Rob Mack
Forum Replies Created
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You underestimate what the provided script is doing, but you’re right, the proper place for a still sequence exporter is in the render dialog.
The script method requires you to know your way around Vegas a bit more than the average Joe. But then, so does the frame server-virtualDub route.
Rob Mack
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Vista is 32-bit so you still don’t see the whole 4 GB. max you could see is someting like 3.12 GB, and if you put a fat video card in there with lots of onboard RAM you may see even less.
You can use XP or Vista 64 and then the OS will see the whole 4GB. Vegas, still being a 32-bit application, will probably not be able to use more than 2GB, but the OS gets more RAM to play with so it’s possible that Vegas would actually get to use the whole 2GB.
As far as migrating to Vegas, a big issue for all such migrations is getting old projects into the new edit system.
Rob Mack
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Most likely “768” is a result of assuming that the video frame is actually, literally 4:3. It’s not.
By convention, most older NLE’s manuals calculated the corrected frame size as if the frame were really a 4:3 image. The math was wrong but it didn’t usually matter because the programs didn’t do the conversion for you. They were merely saying that you could use scans or camera images that were 768×576 and then before you imported it you’d have to manually convert it to your PAL frame size.
By convention, subsequent systems usually just copied the information from the older literature. Technically, the numbers are wrong, but if everyone does it wrong in exactly the same way it then you can still move media between programs easily.
For better or worse, Vegas does the conversion from square to non-square for you. Because it was written by audio guys, they actually did the math on the video sample rates and came up with different numbers. Vegas’ math is right, but sometimes being right isn’t as useful as going along with everyone else’s wrong answer. So you might have a compositing program that insists that you need to use 768×576 for your output while Vegas might want something else. You might need to do some adjusting to get this output to work right in Vegas.
Vegas is a resampling editor which allows it to use all sorts of media on the same timeline. It was pretty revolutionary for the first several years of Vegas’ life and Vegas still does it better than other systems but most other systems have closed the gap.
Vegas resamples everything to fit it to your project, including still images, which it assumes are using a 1:1 sample ratio (aka Square Pixels). The problem with this is that, to be consistant, Vegas also has to export stills that are corrected back to square pixels. This creates problems for other software.
The best thing that could happen would be for everyone to settle on a standardized PAR tag inside image files, because otherwise there’s no way for software to know just how an image is supposed to be displayed.
Rob Mack
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People have their preferences, and if your entire operation revolves around exporting frame sequences then maybe it’s worth it to invest in one set of hardware and software that requires less of a learning curve for that button press than another platform that might require a bit more knowledge than ought to be required.
Different systems have different strengths. Vegas has a certain amount of speed and lightness that can be appealing, and it’s probably better suited to desktop usage than FCP. It will run on most desktop systems out there while FCS requires you to purchase Macs. Certainly the cost of entry is less.
They’re both prosumer applications that were built out to try to compete in higher end markets than they were originally designed for, and FCS pushes a lot higher up the production food chain with Apple’s server solutions.
It may very well be that Vegas is not the right fit for your group, but this particular issue is just so miniscule that it’s hardly worth obsessing about. If you or your coworkers can’t get your heads around the fact that different systems have different methods of doing things then I’d say you need to settle on the one you know and stick with it.
We just went through a migration here from Media100 to PPro/Axio (because we’ve sworn never to go with an Apple platform ever again. Too much experience.) There was a certain amount of hammer-headedness about trying to get the new systems to do things just like the old systems and this is so common that I think it’s very hard to get editors to move, especially when they have to change their OS too. It’s all boiled down to twitch responses and it’s too painful to switch edit systems.
This thread is pretty well hijacked and I think we can put it out of our misery at this point.
Rob
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Hmmm. I think since still sequences are covered in so many ways they just don’t feel it’s a pressing need. Reasonably clever people seem to figure it out.
Rob
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You’d have to do it to every piece of media in the project. I think Randall C’s approach to things like this was to actually have the script make a new copy of the project and then do all this manipulation to the copy. Less likely to screw up the original that way.
Square Par stills brought into a non-square project would have to have their par changed to a non-square setting to counter the squaring of the project. Whew! 😉
Could get hairy.
