Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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This is the cheesiest thread of the year!
-Dave
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It’s not entirely without precedent. For example, Vegas supported High Definition editing well before it supported any standard HD delivery mechanism, such as Blu-ray.
On the other hand, DVDA 5.0 did give us a basic HD delivery mechanism not long after Blu-ray became the established standard. And it was a “mid-release” upgrade to Vegas. So who knows, Sony could deliver an updated version of DVDA with 3D support before Vegas 11 ships. I wouldn’t hold my breath over it, but this kind of thing has happened before.
-Dave
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Simple answer: there’s no “3D” stereoscopic format for DVD. You might be able to create something anaglyphic (color multiplexed monochrome) on DVD.
For proper, modern “3D” you need to author a Profile 5 Blu-ray disc (which of course, has to play back on a Profile 5 compliant Blu-ray player… these require a 2x Blu-ray drive and HDMI 1.4 compliant output).
So yeah, Sony built in support for editing stereographic video in Vegas 10, but they do not have Profile 5 support in DVD Architect. And far as I can tell, the only 3D output format Vegas 10 supports is Cineform Neo3D… an extra $$$ add-on); they don’t create Blu-ray standard AVC MVC output. You can do a little messing around to render both left and right views… but over all, not a finished solution.
Right now, stereoscopic Blu-Ray authoring is available in Sony’s Blu-print, NetBlender’s DoStudio, or Sonic’s Scenarist … all multi-thousand dollar programs. This was one my concerns when Sony bought The Sonic Foundry, and it seems well founded.
Companies protect their higher-end products. When SF was a stand-alone company, they certainly had to manage their development time, but there was no inherent limit on the features they could build into Vegas, Acid, Forge, etc. But you don’t see all of the features included in the “Studio” versions of those — they have to protect the higher value of the top-of-the-line.
Today, Sony’s high-end Blu-Ray authoring application is Blu-print, which they sell for about $50,000. Which helps explain why, other than some basic support for Blu-ray-modeled-as-a-DVD, DVD Architect hasn’t seen much of an upgrade in years. Vegas itself won’t produce higher bitrate AVC output, despite the fact that it can certainly edit many professional formats, and Blu-ray itself supports video bitrates up to 40Mb/s (72Mb/s for a Profile 5 MVC disc)… this sure looks like they’re protecting the high end.
With that said, it makes zero sense to sell Vegas Pro as a full authoring system, tout both “3D” and “Blu-ray” as major features, but not connect them. Sure, they do basically disclaim this; they only claim “3D Editing” as a top-level bullet point feature. However, they have a banner ad, showing on the Sony Media site right now, which says things like “Simplify 3D creation and delivery” and “Edit and produce 3D with speed and precision”. The editing is unquestionably there. Production… not so much. And delivery? I can’t find it.
I have no current interest in editing stereoscopic video or making “3D” discs, but the hole here is just a little gaping, for those who do want these things.
-Dave
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I’ve seen random black frames in Vegas 10… never in 9. At the time, I was in a serious hurry to get a long render going again (at day away from my rendering PC, it ought to be rendering), so I didn’t spend the time to analyze what was happening. No Camtasia, but I did have a number of .veg files included as video on the timeline. Sources were MXF MPEG-2, MPEG-2-TS AVC, and w64 audio.
And I’ll second the OpenFX crashiness. The big one was a weird interaction. I was using BCC7 ChromaKey, no crash in site. But if I did much pan/crop editing, Vegas would crash when I exited the Pan/Crop dialog (some simple animation for a DVD/Blu-Ray). It took me awhile to start changing things.. I went back to the Sony ChromaKey, and no crash.
But aside this, and the broken Cineform support, I’ve been pretty happy with Vegas 10. But I would never recommend rendering back to the source data drive… that’s just going to slow things down. Of course, many crashes are the result of unexpected race conditions in software state machines.. so it’s actually the case that changing the timing of a render really could eliminate the crash. Chances are, speeding it up somehow might, also.
-Dave
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There are a bunch of factors.
