[Dave Haynie]

You probably need to phrase your question more precisely. After all, MPEG-2 is a format used for both HD and SD… there’s no question that a full HD video rendered to full HD MPEG-2 looks better than an SD video rendered to SD.

Rendering HD down to SD, correctly, looks better than SD. It’s even more profound in the real world of NTSC video. When you shoot SD, as typically people do, on DV tape, the video is recorded in DV format. DV is a DCT format, very similar to Motion JPEG. As well as the lossy compression (low-pass filtering of the frequency domain transform), there’s a color decimation… 3/4th of the color is basically just tossed out.

The problem here is that, in DV, we do 4:1:1 color decimation; in DVD/MPEG-2, we need 4:2:0 color decimation (PAL DV does the same 4:2:0 that’s done in MPEG). So, even if you want an SD target, shooting in HD will give you much better color, based on practical gear. Pretty much any MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 camera will use 4:2:0… once you get more high-end in the pro market, there are also 4:2:2 options (only half the color samples are tossed out).

As a general rule, I recommend shooting at your target frame rate, and otherwise in the best possible resolution and bit rate, at all times. You paid for high quality gear, presumably, no need to use it in lower quality modes, unless there’s some absolute need (once I had to buy a couple memory cards in a pinch… my camera refused to allow full quality modes with one of them… despite at fact they were the same SanDisk model).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

There’s some logic to using a good quality LCD TV for preview. I don’t use a television while editing, but I always watch a preview on my 71″ rear-projection DLP.

For accurate color, you really need to calibrate your monitors and your HDTV. For video/graphics editing, I always strongly recommend against the TN (Twisted Nematic) displays.. which are sadly, the kind nearly every “regular monitor” is. These are easily recognized by the fact that rapidly fade when viewed off-axis. There’s a list of problems: most only deliver 6-bits of color per pixel, the color is questionable in the first place, etc. The reason they’re popular: they’re cheap to make, and very fast — gamers pretty much drive the needs of the PC industry.

The “right” LCD monitor type is IPS (in-plane switching) or VA (vertical alignment) .. or one of the variations of these (MVA, PVA, AFFS, AVS, etc). Opinions vary… IPS probably has the best color stability, MVA tends to be better for moving video, etc.

As for HDTVs themselves, I actually like the look of DLP over that of LCD, but the consumer market demanded thin panels, so everyone gets LCD these days. The “LED TV” everyone advertises is really an LCD panel with dynamic zone LED lighting. Rather than one gigantic CCFL backlight, modern panels use a large array of LEDs as backlights. The LEDs are modulated based on source material.. this is good thing. A typical TN LCD display has a contrast ratio of about 1000:1 if you’re lucky, but using dynamic LEDs, they can extend this dramatically. The target is to as good or better than a phosphor display, which is typically 15,000:1 or so.

Of course, one could argue that if you really want to edit for the masses, you could get your video to look correct on an uncalibrated HDTV, since that’s the TV most people will own. TVs leave the factory set to deliver a crazy impact on the floor of a Big Box store, not even close to being set up properly for home viewing. Naturally, I wouldn’t actually recommend that — a decent HDTV properly set up is the proper preview device. I’ve seen excellent units from Panasonic (who also made the second-best Plasmas… Pioneer Kuro is the best, but Plasma too is kind of becoming a specialty item, if not leavinghe market entirely — they’re power hogs), the new ones from Sharp with yellow added is new to LCDs and may yield some better flesh tones… I have yet to see one properly set up in a realistic viewing room, however (most rear-projection DLPs have been 5 or 6 colors since, well, DLP was popular… Mitsibushi still makes these, and of course, most digital projectors, for home, office, or at the local IMAX, are DLP-based).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Second, having both monitors plugged into the same card will definitely impact graphics performance on any machine.

It’ll impact PEAK graphics performance. Or, more correctly, it’s exactly the same graphics load as driving a larger display. For example, the bandwidth requirements for driving both of my 1920×1200 monitors is precisely the same as for driving one 3840×1200 monitor.

Now, for any kind of 2D work whatsoever, that’s not even remotely a concern. The memory bandwidth on all modern graphics cards is pretty insane… my oldish nVidia 8800GT has a memory bandwidth of 57.6GB/s. A single 1920×1200/60p display needs 415MB/s of bandwidth for screen refresh… I have enough memory bandwidth to display 138 of these screens. So the load of two is hardly measurable on anything else I’m doing. Neither will all of the 2D blits I could ever want. This is why graphics card vendors long ago abandoned dual-port VRAM (no loading on the main bus for graphics display) for super high speed GRAM (Graphics DRAM).

