Norman Black
Forum Replies Created
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OFX has nothing to do with GPU. It is simply a defined portable video effects plug-in format. An OFX plug-in and be GPU accelerated or not.
Nearly all of the Sony plug-ins are OFX. All the OFX plug-ins have a similar user interface. Look at Sony levels, and other OFX plug-ins and then look at Sony Rays which is not OFX.
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Someone on the Sony forum polled users and this is what he came up with.
https://www.hyperactivemusic.com/vegaspro/vegaspro.html
Bottom line.
The Vegas composite engine work fine with everything. This is used during playback and render as (all codecs)The only encoders (render as) that use GPU accel are Sony AVC and Mainconcept AVC. This GPU use is in addition to that of the Vegas video engine. Mainconcept AVC does not support AMD 7xxx and R9 Gpus.
Nvidia 6xx and 7xx GPUs are not as good at “compute” as 5xx GPUs for a similar chip. aka 580 to 680.
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Yes, you have to make sure your levels are correct for correct playback. Rec 709 is the color standard for HD and in 8-bit digital form they specify that levels are to be 16-235. Full range is 0-255.
Now it gets fuzzy and loose with “standards”. AVC (H.264) video stream support a flag which denotes if the contained data is full range. Many cameras output full range data and set this flag and the Vegas decoder handles this. They probably output full range because maybe you can adjust better before final output which might be 16-235.
Some players/decoders may not look at this flag and assume a Rec 709 encoded file is 16-235. Here you will have a problem with playback if you have a full range file.
Some editors like Premiere always normalize input to 16-235. Vegas does not. This gives access to the full camera range data but then puts the burden on you to get a proper range on output. Whatever that may be and whatever those requirements are.
Also, I have no idea if the AVC encoders in Vegas support both full range and Studio (16-235) range or if they always assume 16-235. I have not tested.
I just make sure my output will always be 16-235 and this means I have to add a levels adjustment to the output. Either Computer to Studio, or studio to computer depending on the situation. It is a pain, yes, and there are ways Vegas could add options to help us. It is what it is and we have to deal with.
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As for why your videos get darker, this is probably because your camera outputs full range data (0-255) and most players assume a smaller video range (16-235) by default (if they have an option). On playback the players expand the range back to 0-255 because this is what computer monitors want.
Assuming your camera source is full range then…
On the output video fx, you can add, Sony Levels with the Computer to Studio RGB preset.This will make the preview window in Vegas look a little washed out. I normally level the levels setting on and let it be washed out. Except of course when I am making color and contrast judgements.
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[Al Bergstein] “so I’m worried that there is something in Vegas’ font handling that is going wrong. “
Whatever file you generated from Vegas is what you look at to evaluate what Vegas did. If that is good, then Vegas is out of the picture.
If the file you send to Vimeo looks good, but their result is not, then the issue is with the re-encoding that the online Video servers do and their bitrates are much lower than you probably encoded.
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[Wendy Lam] “save it so that it can be referenced next time?”
You create a subclip to do this. The subclip will be listed in the project media window. You can save a subclip in the trimmer or from the timeline.
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Sad about the Vegas 12 decoder issue that shows up with GoPro files. We know it is not GoPro’s fault as VP11 is supposedly fine and other editors as well. Thanks John R for testing that!
I know from experience Sony Support is a black hole and reporting there is of little help. No harm in reporting anyway so I should.
There is one Sony developer trolling the Sony forum and that is the sole reason I started a thread about the GoPro Black issue hoping he would see it and maybe investigate at least a little bit.
I am not a video professional. I am a hack with a mountain bike and a GoPro having fun. So with Vegas having issue with my only camera really sucks. I am actually a systems level software developer by profession and have debugged Vegas a little from curiosity given all their quirks.
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Yes, any other option getting out of the GoPro file will help. I have identified that the Vegas 12 AVC decoder has performance issues with GoPro AVC files. It mostly only shows on the most stressful files like 1080p60 on most machines.
There is a thread about this on the Sony forum and John Rofrano ran my example clips on VP11 and VP12 and VP11 was fine but VP12 was choking.
Choices for a change could be
HDCAM SR Lite
XAVC Intra
XAVC-S
Mainconcept AVC at a high enough bitrate.
Cineform is a highbitrate Intra only format like HDCAM SR and XAVC Intra.All of these are higher bitrate and quality than the GoPro files.
MPEG-2 formats (XDCAM EX, MXF HD EX) will probably lose fine detail quality to the GoPro AVC files while pixel peeping. -
Titler Pro 1.0 is what is bundled with Vegas. 2.0 is a newer version with more features.
NewBlue changed Titler Pro 1.0 and 2.0 to operate in a separate process to help deal with GPU conflicts between Vegas GPU use and their GPU use on the timeline. So if you had problems before, maybe it will be more compatible now. That is what the big deal is with this new update.
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It seems the Gopro Black 1080p60 files are most troublesome for the Vegas decoder.
Download a 1080p60 GH3 sample here and it plays back fine. Both are CABAC and the GH3 is higher bitrate.
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-gh3/9Why is GoPro so hard to decode? I wish I knew of an analysis tool to list the frame sequence types of the video streams. I know they exist but are $$$.