Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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Stuttering on AVC playback rarely if ever has anything to do with the bitrate. It’s the decoding complexity… AVC is more complex than pretty much anything else you’re going to run into. WMV/VC-1 is different enough that it’ll play on systems that might be a bit challenged by AVC.
So I tried the MP4 version on my system… smooth as silk in Windows Media Player. This is a Core2 Quad System, Q9550 CPU, 2.83GHz, nVidia 8800GT CPU… nothing all that recent. The CPU peaked at 17%, but stayed around 12% most of the time. This is playing fullscreen on a 1200p monitor. Played it again in Splash Lite, pretty much identical results. I shut off GPU acceleration, played it in Splash Lite… still silky smooth, but now peaking at about 50% CPU use. And man… going to 10Mb/s sure crapifies the video, compared to the usual 28Mb/s, probably more than usual, since this is high motion footage.
I tried it in VLC… that’s usually the way to get bad AVC playback. It stuttered a little, but actually not too bad, and peaked at about 45% CPU. VLC is probably better than usual — I think higher bitrates, not the AVC decoding pre se, are its main issue.
Let’s see.. played it in Nero MediaHub (replacement for Nero Showtime). It jumped badly with video acceleration enabled… that’s weird. Worked just fine, with about 45% CPU use, with acceleration disabled. Played it in QuickTime… 60% CPU, worst of all, but just as smooth as the others, all 60fps.
I tried the MP4 in WMP on my laptop (Quad Core2 Duo, 2.4GHz, nVidia 8600M GPU)… played smooth as silk, all 60fps. Peaks at about 60% CPU… seems a little high for GPU-accelerated playback, but whatever… it played just dandy.
You definitely have a problem somewhere.
-Dave
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Stuttering on AVC playback rarely if ever has anything to do with the bitrate. It’s the decoding complexity… AVC is more complex than pretty much anything else you’re going to run into. WMV/VC-1 is different enough that it’ll play on systems that might be a bit challenged by AVC.
So I tried the MP4 version on my system… smooth as silk in Windows Media Player. This is a Core2 Quad System, Q9550 CPU, 2.83GHz, nVidia 8800GT CPU… nothing all that recent. The CPU peaked at 17%, but stayed around 12% most of the time. This is playing fullscreen on a 1200p monitor. Played it again in Splash Lite, pretty much identical results. I shut off GPU acceleration, played it in Splash Lite… still silky smooth, but now peaking at about 50% CPU use. And man… going to 10Mb/s sure crapifies the video, compared to the usual 28Mb/s, probably more than usual, since this is high motion footage.
I tried it in VLC… that’s usually the way to get bad AVC playback. It stuttered a little, but actually not too shabby, and peaked at about 45% CPU. VLC is probably better than usual — I think higher bitrates, not the AVC decoding pre se, are its main issue.
Let’s see.. played it in Nero MediaHub (replacement for Nero Showtime). It jumped badly with video acceleration enabled… that’s weird. Worked just fine, with about 45% CPU use, with acceleration disabled. Played it in QuickTime… 60% CPU, worst of all, but just as smooth as the others, all 60fps.
I tried the MP4 in WMP on my laptop (Quad Core2 Duo, 2.4GHz, nVidia 8600M GPU)… played smooth as silk, all 60fps. Peaks at about 60% CPU… seems a little high for GPU-accelerated playback, but whatever… it played just dandy.
You definitely have a problem somewhere.
-Dave
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I did a couple of experiments on my system. I rendered a short video segment to AVCHD at 50i… not something I’d normally do, but what the hell.
So yeah… in WMV, I’m seeing it kind of shakey and stuttery once you get a couple minutes in, or if you seek into the file. Never seen this on any video format before, at least not on this hardware.
This doesn’t happen in Splash Lite.. which of course, isn’t using the Windows MPEG-2 TS splitter.
I re-rendered to an MP4 wrapper, same template otherwise (mine was actually AVCHD in 1920×1080/50i). None of these issues are present.
I’m guessing it’s related to the specifics of how Vegas is creating the MPEG-2 Transport Stream, since you don’t see this directly on your camcorder video, which really ought to have the same behavior (same CODEC, same wrapper). It could be a bug in Sony’s MPEG-2 TS creation, it could be a bug in Microsoft’s (at least, I think I’m using Microsoft’s) splitter.
-Dave
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30p isn’t supported on Blu-Ray either. Both 30p and 60p have to go on Blu-Ray as 60i. Of course, anything goes online… it’s just that the bandwidth isn’t there, really, for 720p yet.
And that’s kind of an interesting thing. I never believed in the download-for-sale market at this point in time, and that’s pretty much proven true… it’s the rental model that’s supporting downloads. But a report last week claims that NetFlix accounts for 20% of all internet bandwidth use in the USA, during prime viewing hours.
