[Dave Haynie]

Hmmm… sure looks like something’s wrong with the WAV file formatting. I’ve been using a Zoom H4n regularly, pretty much since them came out (replaced my old Tascam digital recorder), and never had a problem in any version of Vegas.

I can recommend a couple of general things: run the latest H4n firmware, of course. The unit gets noisy if you’re using external mics with phantom power and the battery gets low. If you record from a mixer, watch your levels — most mixers will put out audio at pro +4dBu levels, and the H4n’s line inputs are -12dBV consumer-level inputs, and if you’re running to the XLR jacks, they’re mic level and you’re going to want a pair of 20dB pads.

However, there’s no manner of bad behavior I can think of that would get me the first waveform you’re displaying. Maybe a noise gate with a real slow recovery, or some sort of WAV encoding issue… maybe there’s a bug in the format, particular if you’re running an older version of the H4n firmware. And just to be safe, make sure you’re not running with the limiter or AGC enabled, at least until you verify you’re not running into any weirdness due to those.

If you have Sound Forge, try loading the WAV there. If it plays/displays as expected, write it out to another file.. WAV is ok, since Forge will re-write the file. Try that in Vegas, see if anything changes. I have an old Sanyo FH1 I bought for crashcam use (before the Heros got good), and while this does a decent job, it records in an MP4 wrapper, sometimes with a corrupted timecode. Vegas always crashed on that timecode (haven’t tried it lately), which is not a huge shock — the job of an NLE is to rapidly process correct assets, not to take the time to assume every asset might be corrupt. Anyway, running that through a program that generated a new MP4 wrapper solved the problem. That’s basically what Forge, or some other audio program (even Audacity) might do for you here, if the problem is Vegas not understanding these files.

However, as said, I have never had a problem with the H4n. I’m running a recent but not absolute latest build of the firmware.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “I’m surprised an animation festival is not requesting that you use the QuickTime Animation codec which is specifically designed to handle animation. “

The Apple Animation CODEC is pretty limited to traditional 2D cell, pencil and paint style animation. It does run-length encoding and conditional replenishment, so it’s better than uncompressed if you’re animating very simple characters over a fixed background. But anything too sophisticated and the file could actually grow larger than uncompressed. It also does alpha channel.

I think the main purpose for this is intermediates in an animation workflow, same thing I do with uncompressed. You’re saving a little disc space, and you have transparency and no loss to manage layers of editing. There’s also apparently some performance issues with this CODEC, though it’s hard to say for sure. Many PCs are not built to support uncompressed 1080p playback (about 150MB/s) without judder. So the same is at least occasionally true of the Apple Animation CODEC.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Hmmm… I have the same recorder, never had an issue with sound… and that includes 40-50 track mixing projects in Vegas 12.

Here’s the problem I have: your waveform files. There are numerous realtime issues that can prevent Vegas (or any program) from playing audio back glitch-free in realtime. But none of those involve Vegas’s processing the audio to build the waveform previews — that’s not a realtime operation, and will succeed even if the driver were too slow for realtime playback. That suggests that whatever’s wrong, it’s real, at least to Vegas, not an artifact of playback.

A couple of things. Have you tried these in Vegas without any other assets, plug-ins, etc. Start a new project somewhere else, to force Vegas to rebuild its waveform files. Try that from a different disc. Try re-acquiring the audio files from the H4n SD card. If you have the SD card in an SD drive on your PC, maybe try a CHKDSK… I ran into a problem a couple of months ago with a dying SD card. Didn’t really expect that to ever happen, but sure enough, it did.

Playback issues can be other things on your system misbehaving, bad audio drivers (particularly MCI drivers, you might want to switch to ASIO and add a large buffer size, just to see what happens).

If you do have it playing back successfully in Premiere, try rendering it out from Premiere to a new file, but otherwise unchanged. If there was some kind of corruption in the file that Vegas can’t handle but Premiere can, that ought to fix it.