Even a full AVCHD decode assist is a small load for your GPU (the fact that a 1080/60p video plays just dandy on my laptop, on a relatively weak nVidia 8600M GPU, just as well as on my much more powerful laptop, is a pretty good indication it’s using only a fraction of the available resources).

Of course, one you’re pushing 3D as hard as it goes, two graphics cards will double your performance over a single graphics card of the same kind, assuming you’re doing that kind of work on both screens. Of course, you might also find a single graphic card that doubles that performance as well.

For example, that 8800GT (G92 GPU) includes 118 stream processors on a 256-bit bus, runs a 900MHz memory clock, together delivering that bandwith of 57.6GB/s and a pixel fill rate of 33.6 billion pixels per second, computing 504GFLOPS. That’s way faster than your CPU memory, but no longer all that interesting. Look at nVidia’s latest GTX580 card (GF110 GPU)… this include 512 much more capable stream processors, on a 384-bit bus clocked at 1GHz using much more advanced graphics RAM, for bandwidth of 192.4GB/s, computing about 1581.1 GFLOPS. And you can get a card with two of these chips on it. Not cheap, of course, but clearly, you’d need four 8800GT cards, more than I could fit in any PC, to perform about as well as one of these GPUs on a card.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I do believe the Kodak rates higher than the Flip in most comparisons. But these Webcam camcorders still bother me. One clue… look at the lens. On most models, where the lens should be, you’ll find plastic, and way deep down, a tiny lens. That’s your light sensitivity, no zoom, and quality loss right there.

For super cheap camcorders, at least check out the Sanyo Xacti FH1A. This is on Amazon.com for less than $300 most times… a bit more than a Flip or Kodak. But it has a 10:1 zoom, it shoots in SD or HD, including 1080/60p (useful for sports). It also makes a passable still camera. It’s decent in low light, thanks to a large CMOS sensor. Files are in MPEG-4 an AAC (.mp4 container), so they generally work very well in Vegas.

One problem .. the 1080/60p mode, on the FH1 anyway, produces a slightly illegal MP4 file, which causes Vegas 9 to crash. Easily fixed (well, if you’re a video guy and know how to remux things… YAMB usually does the job). And like most of the cheaper models, you get a short glitch between 4GB segments in your video.

This is my current “backpacking camera”… no tragedy if it gets destroyed, but also fairly rugged, compared to tape and OIS (optical stabilization) mechanicals on better cameras.

Curiously, the FH1A can also connect directly to a USB storage device, and let you copy files to it (HDD or Flash memory), without the need for a PC. This ought to be standard on all tapeless camcorders.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If it’s not a terribly complex edit, try exporting an EDL from Vegas 10, importing in Vegas 9. The best kind of EDL export in Vegas is AAF. You should be able to “Save As..” your project as an .aaf file, read it back in Vegas 9.

Fire up Vegas Help and search on .aaf for the limitations of the interchange format.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I am working on a series of video seminars. Just finish editing them, but now that I’m starting to render noticed that the longest video that is 80 minutes, it’s going to take about 11 hours to render.
My computer is fairly fast, these are the specs:

Intel Core I7 CPU 860 @ 2.80 GHz 2.80 GHz

No way that should be taking so long. Until recently, I had the Q9550 CPU, which is a slightly slower version of your CPU (old Intel bus architecture, etc). Check out this one:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/24/919135

That same video, in Vegas 10, on the new machine, renders to DVD quality MPEG-2 in 11:32min.. slightly more than realtime. This includes the HD compositing… just rendering a finished video to MPEG-2/SD would be very fast.

I’m using Vegas 10, the video is full HD 1920 X 1080. I’m using about 11 video channels and 2 of audio.

It’s likely that your compositing, etc. is the bulk of your CPU time. I have a couple of 2 min videos that take 2-4 hours to fully render. But that’s with 40+ video layers, many of them greenscreen. In short, there’s no single right answer — it depends on what you’re doing.

The extra channels are mostly titles and photos. The channel with the video has no splits. Since I have to deliver it in DVD I’m rendering it as uncompressed Quicktime with MPEG4 encoding.

Why would you render to Quicktime or MPEG-4? You’re making a DVD. DVD is MPEG-2, there are basic templates in Vegas that allow you to tweak the settings. But rendering first to MPEG-4, you’re just lowering the quality of the final product, and spending more CPU cycles than you ought to (MPEG-4 is more compute intensive than MPEG-2).

I have rendered commercials and songs no longer than 4 minutes before in HD, this is the first time I do something this long. My major concern is that I’m barely rendering the first one and I have 4 more to go (the other 4 are about 60 min each), and had promise the client to have them ready over the weekend.

