[Dave Haynie]

Apple makes some nice… and pricey… monitors.

They’re pretty much all IPS (in-plane switching) panels, which have excellent color and a very wide viewing angle. Some are a little sketchy for video, though… they’re also one of the slower LCD types, and may have weird motion artifacts.

The typical LCD panel is the TN (twisted nematic), which are great for gaming and general PC use. You can recognize these easily.. they fade when viewed much off-center. They typically only support 6-bits per pixel in real color, so not at all ideal for video. Nearly every laptop uses this sort, as they’re lower power than other types. Apple and perhaps other expensive laptops my offer IPS or MVS.

I have two MVA (multi-domain vertical alignment) panels here. MVA and PVA seems to have fallen out of favor lately, squeezed between low-end TN and high-end IPS, but some years ago, it was probably the best overall type for video (mine, in fact, also have video inputs in addition to the HDMI). You get good color (not quite as good as IPS), excellent contract, and wide viewing angle on MVA.

Anyway, that might well be the reason you see a nicer picture on the Mac … nicer monitor. They’re digital displays, and in fact, Apple uses the same video chips as everyone else, so there’s nothing fundamental about the Mac PCs themselves that deliver better looking video. I’m no Apple fan, but I do admit those 30″ Cinema Displays are lustworthy… and do work on regular PCs, too. Well, you probably need a video card with DisplayPort, but other than that…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

And actually, if you create a Flash video using modern tools, it will contain H.264 video.

Like .MP4, .MOV, and .AVI, a Flash file is really a container, and supports several standards… nothing like AVI (Video for Windows, DirectShow) or .MOV (Quicktime). The older standards established were based on the On2 VP3 and VP6 video CODECs, but Adobe adopted H.264 some years ago.

Its possible to use both in the same web page, in theory. As with many HTML conventions, you can build a …. tag that will play a compatible file if the browser can support it, but drop back to a flash player if not. However, this is still a work in progress. And H.264 doesn’t have universal support yet. In theory, H.264 is supported in a tag in Google Chrome, Apple Safari, the new IE9, and many cell phones… however, they’ll probably reject higher resolution videos. Firefox and Opera don’t support H.264, but prefer WebM (Google’s new format) or Ogg/Theora (an updated version of VP3, with a kind of hacky container format really just designed to stream audio).

I actually tried this awhile back. I had been using Flash for online video, but including MP4/AVC files for download. Seems a no-brainer to skip the Flash part. I also tried WebM and OGV… this was a few months ago, and HTML5 is an evolving standard (due to be finalized by 2012), so maybe things are better. Anyway, I could see everything in Google Chrome. Safari choked on my HTML5 stuff. Firefox drew X’ed boxes and showed nothing.. it though it could play WebM and OGV, but failed, rather than fall back to Flash. Opera worked with WebM, but choked on OGV. IE8 doesn’t know and fell back to Flash as it’s supposed to.

In short, I didn’t bother with HTML5 just yet… Flash still works better. For now. I’d be kind of surprised if problems last much longer in this respect. And who knows… maybe I’m missing something, though the fact that it all worked in Chrome suggests otherwise.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah… ok. Once again, “why the need for special support”. Ok, they’re using Cineform’s private SDK. That still shouldn’t have prevented the use of older versions via VfW/DirectShow. I mean, in the old days, I could use the Sonic Foundry/Sony DV CODEC, but wasn’t locked into using a standard one from VfW/DirectShow.

What’s the point in this — what do we get in return? While I did buy the NeoScene upgrade, Cineform pretty much just worked before. Now, it’s flakey… I was trying to render from the timeline just tonight, and it crashes. First time I ever had Cineform crash on me (yeah, it’s Cineform… rendered the same to Sony Lossless and to MP4, no worries). I’m all for real progress, but not unnecessary complexity that actually runs retrograde.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Any SD card from a reputable manufacturer will at least meet the minimum spec for that card class. Going faster is fine, but buys you nothing on the camcorder itself (ok, sure, a little margin is nice, but you get that with any AVCHD camcorder and a Class 4 card… some the DSLRs may actually need a Class 6).

The interesting thing in my SanDisk dilemma.. the flawed card performs (SiSoft Sandra Lite 2010) identically to the matching un-flawed card, as well as several other class 4 cards I had lurking around. It also worked just dandy in my TM700 (even at 28Mb/s) and Sanyo FH1. Go figure. I was sure I had been slipped a Class 2 card with Class 4 markings, but it’s very definitely performing as a Class 4. Not sure what the HMC40’s problem is with it… I need to find a utility that reads the card’s ID block. There’s got to be some explanation.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

K-Lite can make a mess of your system… not recommended.

Vegas can be pretty sensitive to errors in video files, MP4 included. Vegas 9, for example, will crash on some of the files produced by the Sanyo Xacti FH1. This seems to be due to the FH1’s MP4 files sometimes containing negative timecodes — an illegal situation.

My solution for this wasn’t to render to something else, but “simply” to remux the MP4. A tool like YAMB will do this for you pretty easily. It’s going to take a little time, but depending on your MP4 file’s origins, you may have some compatibility problems.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

There is a complexity level on ANY PC that will have you wanting to pre-render sections to see things work.