The others pretty much addressed the memory issue.. that’s the big one. When you don’t have enough memory, Windows, being a virtual memory OS, will allocate more virtual memory… memory the system doesn’t really have. What this means is that stuff that should be in memory gets “swapped” to and from hard disc. Even on really fast HDD systems, your PC’s memory is thousands of times faster than the HDD. So this can be a huge slowdown.. and memory is cheap.
After that, it’s complexity of any kind. Each layer adds rendering time, each effect adds rendering time, etc. And memory requirements. I did a music video with over 40 layers of video… eventually split up into two .veg projects, and on the PC of the day (a year and a half ago), it took over four hours to render… for a 2-minute video, on a Quad-Core CPU with 8GB of memory.
But that is one thing you can do today… if your project is at all complex, figure out how to render part of it out, then load that into the next project. In the old days when computers were hard pressed to mix more than a few audio tracks in realtime, we called this “bouncing a submix”… multiple tracks go into one, freeing up resources to allow more stuff in.
-Dave
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Your computer should be just what it was after the removal.
With that said, if you need specific CODECs, you should install just those.
If you have any Blu-Ray player software, many camcorder support packages, Adobe Flash, even some Web browsers, you may already have an AVC CODEC installed. The question to ask… your AVC video originates from somewhere. Unless you’re just grabbing pirated video off the web, there’s some help from the provider of that video. For example, YouTube has a help page here: https://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=56115
Apple’s Quicktime can play most AVC formats.. you can get the free download here (it’s a little annoying, and huge, but it’s also pretty stand-alone, it doesn’t mess with other functions in the system): https://www.apple.com/quicktime
If you’re just looking for playback, you can try a couple players. The best quality, and some of the lowest CPU overhead I’ve seen on a PC/Windows system is from Splash Lite: https://mirillis.com/en/products/splash.html
Another option is the VLC Media Player. This actually contains some of the same open source software that went into K-Lite, but it’s all self-contained… these don’t get installed at the system level, so they don’t muck up other programs with questionable CODECs. That’s not to knock all open source CODECs; I have used some of these same bits of code in video servers I’ve integrated for industrial use. But there is some junk out there, too. VLC isn’t terribly efficient at playback, the price is right: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
DivX, Inc. is responsible for the various DivX formats. They have free CODECs for playback, which you can find here: https://www.divx.com/en/software/divx-plus/codec-pack
None of these necessarily let you create videos, but they will help you play things back.
-Dave
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It’s really helpful to describe your system, when asking for technical help. There are multiple reasons things go slow, but usually, the answer is simple: your computer isn’t fast enough.
First of all.. don’t worry about the memory card. But you will definitely benefit if you copy all files to a hard drive; SD Cards just aren’t all that fast, by comparison. Your Class 4 card is just dandy for recording HD video, but it’s a slow read (I have several 32GB Class 4 cards, I know of what I speak). A good hard drive can be 10x faster, but also, a bit less of a burden on the CPU.
Next… playback in a video player can usually tap features of your system that Vegas doesn’t (at least not yet). If you’re reasonably up-to-date, it can use your video card’s GPU to accelerate the AVC/MPEG-4 video your GoPro is shooting. AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is the most complex video CODEC in common use these days — a CPU has to work pretty hard to decode it all by itself.
720/60p is often the preferred format for sports videography, nothing wrong with using that — it’s fully compliant with the prevailing ATSC and Blu-Ray standards, and YouTube will at least accept 60p uploads. Your PC will perform about the same on 720/60p, 1080/30p, and 1080/60i video (the GoPro doesn’t shoot the latter, but that’s the most common HD format). I use 720/60p when I shoot High School soccer in the fall; the GoPro is clearly designed for sports-related work.
So, there are a few things you can do. Set your project to 1280×720/60p (in Vegas Pro 10, there’s a template for this, “HD 720-60p”… not sure what support you get in Studio), which will keep Vegas from needed to do any on-the-fly format conversions. You can change the “Preview Quality” setting in the Video Preview window, to let you trade off speed for quality. But, bottom line, AVC is a complex format, and you need a pretty decent computer for editing this quickly. My 6-core AMD 3.2GHz system, with 8GB, is decent, but there are folks here with faster systems.
