Sony nor anyone else can be responsible for every possible CODEC plugged into these various frameworks. Same exact issue as Windows vs. device drivers, Firefox vs. browser plug-ins, etc.
Am I happy they support AVI and Quicktime, in addition to those formats Sony actually develops themselves (DV, HDV, AVC). Sure I am… way better than the FCP world John described (Avid and Adobe used to be similarly restrictive.. one reason I went to Vegas. That, and my e-buddy Peter Haller was working for Sonic Foundry). But if I find DNxHD and AVC run just dandy under Quicktime in Vegas 10, and ProRes has issues, I do know it’s not likely something under Sony’s control. I don’t think they recommend ProRes, much less promote it… I searched the site, and found only two mentions of it. One of those was telling you to use industry standard MXF, rather than ProRes or DNxHD. The other mentioned ProRes as a download from Apple, and integrated with Quicktime above a certain revision level.
They allow you to use it, but again, unless there’s a specific bug in Vegas relative to Quicktime support, the problem isn’t Vegas. Freedom has its own price, eh?
-Dave