Rob
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Agreed. Vegas should have a “render as” option for image sequences. The Render Image Sequence script found in the Tools menu is user created and included in Vegas as an example of a script. It probably shouldn’t be, because there are better scripts out there to do the job. However, they all must rely on the Preview window (which can give you uncompressed full resolution output, and can be set up to do so as part of the script).
The only problem with using a script and the preview window is that Vegas will automatically correct for your project’s Pixel Aspect Ratio setting, so you can’t get uncorrected frames out of some project templates like SD and HDV templates. This is the only problem aside from the user errors you’re encountering, but it’s a show stopper for most applications where you’d want to export an image sequence.
The best way to deal with it is to frameserve to VirtualDub, which is free and actually works a bit better than Quicktime Pro for this. Frameserving to PPro is an interesting solution but kind of like pulling a plow with a station wagon–wrong tool for the job but it works if that’s all you’ve got.
I don’t use XDCam but I know that Vegas has been incorporating features for it for at least the last two versions, as well as the ability to use SDI, and most recently a 32-bit float mode and support for reading and writing 10-bit formats. It’s pretty obvious that Vegas has higher aspirations than DV and HDV, but these have vastly wider adoption and Sony, like Adobe, have to cater to those markets. Adobe is also struggling to have their product accepted as a professional tool.
Rob
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I can’t argue with you on that. Vegas, just like FCP and PPro, relies on consumers for the bulk of their sales. I’ve talked to development teams from other companies about certain “non-pro” practices they use in their software and gotten blank looks. Consumers editing DV still drive these products. Some systems cover some features better than others.
I didn’t try frameserving to tmpegenc because I assumed it was a tool for making SD encodes, so it’d have more restrictions on frame size. It sounds like you’re confirming that. Don’t give up just because you think this one method supports your opinion.
If you can stand back and look at Vegas’ design you’ll see two things. First, it was built originally as an audio application, and second, it evolved into a prosumer DV editor. The point about it being an audio editor is important, because Vegas resamples everything you put onto the timeline to fit the project properties. Vegas has no real tool for outputting image sequences, but it assumes that all stills brought INTO vegas are 1.0 PAR. So it just treats any still as if it had a 1:1 sample rate (which is what a pixel aspect ratio really is–a sample rate)
The truth is that most users really DON’T get non-square pixel aspect ratios, and Vegas really DOES handle it simplisticly. It’s unfortunate that users have to rely on free tools like VirtualDub to create still sequences since, as you say, grandmothers aren’t likely to figure this out. But I’m sure you’ll be able to.
As far as “Real” frame rendering goes, the frameserver method is about as real as you can get up to an 8bpp limit, and the preview window in Vegas is potentially more real than the prerendered frames you see in other programs, because it’s a straight frame off the timeline (The caveates here are many, though. You have to set up the preview window “just so”, and of course you’re getting an 8bpp image).
But you make a very good point that grandma’s aren’t going to be able to manage this.
Good luck,
Rob
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Don’t know about PAL, but in NTSC DV a frame of 720×480 is wider thans a 4:3 frame. 704×480 represents a 4:3 frame area.
NTSC TV signals always overshot the 4:3 area to allow for variation in TV side to side adjustment as well as rise and fall at the beginning and end of each line. Tube TVs had pretty slow response times, after all.
I’d assume that PAL is about the same.
For better or worse, Vegas assumes that still images are all “square pixels” and resamples them for your project. This is good for home users but can throw people who’ve always had to handle the conversion themselves when using other NLEs.
Rob Mack
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The biggest advanatge of the debugmode frameserver is that it outputs uncompressed data withou having to render a huge uncompressed file. And of course if you needed to render a file you could do that by other means.
QTPro doesn’t show the output of the frameserver for some reason, but you can take a leap of faith and just start the export. It appears to work.
VirtualDub would give you the same results for some of those output formats, and of course it’s free, and it would show you your progress.
It would very nice if Vegas could do this directly, but it can’t, and it’s not really a quicktime-based application so what you get fom quicktime is essentially extra sauce. (But then, sauce is the most important part of any meal…)
Rob