[Frederic Baumann]

Hi,

@Jonathan:

I have made some experiments by developing GPU-accelerated versions of my White Balance and Exposure plug-ins, and did several benchmarks.

One of the benchmarks was comparing a GTX460 GPU with an i7/950 CPU, and the plug-ins computing times are about 10 times faster with GTX460…
(And by the way, I bought this card 1 year ago to benefit from Vegas Pro 10 GPU acceleration, but could not see any acceleration).

Although Vegas 11 relies on OpenCL, while my plugins rely on Cuda (meaning the performance improvements might be slightly different), I would definitely recommend a GTX 460, as it’s a good trade off between price and performance for this kind of computation.

My 2 cents, hope this helps,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check GPU-powered FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

Hi,

If you are thinking of Cineform Neoscene pre-processing, it looks like this tool is extracting information from the MOV file in a smarter way than Vegas does, so it is able to get more bits of information for every pixel, leading to better quality video.

I must admit that I have personally skipped this step since I have upgraded to Vegas Pro 10 (I only bought Cineform because I got crashes with Vegas Pro 9 with my MOV files), saving conversion time and disk space.

If you dig a little on the support site of Cineform, you will find more explanations. Shortly said, it is related to the fact that it is able to mix information between neighboring pixels, which helps reconstructing more accurate data, whereas Vegas does not do it.

Another benefit is that the resulting AVI are easier to decode for Vegas, so the preview is slightly smoother than with MOV files.

Hope this helps,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check GPU-powered FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

I also have a 7D. Prior to using Vegas Pro 10 which supports its AVCHD/MOV format, I was using Cineform Neoscene to convert the MOV files to AVI, and was having pretty good results.

I only tried this with Vegas Pro 9 and Movie Studio 9 and 10, but I guess the output format is good also for Vegas Pro 7.

They have a 7-day free eval to check this.

Best regards,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check GPU-powered FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

I did not check that, but never know…

Did you have a look at the Vegas log files? they might contain relevant information about files not found, or other errors, leading to an empty result (log files are in [user]/AppData/Local/Sony/Vegas Pro/10.0)

Also, did you check with a text editor, that the contents of the EDL file is conform to expectations?

Hope this helps,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check GPU-powered FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

I have no clue about Boris FX GPU usage, however a thing you could do to investigate is running a GPU monitor such as evga-precision (as illustrated here: https://www.fbmn-software.com/en/gpu.html): the load % will show you if the GPU is used or not.

Also, you might want to check that you have the right GPU driver. For instance my GPU-accelerated plug-ins require CUDA 4 to be installed, so you have to install a nVidia driver version recent enough to support CUDA 4 (270.61 or above for GeForce cards), otherwise the GPU will just not be recognized. Not sure at all this also applies to Boris FX, but you might want to check.

Finally, it might happen that your GPU is slower than your CPU, or that memory transfers between mother board and graphics card are too slow, so that in the end, the overall computing time is longer than keeping everything on the CPU. However, with a Quadro 4000, this would be surprising. A good way to check this is using the GPU monitor: if your GPU is almost 100% loaded, then it does all what it can, but cannot go faster than your CPU (which patiently waits for results, having time for other Vegas sessions should you have any…)

Hope this helps,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check GPU-powered FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

Hi,

Couldn’t you use parent/child tracks and compositing?

The parent or top track would be the master, embedding all the settings/customization, and would then control the track below (child).

Then you would put your pictures in the lower track, with no effect, no settings, nothing but the raw media. It would be easy to change the pictures as no customization has been applied to them.

Fading in/out may be achieved by having a white generated effect on top of your still image (same start, same duration), and combining the 2 tracks with a multiply compositing. Adjusting the fading in/out of the white event in the parent track controls the fading of the picture.

Still for instance, this might also work with track motion: track motion would be controlled by the parent track, whatever the still image being in the child track.

Hope I am clear enough, and hope it helps,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

Hi,

Also the one listed below in my signature.

Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

Hi,

If you don’t even know this, you should definitely have a first overview of Vegas. Even if we fix this issue, you will be faced to many others afterwards.

Go to the Help Menu, and choose Interactive Tutorials (are similar English wording – I am using a French version of Vegas). There you will have interactive exercises to discover Vegas.

Hope this helps,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

I do think the problem is the one about field orders, and can see no other issue with your settings.

Did you try a new render?

Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.

[Frederic Baumann]

Got you! The video capture helps a lot!

I was speaking of bitrate, not of pixel format (8-bit in your case). Bitrate should be around 10 Mbits/second, and is a setting of the renderer.

Anyhow, it does not matter anymore, because I think your problem is not pixellation, but interlacing (not sure of the English word, sorry). It looks like you have horizontal lines which are not scanned synchronously (as in every digital movie btw), and this appears on speedy moving areas. “Pixellation” appears horizontally only, not vertically.

I am not expert at all on DVD standards, but it might be one of:

1) a mismatch between odd/even frames. Try changing the field order when rendering. You certainly have input clips which are interlaced, and the field order is not properly set.

2) (less likely) you rendered your movie with a frame rate that is not compatible with DVDs. As a result, a reader on the computer is OK because it renders frames differently than a TV set, and so, is more tolerant. For instance, getting the picture frame by frame, and displaying a frame only once it has got all its scan lines — as opposed to a TV set, displaying every scan line as it gets it, without waiting the whole frame to be received by the reader or the antenna).

3) other issue – no more idea.

Please let me know if this helps fixing the problem,
Frédéric

—

Want to Match Colors between clips? new plug-in here.
Check FBmn Software plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.