[Dave Haynie]

As I said, I’m very skeptical. For one, it does appear to be in HD. Last I really looked into it (about a year ago), Vimeo was streaming their 720p HD at 2500Kb/s (YouTube at 2000Kb/s). If that’s still true, you have about 80MB there.. and they could well have upped the rate.

All I know for sure… it’s above 1500Kb/s, because I can’t stream in realtime over satellite.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Everyone here will say “Vegas”, and that is the correct answer. But the big win is that you can choose different levels. For example, start with Studio Platinum, which is pretty cheap and offers great HD editing. Later on, if you get more serious, you can upgrade to Vegas Pro, and take along everything you learned in “Studio”. And you can get a 30-day demo via download… that’s the best way to learn if the expense will be justified.

My one exposure to Pinnacle was with Impression, their old DVD program (I think they bought it from Minerva). This was in the early days of DVD authoring, and I did like the fact that, while low-level, you could do anything DVD is capable of doing in that program. Most others put some abstraction layer on top of the DVD machinery… makes it easier to edit (and perhaps, these days, easier to also do Blu-ray with the same abstraction), but it can limit power.

The huge problem with Impression: buggiest program I have ever successfully used for anything productive. I spent $350 for the program, endured months of agony, and got a pretty good DVD out of the deal. I mean, serious bugs… it was self-corrupting. You could edit your project, save it, only to find it couldn’t be re-read by the application. So I developed a workflow where I only edited on a copy, and did very frequent saves AND reloads (a save wasn’t sufficient).

The first version of DVD Architect would not have yielded just what I wanted, but I would have finished in a few days. Pinnacle offered one bug fix that didn’t do much, then pretty much abandoned the program. A company that does that will never “fool me twice”. Sony has occasionally stumbled on releases with a bug or few, but they do work hard to fix the bugs, and even add new features in-between major (eg, you pay again) releases.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Is that 66MB on upload, or 66MB in the final Vimeo format?

Vimeo is recommending HD be encoded at 5Mb/s for HD. That would mean 160MB for that particular video, assuming it’s really in HD (there are plenty of compression artifacts, but if I’m watching at a normal distance from my 24″ monitor, it looks good). Now, like YouTube, Vimeo doesn’t say a great deal about their presentation format (eg, they take your video and encode it into several streaming formats, including HD and SD, and these days, Flash and H.264/AVC versions). But the best possible video you can get with a really good video encoder (for low bitrate, I’d probably use MainConcept AVC in VBR mode, over Sony’s fixed-rate encoder, from Vegas) would be to encode to a format that won’t get changed at all. If I encode to 5Mb/s AVC and AAC, will Vimeo not re-encode it for the HD presentation format?

It also may help to be sure you do the frame rate matching. If you upload at 1080/60i, and they deliver in 720/30p, you have no control over the de-interlacing OR the final encoding. In short, the more you know about the web streaming site (I’m on Vimeo, but I have generally used YouTube more), the better you can tailor your encoding to the potential damage the web site will do.

Otherwise, you need sufficiently high quality. Unless upload time is a major issue, you probably don’t need to worry about upload format quite so much… a sufficiently large upload should deliver the best quality that their re-encoding is willing to deliver. Naturally, it helps to start with good video — this video was expertly shot and cut, so yeah, it does look good.

Here’s a much less well edited video I shot, then uploaded to YouTube from a very high quality 1080p original. YouTube uses a lower bitrate for hosted video in 720p than Vimeo, but essentially, this is about as good as one can get on this video, based on it being recoded by YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1rVPpT47hc

Some issues are based on the encoder. Some encoders just handle things like fast motion better than others, and that’s where doing your best mastering job at a lower bitrate may pay off. For example, any time you go too fast in an AVC video, the encoder winds up with a few hard choices. It can try to just encode the video, but that’ll lead to visible DCT blocks (what consumers call “pixelized” video). Or they can apply selective blur — another name for a low-pass filter, which will make the encoder’s job much easier, since it reduces the high frequency information in that area. I’m not sure how adaptive either AVC CODEC is at this stuff, though I would expect the 2-pass encoder to have a better shot at doing this right.

