[Dave Haynie]

[Chuck Pullen] “Thanks for jumping in on this Jay, I totally agree the “3D” stuff totally irked me as well. “

Yeah, there’s a bit of “Microsoft Syndrome” here. For any new release of any well used software, the authors will have a very complete list of the most requested new features, a list of the things they think they need to address (some of which may be stability related, some of which may be hidden architectural changes to remove known limitations, etc). And then there’s the list of “strategic” changes.

Microsoft has had a number of releases (see “Vista”) in which they pretty much ignored the user feedback, and concentrated on the strategic stuff. Vegas 10 has, I think, some good stuff in it.. some of which (like integrated Cineform API support), is still a little half-baked. And then there’s the strategic bit: 3D. Sony sees 3D as the Next Big Thing, and this one’s corporation-wide: TVs, Blu-ray players, camcorders, probably laptops before too long. And there’s some value to them here: being the first major NLE with integrated 3D support, if there’s really a forthcoming 3D craze (I’m waiting for 4K, sorry), could win them some sweet new market share.

Along with this idea, there’s the other problem often displayed in Microsoft products: 1,000 new features, each one only 25-50% functional. This is great for bringing in new customers and old customer upgrades, at least in a world where most people don’t use most of those new features, but figure “maybe some day”. Thing is, in a professional class product, a 50% or even 75% functional new feature is not likely something you can use.

I’ve worked at computer companies (Commodore), dealt with software development from the inside and outside, used wicked expensive CAD tools for electronics development, etc. Back in the Sonic Foundry days, I was absolutely certain that Vegas, Forge, and Acid were the most rock solid tools I had found anywhere in the software world. They shipped good, got better pretty quickly, and even grew new features between revisions. I don’t think Vegas is buggier than other programs in this class, but I also don’t think they’re delivering that previous best-in-industry quality any more. And in other industries, I have used $10,000+ programs (with $2,000+ annual support contracts) that misbehaved more often than Vegas, even today.

With that said, of course we need to demand better. And Sony’s definitely less responsive, in general, than the Sonic Foundry was, in the early days (given that I actually got new features I requested in the very next revision of Acid, that would be hard to top).

But also… proprietary is proprietary. Vegas was the very first NLE to support a wide variety of input formats without conversion. But like any other NLE using Apple’s formats, Vegas is at the mercy of Apple’s Quicktime subsystem as implemented on Windows. Unless there’s some Vegas-specific bug in interfacing to that, you’re not going to find it better with ProRes on any Windows NLE. Apple has kind of a vested interest in delivering the absolute minimal Windows support that doesn’t prevent ProRes from being an acceptable industry standard.

Looking at it from the other direction, if you have any slightly off-norm format in Apple’s Final Cut Pro, you have to convert it to ProRes or something else before editing. Even AVC, except maybe in the very latest version (not sure, I know iMovie does AVC to some extent, my daughter uses it in school).

On a personal level, sorry we didn’t do enough back in the early 90s to keep the Amiga alive, thus letting Apple jump into the video thing before PCs were really ready, and thus creating this situation.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

That’s your problem right there. Rendering to any DCT type compression format (MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1, VP8, etc) is inherently in multiples of some block size, usually 16×16 pixels, though it varies by format.

When you render to 1620 pixels, you have 101 DCT blocks and 4 pixels left over. In the old days, the rendering program would more than likely just reject the 1620 size. Later on, it might have put a black bar there, but these days the standard procedure is to just replicate the extra pixels… that leads to the best compression of the “fractional” DCT block. So that’s what you see, your 1620 being extended to 1632 by pixel replication.

It’s also common for a rendered format to include metadata for a mask, so you don’t see that stuff. The 1920×1080 HD format is actually rendered at 1920×1088.. this allows not just the multiple-of-16 you want for 1080p, but the multiple-of-32 boundary needed for MPEG-2 in interlaced video. Every HD player knows to truncate those extra pixels. But I don’t know offhand if horizontal masking is commonly supported… but certainly, Vimeo is not seeing that mask.