That’s all I got for now.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Not to be Captain Obvious here, but if you specify a minimum bitrate of 9800 kb/s (9.8Mb/s), that IS the DVD maximum bitrate. Are you sure you’re setting/saying the right thing? And in DVD mode, that 9800 is a magic number. In Blu-ray mode, it’s meaningless, so it sure sound like you have a DVD project there. I doubt DVDA will allow a minimum set to more than whatever your maximum value is, either, for either media type.

I just render in Vegas.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Ryan McRobb] “I have always been told that Nvidia cards are superior for video editing; but I think that is just in regard to Adobe products.”

One problem with memes and other things “everyone knows”… they die a hard death.

When GPGPU computing was young (oh so much younger than today), it was pretty much just CUDA. AMD has this thing called Streams that no one supported, and once Adobe figured out how to have the GPU help you out, it made nVidia a clear leader. nVidia was also faster at gaming for the most part, and maybe had an edge in OpenGL, at least from time to time, so no one really questioned this idea.

But looking at least at OpenCL benchmarks, and in particular at Vegas benchmarks, that’s no longer the case. If it ever was. As I’ve mentioned before, I bought both the nVidia GTX570 and the AMD HD6970 right after Vegas 11 came out, did lots of benchmarks, and found the AMD faster at everything, and bugs in some of the OpenCL stuff (non-Vegas) on the nVidia. They cost the same, so this was a no-brainer.

But it’s not just that. Ok, sure, you’d expect the newer AMDs and nVidias to do better — both nVidia’s Kepler architecture and AMD’s GCN architecture were designed from the ground up to do this General Purpose GPU computing, as well as the usual stuff. Look at the latest stuff… the nVidia Titan should, by all rights, be wiping the floor with my 2011-vintage HD6970, like the R9 290 is. But it’s not… the HD6970 is actually beating it on the Sony benchmark.

But here’s the weird part: nVidia hitting the wall. What you’d expect to see is something like the DirectCompute benchmarks (first and last in that linked article)… gradual dropping of performance as you go to older or lesser cards. And sure, there’s that double precision Folding @ Home run that has the Titan pull way out in front of everyone else… the Titan does have the same chip as the Tesla 20X, which is sold specifically for “compute” applications. But look at any of the other OpenCL benchmarks — nVidia just hits a wall. Sure, the HD5870 and HD6970 are most of those benchmarks, but keep in mind, the HD6970 is from 2011; it’s a contemporary of the GTX5xx series. And the HD5870 is from late 2009. They’re not even testing the nVidia GTX5xx or GTX6xx devices form that era.

Hitting a wall like that usually tells you there’s a problem of some kind. No telling if it’s intentional or not, but it would sure be interesting to see a Tesla 20X run those same benchmarks… same chip as the Titan, the Kepler GK110. The Titan is higher clocked, too. But the Kepler’s 3x the price. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tesla did better on those benchmarks anyway. Could be chip yield, could just be software holding the Titan back. Which never looks good if the other guy isn’t doing that.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I found Sony’s Huffman lossless CODEC to be faster than Lagarith or HuffYUV, I assume it’s just a coding optimization thing, as none of these ought to be expensive per se. DNxHD also suffers from what seems like slower than reasonable performance.

Of course, the other concern is HDD performance, particularly with I – Frame CODECs, but particularly anything lossless…. so 150MB/s for lossless uncompressed 8-bit video without alpha channel (most of the I’m doing pure uncompressed, it’s for animation, so I need the alpha too). That’s faster than pretty much any single HDD, so unless you use an SSD or a RAID, disc is going to be the limiting factor. Crunching that to lossless compressed may help, but on a modern PC, I’d expect much better performance overall with I-Frame-Only MPEG-2 or AVC, or maybe something like Cineform, if it’s become stable again.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

About the only thing Sony can do directly is ensure that Vegas works reliably with stable GPU drivers. Given my experience with the AMD HD6970 and the more recent versions of Vegas 12, that seems to be a pretty solved problem. This, plus any critical plug-ins, is the basis for your editing/preview performance, and certainly part of the rendering performance, since everything you see during a preview has to feed the rendering engine during a render. Perhaps Sony could further improve GPU performance, but in my short bit of testing, they do not seem to have done anything here.