The first thing.. are you rendering multiple delivery formats? If so, you definitely want to pre-render your video. Once single video stream, whether MPEG-2 or AVC or Cineform, HD or SD, isn’t going to take a huge bit of CPU to process. Your project, however, very well might. So if you have more than one target, render the project first.

When I make a Blu-Rayin a hurry, I render the final project to AVC, then from there to SD-MPEG-2 for DVD. Technically speaking, rendering first to AVC and then to MPEG-2 will lower quality. But in practice, HD to SD looks better than native SD, so chances are, it’ll be fine.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Mostly.

The big problem I’ve had with Vegas 10 is their Cineform support. In the past, Vegas didn’t know a thing about Cineform, so it was handled as just another Video for Windows/DirectShow CODEC. In short, it just plain worked.

They’ve added direct support of Cineform to Vegas 10. This is apparently Vegas knowing about Cineform’s private API. Presumably this will allow Vegas to produce better video, or faster rendering to Cineform… not really sure here.

Here’s the problem… if you have an older version of Cineform, Vegas won’t support it via VfW as it should… it ignores it entirely. On loads, too… you can’t load Cineform files into Vegas 10 with older versions of Cineform. I had to pay a $50 upgrade fee to get Vegas 10 supported. Not the end of the world, but, while I needed Cineform support, I didn’t necessarily need the upgrade.

Worse yet, even with the latest version of Cineform NeoScene, I’m seeing crashes in rendering. I can render just dandy from Vegas 9 to Cineform 5.x, but in Vegas 10, I get an instant crash, at least rendering to 1080/24p at top quality. Unlike most things in the past version of Vegas (internal CODECs like Sony DV), there seems to be no way to turn this “improvment” off.

So, in short, if you’re a heavy user of Cineform (and not being pushed by all these bugs to consider Avid DNxHD and/or 50Mb/s MXF as viable alternatives), I’d wait. That’s the only real problem I have so far with Vegas 10. Another caveat: it can be slower at rendering than Vegas 9, in some cases. Faster in others… neither terribly significant — check my post on this for details.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Ditto… I have the HVR-A1. I was pretty happy with it, but also … that wasn’t a cheap model. And every time you use it, there’s wear and tear.

So last year, I bought a Sanyo Xacti FH-1. Sure, kind of a cheap consumer camera. But it did the first decent job I’d seen encoding AVC, and while it had issues, it did 1080/60p… something you didn’t see anywhere short of high-end pro.

I played with it. The main real use was replacing my broken Canon HV10 as a backpacking camera… no OIS, no tape, nothing to break if I drop it, and it was a $300 camera. What surprised me was that it regularly produced better looking video than the HVR-A1. It was no replacement… but better video is better video.

Then there’s the fragility of tape systems. I was shooting a concert last February (Al Steward and Dave Nachmanoff, with my sister Kathy playing piano on “Year of the Cat”)… a cold day, for sure. I got to the venue late, only 1/2 hour to set up. I was getting moisture/reject tape messages from my Sony… condensation? Don’t know. But the usual thing with a Sony doing this… give it a hard wack, and it probably goes away. They have stupidity built-in on the moisture sensor.

Anyway, the Sanyo was the A camera for the first set, just because I couldn’t trust the Sony not to fail.

Shortly after this, I bought an HMC40. It’s not $4000 camera, but compared to the Sony (which I was already happy with), the quality was crazy good. Later, I got the TM700… improved set of guts over the TM300/HMC40, still a family member, thus, less work on color matching. And this is crazy good… no contest compared to the Sony. In the dark, 1080/24p is just going to be better.. for sports, 1080/60p (or 720/60p on the HMC40) is just better.

Panny just dropped the price on both HMC40 and HMC150, too. Very worth consideration. Of course, if you only want to spend $300, the Xacti FH1 is no TM700, but it’s better than it ought to be. It’s hard to believe novices buy “Flip” cameras instead of this, for similar prices.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Nope. Not really.

But if you render AVC to an MPEG-4 container, nearly every .mov reader will support it. You should try this. The reason is simple: Apple’s Quicktime (eg, .mov files) was the basis for the MPEG-4 container structure. They’re not identical, but given that “.mp4” files are now an established industry standard, and it’s practically trivial to make a Quicktime reader support MPEG-4, it’s the right thing. Apple’s own Quicktime player, for example, supports .mp4 files.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The $140 upgrade is a special. Sony pretty much always offers discounted upgrades when a product first ships. Vegas 10 is Vegas 10… you buy it, you get 10a…10(n), but you will pay more if you wait. If you wait all the way ’till Vegas 11, you should be able to get the early adopter discount once again (at least, that has been the policy in the past… I’ve skipped generations before and not been penalized).

-Dave