I’m not sure what options you have in Studio, but it’s also common practice to transcode AVC into an “intermediate” format for editing. This could be a format like Cineform (about $100) or Adobe DNxHD (free download), which trade off much larger files for much lower encoding complexity. Some people use higher quality MPEG-2, which isn’t quite as computationally simple as these, but much easier on your CPU than AVC. This does tend to be pretty complicated, so if you’re just starting out, plan to spend a little time learning the ropes — most people don’t learn this in a week. I’m still learning after 20 years at it…
-Dave
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It will certainly be slower than your other drives… the real question is the value. If you’re doing HD, 40GB is awfully small. It’s maybe useful as an output drive (eg, just used as the target of a render), to help reduce seeking on your main data drive. That’s about it.
People think of drive performance being based on rotational velocity (eg, 7200RPM), but that’s only one factor. The drive speed does affect “straight-line” performance, but a far larger contributing factor is the density of a track… how much data can be read in one rotation? As your 1TB drive is many times larger than the 40GB, even at the same speed, it’ll be dramatically faster in real terms, as it can transfer much more data before the next track-to-track seek.
Now, for anything that will fit on that drive, sure, it’s not going to have a real drag on performance, simply because you’ll never use that for a CODEC in which the data rate might actually be a large contributing factor to the render… it’s just too small. So adding that for limited use is probably better than not adding it. Adding a cheap, large, external USB drive will get you the same help, much more storage. But of course, not free.
-Dave
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Hi-
It’s great to hear from someone who remembers the Jurassic era of personal computing. I’m not sure “well known computer super star” still applies, but I’m really proud of what we accomplished back in those days.
I did one film on the Amiga in the dark, dark days of analog, and that was my video about the end of Commodore. Things were getting bad, and I had recently seen Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me”, so I got motivated. With years of still photography, absolutely no video experience, and nothing but a “Video8” (not even Super) camcorder. And more embarrassing still, I used the built-in mic. But I did sell about 4,000 copies, not too shabby.
That was sophisticated I guess, for the day, for a garage production. I used Scala MM400 to control my camcorder via LANC and my JVC Super VHS deck via IR. I borrowed a SuperGen 2000 and a JVC TBCPlus, and managed to get them to fit into an Amiga 3000+ prototype (same Pandora/AA/AGA chipset as the Amiga 4000). Audio was though a small mixer… I just had to move faders and hit the cassette’s “play” button at the right time.
I started doing music, later video, on PCs. Particularly in the early days, PCs were just a mess. Since I actually had designed Amigas that could do the same jobs, I hung around the PC-DAW mailing list, helping folks get their PCs to actually manage to do recording (and sometimes, even MIDI) properly. One heated discussion actually landed me free copies of Vegas 1 and Acid 1… seems the guy I was defending (who was correct) worked at Sonic Foundry. Vegas Video came along just in time to save me from the hell that was Adobe Premiere and/or it’s drug-addled pool-boy, Ulead Media Studio Pro.
So now, between compiles and renders and autoroutes, I try to help out on boards like this.. as well as learning what I don’t know about video.
Oh, if you haven’t, and you’re an Amiga or C= fan, check out my “hazydave” channel on YouTube. I have some C= related stuff there, as well as a small number of other videos. If I actually manage some time off this Christmas, hopefully a couple more music videos…. I wrote a couple new songs last summer.
-Dave
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You don’t usually render audio and video together when creating a DVD. Are you using DVD Architect, or something else? For DVD, you should use one of the profiles for “DVD Architect” under MPEG-2, to ensure you have DVD compliant video.
As for audio, if you want PCM (uncompressed), just render to a WAV file, and load that separately in your DVD authoring program. There’s no reason to worry about creating a multiplexed MPEG file for DVD, since the DVD application is going to strip that container and create its own, anyway. And you can’t use 44.1kHz sampling; DVD requires 48kHz.
-Dave