Far as nVidia Kepler performance, I do not believe that Sony can do anything. That is a nVidia problem, and it shows up in many OpenCL benchmarks, not just Vegas. There are various theories. One is that nVidia just doesn’t have their GPGPU stuff tweaked for Kepler. Unlikely, as Kepler was the first architecture designed specifically for GPGPU computing. Another suggests nVidia is just slacking on OpenCL… maybe, I have not followed comparisons between Kepler and older chips on CUDA. And finally, it’s suggested that consumer and pro drivers are holding back on GPGPU performance, in order to make the Tesla “compute” boards more attractive. They all use the same chips, the Tesla costs twice that of the high end desktop GPU, it does get better performance on some benchmarks, and nVidia has done just this between OpenGL coding for desktop vs pro drivers. So maybe. But so far, nothing points at Vegas being the problem.

And finally, rendering, or more specififically, GPU accelerated rendering, which reallyy has been mostly about AVC rendering. Sony doesn’t seem to have done much here but add XAVC profiles, which isn’t new CODEC work. The Sony AVC CODEC has very marginal GPU acceleration. Main Concept’s is great, but according to their web site, still locked to just the 2011-vintage GPU they supported back when Roxio bought them. Sony really needs to find a better AVC supplier, or get their own act together. And add HEVC while they’re at it. No motion on any of these that I can see.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

For a small run, most any recent Epson photo printer can print on DVD blanks, obviously the printable variety. That’s been working for me for quite a long time. It’s slow and expensive for large runs, but so is burning them yourself. But for event videos, etc, where you may make only a dozen or so, it’s just the thing, and not a quality compromise in the slightest.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

That’s pretty typical of any live event — voice levels are usually really low compared to music. There are reasons.

Your brain tends to compensate a bit. Voice doesn’t have the range of dynamics that you get from music, so we accept the fairly low levels as louder than they are because they’re more consistent.

Many speakers aren’t as good at vocal projection, or as experienced in using a mic, as are singers.

If you’re getting a mix from the board, are the musicians using the same mics as the speakers? Do you have a multi-bus board? The easiest thing to do would be to create a submix for recording that boosts the speakers’ mics to your recorder, but leaves it as is for the audience.

You can try using automatic gain control on the H4n. Mostly that’s something to avoid — bad AGC can act pretty much like a compressor, which isn’t what you want. But the H4n AGC isn’t bad. That would boost the levels for speaking parts, drop them for music.

And the other thing… as long as you’re not clipping on the loud parts, you have a 24-bit recording there. There’s probably plenty of signal on the speakers, and I assume you’re editing anyway.

What I do in pretty much every live event (but particularly if I’m mixing for a DVD or Blu-ray), I duplicate the best track with audio (in the case of multiple recorders), call that voice, then mix that to the center channel in my surround-sound mix (in stereo, you can still set that center).

So then I cut at the transition points, remove the music parts in the voice track, the voice parts in the music track, and of course make the voice track mono (mix both channels, select left or right, whatever gets you good voice). I’ll probably normalize each voice clip, and then add enough compression to get the voice where it ought to be. After that, you have independent level controls for all voice and all music, so you can place that voice wherever you like in the final mix. This also frees me up to work on any music adjustments that might be needed without worrying about their effect on voice.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The Hero 3 White Edition sells new for about $200. I did a little double-check… in addition to wired remote/sync, all of the Hero 3 series support WiFi control via an iPhone/Android Hero App or a dedicated WiFi remote control (about $65). You’ll get better quality with the Hero 3+ Black Edition, but it’s almost twice the price. Here’s a comparison chart: https://gopro.com/cameras.

You will need MicroSD cards, about $30 for 32GB. And unlike pretty much any other cheap camcorder, there’s basically an entire industry devoted to Hero camera add-ons.

There are cameras you attach to something… no image stabilization. That something is quite often moving; there are thousands of videos online. These days, some of the best quality for the price, as well as features as mentioned, like WiFi control and mic input.

-Dave