That does suggest just how big Netflix is, and why they almost single handedly ended the meatspace rental market. But consider what you get. Their HD offerings are encoded in fixed bitrate VC-1, with a transport that can dynamically switch bitstreams based on your actual bandwidth. If you’re lucky, you see 720/30p or 720/24p in VC-1 at 3.8Mb/s. They downscale you to VC-1 at 2.6Mb/s, and if you fall below that, you’re at SD (640×480) at 1.5Mb/s, 1.0Mb/s, 500Mb/s, and then 300Mb/s.
In short, at best, you get about 1/10th the quality of Blu-Ray. This will get better, but given the current bandwidth use, that’s probably not going to happen before there’s a battle with the ISPs over this. It could take many years… and by then, we’ll all be worrying about how to deliver 4K to the home 🙂
-Dave
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I was kind of hoping they’d drop that in there along with the 3D spec, given that the bandwidth requirements are similar. Given that they didn’t do that, I wouldn’t hold my breath on 1080/60p support in Blu-Ray any time soon.
I do think Blu-Ray is doing fairly well in the market. There’s some contraction of the whole DVD/BD market, but given both the economy and the transition of the rental market (eg, from the meatspace pay-per-view model to an “all you can eat” mail and online model, thanks to NetFlix), it’s actually surprisingly still pretty healthy.
This is also boosted now by the fact that SDTVs are end-of-life in the market.. no one’s introducing new SD models. And that BD has basically become the hot $100 feature this year in DVD players… last year it was DVD upscaling over HDMI, before that it was 480p or whatever. Anyone looking beyond discount DVD players will get BD, and they will almost certainly connect it to an HD screen.
-Dave
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I shot the fall 2009 season of my daughter’s JV soccer in 1080p, on a Sanyo FH1. It worked, but I wasn’t all that happy with the camera itself. I bought that primarily to reduce wear and tear on my pro HDV camera, but really got to like the progressive video.
While I have a TM700, I used my HMC40 at 720/60p this season. I just find the larger camera and pro mic (with dead cat) better for this kind of thing… and of course, without the tape drive, I’m much less concerned about putting extra mileage on a higher end camera.
1080/60p output is less useful. Sure, I’d LOVE for Vegas to learn to Smart Render AVC, since I’m now shooting nearly everything in AVC. But 1080/60p as a delivery format is still a problem… too big for internet, and not yet supported as a Blu-Ray format. It’s still useful to shoot in 1080/60p… you have the option, in editing, to decide if the material looks better on BD as 1080/60i or 720/60p.
-Dave
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The choice to avoid the C: (System) drive for anything had a ton of merit back in the old days. If you have a small C: drive, avoid it, but if you have a large drive, it’s still useful for some things.
The main reason for avoiding C: was that, by default, you have a swapfile there (for virtual memory). That’s still there, but if you have a decent amount of memory, and don’t have too many apps going at once during even a complex render, it won’t get much use.
The other, not-as-often-understood reason is speculative loading. When you start a Windows application, the main bits of the application load, but other pieces, not necessarily. This can be DLLs that only load on demand, or it can parts of the main app that are marked in the process page tables as loaded but invalid… forcing the OS to load these pieces only when needed. This can be an issue for realtime work, but it’s not much of a problem for video rendering.
The core reason swapping might be an issue is simple… it increases disc seeking. An HDD drive that gives you 100MB/s performance from one file won’t give you 50MB/s each from two files, but something less. Each time it has to move heads from one file to another (eg, seeking), that’s time not spent transferring data.
However, this isn’t just a concern for the C: drive, but for any drive.. the more you load up on a single drive for a project, the more seeking you’ll experience, and the slower your effective drive speed will be. But really, as long as you see 100% CPU use while rendering, the drive’s probably still fast enough. When it starts to drop, that’s usually an indication that HDD I/O is now the bottleneck (certainly, other possible bottlenecks exist, like very CPU intensive plug-ins).
I keep a “scratch” drive along with C: and the project drive(s), which may contain small projects, becomes my default output drive for CineForm conversions, and gets used to offload assets from the main project if I have enough stuff in there to slow down a render.
RAID isn’t a bad idea, but it’s not always as fast as everyone thinks. And I dislike RAID0, as that’s less reliable than a single drive (eg, your drive fails based on the minimum time-to-failure of a set of drives). RAID is faster at reads, transfer-wise, but actually slower at seeking (since both drives have to seek, and you’re always going to have one slightly faster than the other, so you always wait for both). If Vegas is grabbing data in large enough chunks per file, the RAID will definitely help, since in theory, you need only half the number of logical seeks per file. This is the likely situations, since HDDs are only really fast if you grab data in large chunks, much larger than sector sized chunks.
For writes, RAID0 is always slower than the original drive, RAID1 slower still. This is, again, because you have to sync up both drives before the write can complete. Of course, if you have a “hardware” RAID (there’s a CPU on a PCI card somewhere running the RAID BIOS software, rather than using the NTFS stripeset or mirror set), this may well be buffered and hidden from you on writes. And of course, RAID5 is slower still, though again, with a good controller, this is hidden on writes.