If you can get your video looked fairly decent at a lower bitrate, you can apply those same tricks to a higher bitrate upload, allowing some “room” for the recoding loss-of-quality, but dealing with the trouble areas that the Vimeo or YouTube encoders don’t handle well.

-Dave

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[Dave Haynie]

Not on the MacOS platform, but I do this in Sony Vegas/DVD Architect… have been doing so since 2008.

The great thing here is that one authored production in DVDA can be targeted to either Blu-ray or DVD with minor changes. On the downside, the program doesn’t currently allow access to more advanced Blu-ray features… their Blu-ray model makes Blu-ray a slightly more capable (mostly) DVD that can be done in HD, AVC or MPEG-2 (no support for VC-1 at the moment… but well, this is Sony). Audio options are PCM and AC-3, none of the new high-definition compression formats, but I’ve found that perfectly adequate for my work.

Adobe Encore seems to the be the go-to application for full Blu-ray authoring on the MacOS. This also supports BD and DVD authoring in a single project, and something Adobe calls “WebDVD”, which is apparently a Flash framework (which I’m sure Apple loves to no end, given their campaign to kill of Flash). I have not used Encore… I know people who think it’s a dandy program.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I would check that Vegas understands your input video properly. 1080/30p is not a valid AVCHD format — it usually comes off the camera encoded at 1080/60i. There’s no particularly good reason that AVCHD doesn’t support 1080/30p in “native” format… it’s just the arbitrary list of resolution and frame rates built into Blu-ray (AVCHD comes from the Blu-ray specs).

If you saw stuttering movement back in the DV days, I’d claim you had your fields inverted. That ought to be impossible these days, particularly with progressive footage, but one of the best ways to go about solving a problem is figuring out what you need to do to create that problem. If I wanted an annoying stutter that only shows up in motion, I’d invert my interlace field order. Works every time 🙂

Anyway, make sure that you’re not getting any weirdness with attempts to unnecessarily de-interlace the source video. Why this would look different between Sony and Main Concept, I don’t know, but it’s the first place I would look.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Dual Westinghouse L2410 MVA-type 1920×1200 LCD monitors here (originally $350 each), with an optional 32″ LCD/LED HDTV output as well. These monitors actually take composite or YPrPb inputs, too… more useful four years ago than it is today, but still occasionally good to have.

I can definitely tell the difference between the 720p and 1080p versions. Part of that’s because the 1080p is too slow to be usefully viewable over my satellite internet connection. But it is noticeably sharper.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

At my house, I can barely stream the 720p, much less the 1080p. I should try it at work myself.

I shot this in San Francisco last June, and uploaded my same-day edits from my cousin’s high speed cable link. I never had much time to look it over.

My point isn’t to suggest a result, but basically, to provide an example for us all to look at. These were shot on good cameras, uploaded at 1080p @ 20Mb/s, etc. You probably can’t get much better out of YouTube, unless they tweak their encoder. If you can’t see a difference, then there may well not be a significant difference, at least based on YouTube encoding last June.

On the other hand, 1080p costs much more encoding time. If you know up front there’s no effective difference, there’s no reason to bother. If there’s a small difference visible only to video nerds, that, too, is useful information. If it was day and night, also good info.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Dave- I’m a musician,so I could do with another few pages of advice too!

Funny story… I had moved from Amiga to PC for audio in the early 1990s, after Blue Ribbon Bakery stopped on new versions of Bars & Pipes, Sunrize (8/16-channel audio for Amiga) vanished. I started with Cakewalk, and spent much time on the PC-DAW mailing list, learning the ins and outs of what others had discovered. Getting a PC to do anything in realtime was harder than the Amiga, in part because we designed the Amiga, HW and SW, specifically to do things in realtime.