I did a video last year without over 40 layers of green screen and other visual effects. This was initially shot in AVCHD, but I did at some point in the project render to one of the uncompressed formats (for a short project, that’s sometimes reasonable, otherwise, I use Cineform when needed). I could handle about 20 layers, mostly chroma keyed, before it got too unwieldy. So I had two main projects, and the result from the first was the foundation for the second. This video is here (it didn’t win.. spent too much time on the video, didn’t kiss enough butt in the song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNmfm-BAwzs. This was done entirely in Vegas. I have some of the Boris tools (and I’m evaluating BCC now) for the next one 🙂

This did take over three hours to render, on my 2.83GHz Core2 Quad PC. Pretty crazy for two minutes of final product.

AVC decoding can be greatly improved using the GPU… it’s over half my system devoted to decoding a 1080/60p video, but add in the GPU via DVXA 2.0, and it’s down to under 12%. Adding something like that wouldn’t on its own accelerate compositing and other stuff, but it would sure seem to put AVC on par with most other video formats, instead of stressing the system.

-Dave

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[Dave Haynie]

My PC, and the Cineform people, told me.

You need V5.20b277 or later.

What I don’t understand — why the need for special support. This is, after all, an AVI file… supported under the Video for Windows or DirectShow subsystem. In previous version of Vegas, it just worked. Cineform just loaded or wrote, just as pretty much any other CODEC added under the Windows or Quicktime multimedia subsystems will. For example, the same Avid DNxHD CODEC I had installed for Vegas 9 worked for Vegas 10.

The one obvious difference here: Sony explicitly mentions support for Cineform. They have some level of integrate support for Neo3D:

Vegas Pro 10 provides integrated support for CineForm
Neo3D files. After the CineForm Neo3D product is installed,
Vegas Pro can read and write files including smart rendering
for I-frame AVI only CineForm content.

So is that it? If so, you’d think there would be a check-box to disable the pseudo-integrated support (“pseudo”, in that you still need Neo3D installed, they’re not enabling that out of the box stand-alone) and just use VfW/DirectShow for import. Cineform didn’t stop working in other applications when I installed Vegas 10.

With that said, I was in a hurry to get back to work, so I bough the Neo 5 upgrade. It works as well as ever, now.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is one of several technologies for GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) computing. In short, it means that, rather than use your GPU for 3D graphics rendering, applications can, via some GPGPU interface, use the GPU for any old sort of math.

Why would you want to do this? Well, largely because, while you may have 2, 4, even 6 CPU cores on your PC, you can easily have hundreds of processing elements on your GPU. Suitable work for a GPU can’t be simple stuff.. your CPU is better at one-after-another computing. But if you have work that’s easily done in parallel (like, say, graphics or video), the GPU may be a big help. Or, in the case of Vegas 10 benchmarks, a rather small help, but a help nonetheless.

CUDA is nVidia’s proprietary GPGPU interface.. it only works with nVidia cards. AMD has their own too, called Streams, but it’s not as well supported. Either kind of card can be supported by the general purpose OpenCL.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I have had good luck on multiple SD devices with Transcend, Patriot, Kingston, and until last night, SanDisk. Seems I got a Class 4 card last night that’s being treated as a Class 2 by my HMC40… and another one, from the same rack, that works just dandy recording at the PH bitrates (21Mb/s = 2.263MB/s, too fast for a Class 2 card, which only guarantees 2MB/s writes).

And SanDisk is usually one of the best. They make their own Flash memory, unlike many of the other labels — though chances are, you get Samsung memory in most things, they’re the largest manufacturer of flash in the world).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The memory card speed is a potential only.. if the camera can use the extra speed, it’ll go faster (in some way), if not, it still works just dandy, but don’t pay extra for it.

I have an HMC40, which supports the same PH modes as the HMC150 (at least, 1080/60i, 1080/24p, 720/60p, and 720/30p at 21Mb/s average). These are just dandy recorded to a proper class 4 card. So you’re fine buying a Class 6 or Class 10 card from a reputable vendor. Hopefully, anyway. The camera won’t see any difference, but the cards will transfer faster to the PC if they’re of a higher class (technically, the Class only relates to write speed, but it’s pretty unlikely that a faster card would have a slower write speed).

I have used nothing but 16GB (Class 4,6) and 32GB (Class 4) cards with the HMC40 until last night. I was caught without an empty card (forget my card wallet), and I had to run to a drugstore to buy a couple of SD cards (ouch! not cheap!). They had Class 4 SanDisk… “great”, I sez to meself, they’re reliable (unlike many vendors, SanDisk actually makes the flash chips that go into their cards).

Tragically, not so great. The first card worked like a champ, the second seemed to be a Class 2 card in disguise… the HMC40 refused to run higher bitrates recording modes with the card, even before I pressed “record” (which tells me it’s reading the card’s ID and just rejecting it, which is at least useful information… I’m sure the HMC150 would do the same thing). Now I’m wondering if I got conterfeits at Walgreens…

But it’s well shown that some manufacturers are exaggerating their SD card performance, or just not testing well. You wouldn’t expect it from a better known company: SanDisk, Kingston, Transcend, etc. Some of the cheap no-name brands have been shown in tests to vary widely from their ratings. And there are actual counterfeits around, even occasionally from trusted vendors. I’ll have to research this recent SanDisk issue. Best best is a card with a return policy.

-Dave