I use plain old SATA drives: 1.5GB for C:, 1.5GB for D: (the “scratch” drive), and usually 500MB-1GB for the project drive. I also have an 8TB RAID on Firewire, but that’s used to hold older projects, DVD/BD sets, photos, that kind of thing. FW800 does not compare to SATA in performance… but it’s also practical to have that much storage [a] external and [b] not subject to the same power supply that powers your PC.
-Dave
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The question is, how temporary.
I have both a BD-R drive and two kinds of SATA “docks” in my PC. This makes it easy to burn BD-Rs, as well as mount a variety of 3.5″ and 2.5″ HDDs.
If this is going to be an on-going thing, with this guy sending you a 25GB-or-less shoot on a regular basis, you might go with Blu-Ray. If it’s inherently one way, you could save a few bucks getting a BD-ROM drive at your end, but the BD-R is also quite useful for archives (I have project media on HDDs, everything on a RAID, and archives of everything on BD and DVD… never puts your eggs in a single basket).
You should just as well send an HDD back and forth. It holds quite a bit more, and with TB drives in the >$60 range, that’s not a bad option. But it’s also a bit of a pain, if you don’t need all that data… you have to package an HDD very well for shipping, or expect it to be broken when you get it.
Another option… I assume, given the fact you’re asking, is that at least one of you is tapeless, so HDV tapes or similar are not an option. How about a couple of extra 16GB or 32GB SDHC cards. I’m seeing 32GB cards closing in on $50. You can put one of these in a protective case and drop it in a first-class envelope or CD mailer for shipping.
-Dave
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Most players in Windows will use the AVC decoder with the highest priority. You might want to get one of those Direct-X analysis tools, to make sure you don’t have something evil as the highest priority decoder for AVC. Prior to Windows 7, Microsoft didn’t support AVC themselves, but they really seem to have done it well in Windows 7. Older CODECs (did you install software from Sony, perhaps) don’t use the latest video acceleration APIs. And if you have installed one of those “every CODEC in the world” downloads (eg, K-Lite, etc)… uninstall it right away. It’s more likely to mess things up than to help.
I see there’s a suggestion of VLC. VLC will use other tools to deliver AVC decoding, not the Windows multimedia system (eg, it’s “built-in”), but it’s also not very well tuned… it is really choppy on high definition in general, AVC in particular, on most systems compared to even the built-in Windows 7 AVC CODEC. It doesn’t do modern levels of GPU acceleration. You’re probably going to want GPU acceleration to play back AVC well on a 2 core machine at 2.4GHz (should be possible without, but you’ll be near the limit of CPU).
On my 4-core system at 2.83GHz, I’m seeing 40-60% CPU and choppy playback on 1080/60p video using VLC, smooth as silk playback in Windows Media Player using the built-in AVC decoder… about 12% CPU. Microsoft’s decoder uses DVXA 2.0 video acceleration.
As an alternate, try “Splash Lite”, which seems to have its own built-in AVC decoding, and also uses GPU acceleration, and delivers TV-quality video on systems I’ve used. Using either Microsoft’s AVC decoder or Splash Lite, I can play 1080/60p videos on my laptop… a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz, a bit slower than that i5 (and the GPU is a nVidia 8600M, also a bit slower). That’s over twice the decoding complexity of a 1080/50i video. It’s not your PC, it’s definitely your hardware.
Another question: how well do the video clips from directly from the camera play? The HF-S21 is encoding in AVC as well, so you should be able to play these just as well as the output video files.
-Dave
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Calibration of a monitor (LCD or otherwise) is pretty simple. All major modern OSs have color correction built-in to their GUI… color calibration works at this level. You attach a device to your PC, which directly reads each screen. Then you run a program, which displays known colors, reads the result back from the sensor device, and alters your color profile accordingly.
HDTV setup is usually simpler. For one, when you’re correcting a monitor for video or photo authoring, your goal is to produce technically correct colors, that will look proper on any calibrated screen. That would work fine for an HDTV, too, but unlike a PC, you’re not usually connected through some device that supports color correction though a USB sensor (though for the forthcoming “smart” TVs like Android TV, this should be possible via a simple application, if they’ve thought to include color correction in the Android API).
A TV-setup pro might use a color meter and a series of test patterns, but most people use a guided calibration disc, and trust their eyes. The better calibration videos help by giving you scenarios that let you make the correct adjustments without necessarily having to know all of the reasons. Monster Cable has sold the “ISF Calibration Wizard” disc since before Blu-Ray (I have a version with DVD and WMV/HD options around here somewhere). If you have any THX certified DVD or Blu-Ray, you probably have the “THX Optimizer” on it, which gives you a pretty detailed guided calibration video (though to use this fully, you need to get a special blue-tinted eyeglass). You can also get some free and very useful calibration patterns and videos here: https://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=948496.
-Dave