There was a thread going around, arguing over weather CPU or other things were the limiting factor on most PCs, for number-of-tracks.. and this was before signal processing plug-ins. I wrote some tome on the fact it was hard drive speed, and even more, seek latency. Turns out that the one guy defending that position, Peter Haller, worked for the Sonic Foundry. He sent me promo copies of Acid and Vegas… and I’ve been using both ever since.

I can play back native EX3 1080 files no prob,but as soon as I add an effect the playback resolution goes to Half,and using 2 effects almost brings it to a halt.

Vegas playback in one of the auto modes will scale according to load… so the more stuff you add, the slower it may scale down. The same PC with more RAM _might_ get a little faster, but it’s not necessarily the case. It depends, of course, on what the actual bottleneck was.

There are effects and there are effects. Some effects are pretty minimal, others take crazy amounts of time. For example, I use the Neat Video noise reduction plug-in on any video I shoot in a too-dark room. That one plug-in reduces throughput well below any level that still resembles “video”. So I keep that one turned off during editing, only run it at rendering time (it would totally be a cool idea to have that option in the plug-in dialog… apply always, apply at render, turn off).

The time spent also depends on your mode.. are you in 32-bit, or 8-bit? And if you’re on a slower CPU, the decoding of things like AVCHD can be a significant portion of the rendering time (see how well you do at playback of a single stream… and know that Vegas may well be slower, particularly compared to GPU-accelerated decoders).

Meanwhile,I can play 3 or 4 of these video tracks together and get full framerate at the Half setting.The CPU usage goes up in predictable chunks with each added track,but the effects seem to use much more CPU. I’ve tried different effects,and some are worse than others,but it seems that windows7 64bit with all the extra RAM is worse than Vista!?

It can depend on the specific effects, or even the video decoding CODECs. When you run 64-bit, you’re using a different set of CODECs and plug-ins than you do in 32-bit mode (though, apparently, 32-bit VST plug-ins work in 64-bit mode… no idea why they’re the exception). You can install both 64-bit and 32-bit Vegas in W764… do this, install both. The try some simple stuff. See you CPU use on decoding just the video streams you’re working on, 32-bit vs. 64-bit. Try the various plug-ins.

In theory, 64-bit will be much faster when you need the RAM. And it could well be a little faster when you don’t… the AMD64 CPU model adds more general purpose registers in 64-bit mode, it has a slightly better SISD FPU model, etc. It’s worth a check, you may find only one or two plug-ins are truly evil.

I opened Windows Task Manager,and, regardless of effects or number of tracks,the RAM usage is around 2.5GB,with plenty in spare and in cache etc.

It’s not going to use more than it needs. Doing various video things, I’ve definitely seen 6.5GB used on an 8GB machine. So you can get there.. but on any given project, not necessarily. I had a project in 2009, before 64-bit, with 45 video tracks, most of them greenscreens, and, well, wanna talk SLOW. This two minute music video took me about 3-4 hours to fully render, even after I had broken the video into two separate Vegas projects.

As i say,I dont have lots of experience,but is it normal that the effects would eat up so much CPU power,and that Vegas would not take advantage of RAM?

Yeah.. some plug-ins can use crazy amounts of CPU. Do as I suggested, and look for anomalous things.. some plug-in really dragging things down, or eating much more CPU in 64-bit than 32-bit. We’ve even seen, on this list, video CODECs that are good in 32-bit, but insanely slow in 64-bit.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Here are a few I did upload at 1080p. These were both same-day edits, so they edit itself, and the noise in the second one (a wedding in a very dark, weirdly lit nightclub) were better in the final project.

This was originally shot at 1080/60p on a Panasonic TM700.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1rVPpT47hc

This was originally shot at 1080/24p on a Panasonic HMC40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8qFgciwIU

Judge for yourself if the 1080p is any improvement over 720p, once in YouTube format.

-Dave

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[Dave Haynie]

2 Internal Samsung F3 1TB

First thing, for editing, get more memory. On a 32-bit system, you’re only good for another GB or so, but once you got to 64-bit, the system can (and will) use whatever you can put in there, eventually.