Incidently, I love doing the “Ken Burns” style from stills too… here’s one of my better ones, made from some of my Dad’s best photography:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGf7xjWc4E

-Dave

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[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, really.. I didn’t even realize that DVDA itself could render higher bitrate AVC — I have never actually allowed it to do that for me. That’s really just a hangover from the SD days, I guess… DVDA didn’t do VBR rendering, which was critical for good DVD quality. But there doesn’t really seem to be a downside here, letting DVDA do the rendering… other than perhaps time.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah… thanks for clarifying. Let me translate Davespeak a bit… when I say “DVD” unqualified, I’m likely referring to the ~5″ round shiny thing. There are any number of possible formats for a DVD… the one everyone thinks of is DVD-Video, that of the VIDEO_TS and EMPTY AUDIO_TS folder. Of course, there’s also the officially sanctioned DVD-Audio format, which will have lots of stuff in the AUDIO_TS folder. And a few other “standard” formats not officially part of the DVD Forum list of specs, such as Microsoft’s WMV/HD format (an early HD format… I used to have a red laser DVD player that actually did recognize and play this format… HD-Net released a few videos on this format), or AVCHD on DVD. A DVD is just data… all of these “formats” are just a standard for how that data is organized.

And my basic point: the Blu-ray format can put on DVD by DVD Architect. This works great in PCs with Blu-ray player software, but will not play on the majority of Blu-ray players (and it will not play on any DVD player). Blu-ray on a BD-R, which is really the expected output from DVD Architect in Blu-ray mode, should play on most Blu-ray players. As will the AVCHD format, on a DVD disc.

Blu-ray players actually have blue (well, blue-violet, 405nms), red (650nm), and probably infrared (780nm) lasers. Sure, it’s not required by the spec, any more than DVD players were required to support the IR laser for CDs.

Technically speaking, the blue laser could do it all.. at least as far as glass mastered discs go. But once you get to CD-R/RW or DVD+/-R/RW, the blue laser is no good. The organic dyes used for the “R” discs, in particular, is very frequency sensitive. Some early DVD players left out the IR laser, and got lots of flack. I don’t know of any Blu-ray player that made this same mistake, relative to DVD or CD.

The issue is logical format. The player has a bit of software logic… here’s a Blu-ray disc, launch this player software, that kind of thing. For whatever reasons, many (not sure about most) players will not play a proper Blu-ray format from DVD. It may simply be that there’s only a guaranteed 2x DVD speed in most Blu-ray players, which is not enough to fully support the Blu-ray format, so they just don’t bother. But nearly every Blu-ray player will play the related AVCHD format from DVD. Why? Could be that AVCHD actually is a formally defined DVD format (eg, part of the AVCHD specs for camcorders), whereas true Blu-ray-on-DVD is not.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

First question: how is he planning to display the “3D”. You may or may not have the easy ability to produce something that’ll work as he’s expecting. You probably need more information.

Second: the easy answer is “no”… an actual 3D shoot contains information you don’t have. There are number of ways of faking 3D. Some programs can isolate foreground from background, or motion form still, and fake it that way. In fact, some televisions can do this for you, too… I was watching a friend’s brand new Samsung plasma 3D doing this about a month ago. It was pretty weak, and I’m not a fan of active LCD shutter glasses, either.

Another datapoint… have you seen “Clash of the Titans” or any of these other 2D faked into 3D films in the theater? “Clash of the Titans” cost about $125,000,000 to make. They spent 10 weeks of rendering with the View-D system (Prime Focus) and $4,500,000 to deliver a 3D version of the film… which SUCKED.

If you must have it, and you’re playing video from a PC of some sort, there are probably dozens of 3D effects programs out now. One example is “3Difier”… at least they have a demo version, and the final product is only $25. This does the conversion on playback, so, again, if the PC is the playback device, there’s nothing else for you to do.
https://3dfier.blogspot.com/

You might also check out the 3D forum on the COW: https://forums.creativecow.net/stereoscopic3d

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

AVC properly rendered at 20Mb/s (which, one hopes, can be done on a modern PC using the Sony CODEC) should look about as good as MPEG-2 at 40Mb/s. Most camcorders offer higher rates, largely because (a) they can, and (b) they’re trying to pack that AVC encoder into a chip that can stay cool and run on 3W power, not the multi-core 1000W monstrosity you might have in your PC case at home.

