Norman Black
Forum Replies Created
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For me Vegas has great difficulty with 1080p60 files from my GoPro Black as well. A smart proxy helped me.
You can try converting the AVC to Cineform AVI using the free GoPro studio software. The Cineform should be a little easier to decode and it might help your setup.
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[Shawn Bossick] “XDCAM EX footage is actually a MPEG-2 based file ? is this true ?”
Yes. Any QT MPEG-2 codec should get you going. Bummer QT does not support MPEG-2 out of the box.
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To do something like your mockup example, make the text color transparent and your background color solid black. The text defaults to solid white with a transparent background.
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[John Rofrano] ” Anyway my point was, PCM audio on in Intel platform will be little-endian.”
Not necessarily true, but the likely case.
The XDCAM EX encoder on my PC from Vegas generated the big endian PCM audio. The Vegas encoder probably uses Big endian because as you are probably right, that the cameras generated PCM in big endian format. The Vegas software encoder generating a file exactly the same as a camera would.
Any software tool worth its salt would accept input in any endian format. It is trivial to swap the endian of the data stream on the fly as you read the stream.
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[John Rofrano] ” You don’t get to select the endian-ness… that’s determined by your computer architecture. All Intel PC’s are little endian by default.”
Yes, Windows PCs are little endian, but the output and input file formats can be either.
The XDCAM EX MP4 outputs PCM audio in big endian format as listed by the mediainfo utility. The source was little endian PCM.
I did a render using Wave (Microsoft) (*.wav) template and got little endian PCM output. The source was little endian PCM.
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GoPro Studio has some presets, one called protune. That preset takes a protune file and basically make it look like a normal GoPro video. Not terribly useful since the whole reason for using protune is to customize the contrast curve to the situation instead of something canned.
Still that preset is something I used to compare my vegas adjustments to the protune file against a GoPro standard. Actually I did not try to match exactly and I liked my tweaks better as they were custom to the scene.
GoPro studio does not have a curves tool for contrast adjustment. Just a contrast slider.
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GoPro Protune will require a number of edits to get to a normal/typical visual look. Protune is designed with a log curve so it is very flat in contrast. Also saturation is low, sharpening is low, and noise reduction is lower than standard GoPro output.
Canon standard picture style is deigned to be a nice contrasty final look, unlike GoPro protune.
In trying to use the Sony colormatch FX you might have better results with that after doing typical protune type adjustments of contrast (curves) and saturation adjustments.
As for camera matching skills and workflow I cannot help there.
I played with some protune footage and compared against Cineform studio presets of the same footage. I compared my adjustment to those of the GoPro Cineform adjustments.
I added
Color Curves for contrast
Color Corrector for saturation and overall gamma.
Levels, a little red gamma tweak
convolution kernel for sharpening -
That sounds in the ballpark. What exactly were you expecting?
On my machine core i7 2.9Ghz, GoPro AVC 1080p30 source and 1080p30 output using Sony AVC is about 1/2 real time speed. Meaning 2 minutes render per 1 minute of source. Mainconcept AVC taking twice as long as Sony AVC.
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[Matt Flay] “so are there any tweaks you can suggest that could be made to make it better? Even minus the GPU, its still a pretty capable processor I believe, and 16GB of ram should be enough no? Can always buy another 16GB, no big deal, if that will help you think. “
Yes, that is the CPU I am about to upgrade my 4 year old PC to. Very capable.
It just seems the Vegas display pipeline is not quite as efficient as it used to be from things I have read. 60fps stresses it more.
See my other reply about some things I have done with GoPro Hero 3 60p footage.
As for RAM, if you open and play your project and then look at task manager and there is still a reasonable bit of free ram then you have enough RAM or more does no good. In my analysis, Vegas is not that big of a memory hog, compared to Photoshop for example. Video streams are so big you just cannot buffer them and need to stream them on the fly which reduces memory use.
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I just tried a 720p60 clip from my Hero3 Black. At half preview resolution it maintains full frame rate. When I change the preview to full it does not maintain full frame rate. My machine is a core i7 860 2.9Ghz.
I have never used 720p60 but I have had problems with 1080p60 files on my machine. I used smart proxy to help in this circumstance. My preview was always half. I have noticed that the 60p is much more difficult for Vegas.
Since decode of the high bitrate AVC streams is hard for Vegas, and single threaded (core) I might add, the simpler to decode proxy (mpeg-2) can help or you can use Cineform studio to convert the MP4 AVC files to Cineform AVI files and this will/should ease the higher compute burden some. It might help. I just tested and on my machine the full size preview comes very close to being perfect.
Bottom line is that 60p, full size preview, is going to be stressing the Vegas playback engine