I use an EX3,Canon 550D,and a Zoom H4 audio recorder.
Just bought an H4n for myself… a Christmas present 🙂 I was a dedicated Tascam guy for years, but I was increasingly frustrated with the preamp levels of my DR-1. I wanted a unit with XLR inputs, phantom power, but also easy use with dynamic mics and guitars. They didn’t fix most of the issues with the DR-100… and add to that the H4n’s 4-channel mode, “portastudio” mode, and easy power (AA batteries, and it comes with a power supply).. it was time to give in 🙂

1 a)Apart from Windows7,Vegas 9e,and Photoshop,
which other programs etc should I install that will be neccessary or helpful but not conflict with Vegas?
What are you doing? If you’re doing any kind of complex animation or titling, you need a good set of plug-ins, and/or something like Adobe AfterEffects. I have Boris FX and Boris Continuum Complete… you need Vegas 10 for BCC7.

If you’re doing original music, Vegas is fine as an audio sequencer… you need something else (I use Acid 7 and Cakewalk Sonar X1) for MIDI and loop sequencing. And for most any serious audio work something for hard audio editing like Sound Forge.

I also have a few plug-ins for noise reduction (audio and video), morphing, etc. It’s not really necessary to load up on things you might use, given the typical download sales model these days — buy it when you know you need it. Ask around sites like this for advice on what to buy.

b)Should I create Partitions?
Probably not. Partitions don’t serve much purpose these days.

c)Antivirus. I’ll only be connected to internet to update or download programs to do with video editing. I was thinking of installing Norton Internet Security 2011.Is this a good idea?I intend to turn it off when not online.
I use NOD32, and you never need to turn it off.. it’s essentially transparent. Most of the “Antivirus screws you up” memes come out of things like Norton, which need to pester you all the time to make you think they’re doing their job… or to force you to buy upgrades. Norton in particular is a pretty bad idea on any media content creation system.

d)I also have a Blu-Ray burner.As I’m going to lose my pre-installed programs when I switch to 64bit,what’s the best program to install for playback etc?
Not sure about best… I use the Cyberlink PowerDVD that came with my BD player… like three years ago. If I did BD playback regularly, I’m sure I would have upgraded. But by the time I’m burning a disc, I play it back on the PS3.

2 I’m going to use the G-Raid via e-SATA for my raw footage and current projects. That leaves me with 2 internal hard drives. Is it best to have one for Windows7 and Programs,and the other to render to? OR Is there any advantage of having them RAID 0?

RAID 0 buys you increased linear read and write speed. It also tends to add together the negative qualities of the drives, otherwise. So you lose your partition when the first one fails. Your seeks take the longer of the two drives’ seek times… a non-issue if you’re reading/writing a single gigantic file (since you’ll need to seek only half as often), but a real issue if you’re dealing with a large number of files all at once.

So no, I haven’t been interested in RAID0. I supposed, if I found a real sweet spot on performance that matched my usual workflow, maybe (in English… a RAID starts out fast. As I add files pulled from the same drive to a project, eventually the RAID may get slower, which eliminates the primary purpose these days. When I did run RAID0, it was usually just to increase capacity. Not a huge issue today).

In my setup, I have two permanent internal drives, each 1.5TB. I use the C: drive for OS, etc. as well as a rendering target… there’s absolutely no reason you can’t use it for that. If you have enough RAM, you don’t actively page swap while running Vegas, and by the time you do a render, anything that’s speculatively loaded from Vegas, or other system-level drains on the main drive, are pretty much done.

The D: drive is for small projects and stuff I keep around all the time. One reason to offload stuff here is differing backup strategies, too… some things need regular backup, some need incremental, some need incremental with achiving, etc.

I also have two SATA “cartridge” drives, and a RAID. The RAID is Firewire 800, not eSATA, so it’s not for high-speed stuff, relatively speaking. I keep finished projects there, media I need regular access to, photos, lots of other stuff.

The cart drives hold one SATA 3.5″ drive and two DATA 2.5″ drives. These are for larger projects… any commercial project I do gets its own drive.

-Dave