With that said, I do agree it’s shame that Sony won’t offer higher bitrates in AVC.. it’s been now three or four generations of Vegas without this being bumped up. Neither does the Sony CODEC offer variable bitrate, which is also what you get on your camcorder formats. VBR doesn’t deliver better quality, but it delivers better quality for a given average bitrate. Couple this with smart rendering, and it would at least be possible to make your BDs from the original camcorder video… doesn’t get better than that.

In reality, given my likelihood of using multiple cameras and/or DSLRs, with color matching, possibly shake or noise processing, etc. it’s probably no big deal at the end of the day. But still, nice to know you could… I’m sure some day I’ll have a vacation video that fits the bill, just one camera, perfect sunlit images, etc.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I own over two dozen mics, and can attest that the AT2020 is a bargain for the $70 or so you can usually find it at… a bit more for the USB version ($92.95 at B&H). And if you only ever need the mic for voice-overs, that’s an acceptable package (my AT2020 is the normal XLR version, not the USB version).

A more versatile solution, though, is to buy the normal mic and a USB “converter” device (essentially, a mini “sound card” with XLR adapter and phantom power), such as the Blue Icicle ($35, supports 44.1kHz audio) or MXL MicMate ($40, supports both 44.1kHz and 48kHz audio). You’ll also need the USB cable. Don’t buy the Alesis MicLink for the AT2020, that’ll not work with condenser mics, only dynamic. Anyway, this setup lets you do more interesting things with the AT2020 in the future, for virtually the same cost.

If you want a bit cheaper, the Alesis MicLink is about $32, and it will work with the GLS Audio ES-58-S ($30 on Amazon), delivering 44.1kHz sampled audio. The ES-58 is a Chinese clone of the venerable Shure SM58 dynamic vocal mic… and oddly, it’s actually bit better, mostly because it uses modern Neodymium magnets.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Same here… I’m using AVCHD/MTS from Panasonic camcorders, HDV/MTS from Sony, and AVC/Quicktime from Canon HDSLR (60D) with very reliable results (other than Cineform output still being broken in Vegas 10). Even that Canon worried me a bit, because in native format, I’m potentially at the mercy of Apple’s Quicktime subsystem for Windows. But I could always re-mux that to MP4 if necessary.

And Vegas has come some distance in handling AVC. This is a fairly complex format, and pretty much every camcorder manufacturer had their own set of quirks with it (a Sanyo Xacti FH1 I was playing with a year ago very regularly crashed Vegas, by including negative timecodes in its particular flavor of AVC + MP4 wrapper). This hasn’t been a Vegas thing, it’s an industry thing. And HD itself has been an evolving thing… for about decade, the right answer was always “DV”.. your worst conflict might be DV/AVI Type 1, DV/AVI Type 2, or DV/Quicktime. These days, there are dozens of HD format permutations, and the count seems to increase regularly.

ProRes is very much, and very intentionally, an Apple proprietary format. Yeah, you can read in under Windows and, thus, in theory, edit in any NLE that supports Quicktime under Windows. But only do far as Apple’s willing to make that stable… and they have largely indicted, as John says, that you should have a Mac for any serious ProRes work.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You pretty much need a Blu-ray player to play any HD video on a disc. With that said, it’s nearly universal for Blu-ray players to play an HD format on DVDs.

Unfortunately, the format they play isn’t precisely Blu-ray. DVD Architect can create a Blu-ray formatted DVD, which will play in virtually no Blu-ray players. But they nearly all play the AVCHD format, largely for camcorder support. AVCHD was of course derived from Blu-ray, but it’s not identical. A correctly formatted AVCHD disc must have audio and video at 18Mb/s or less, and a few other small details.

There’s a freeware tool called multiAVCHD that can prepare such discs from projects rendered to compatible video from Vegas.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Another thing that helps, at least for a new project. I always record an entire event with a digital recorder (Tascam DR-1 or Zoom H4n), start to finish. With that, I’m free to start and stop cameras a needed, without worrying too much about being able to sync up. I actually started this before using Plural Eyes, but PE does seem to function pretty well, this way, no scrambling of the clip order.

-Dave