Scott Simpson
Forum Replies Created
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Now my newest computer feels very old. Are you looking to part with it? Reckon it’d be a significant performance jump?
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Ah! IIRC, I bought Ultimate S. Auditing time!
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
After John’s notes on the CPU, I just did some looking around. My board is an Asus P7P55D-E — it’s an 1156. I’m running an i5-750. At this point, I’m best off replacing ………everything except the drives and case, probably.
My life is in a state at which I can’t take up PC part research as a new hobby. I’m going to have to live with it for now, or poke around at a local dealer and see if someone can make me a pitch on doing the upgrade for me so I can weigh the cost. I built this rig myself, but that was a few years ago before family and everything else that’s going on.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Great tip, and not something I would’ve thought of. Much appreciated.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Good tips there, John.
In some ways, there *is* resizing going on. A few small bits are SD upscaled (in Boris UpRez) to HD, but the whole project is being re-rez’d in a way, because it’s my footage is 1920×1080, but the render is to 1440×1080. But the Good vs Best change is a wise one, and I’m quite happy to settle for Good if it’ll speed things up.
Point taken on the i5 vs. i7. I bought the four-core i5 when they were first-generation, less than a year from release, I think. It was top of my budget at the time. The chips have gone through several iterations of improvements since then. My next CPU & mobo will *definitely* be i7. At the time I bought, I was doing a lot of audio and rather little video, and nothing in HD. I’d gladly empty my “audio video hobby” account right now if it would replace my PC tonight. In fact, I was at newegg earlier this afternoon taking a quick look at mobo/cpu/ram upgrade kits to see what it would cost.
8-bit pixel mode. Have never messed with 32 — heard more cautions than benefits for that.
Great tip on checking the track opacities. I recall seeing one of the nested files in one of the episodes had an (unused!) track with the opacity turned down a bit from an earlier time when I’d had a graphic logo ‘bug’ in the corner. I’m going to personally groom each one of these before hitting the next render.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
It’s like making photocopies of photocopies. Even on an excellent photocopy, if you make copies of copies for long enough, the artifacts are going to add up.
Obviously you have to render at least once, right? If you want anyone to see your product, it has to be rendered.
If you’re talking about pre-rendering elements as intermediate steps, sure, there are good reasons to do that from time to time. If you can use original source material on your time line instead of intermediates, you’ll get better quality.
But there are alternatives. Rendering to an uncompressed format (leaving aside super-techy things like color space conversions) will be roughly perfect.
What you need to watch out for is lossy compression. Just like converting a wav file to mp3 throws out a lot of information to make a smaller file, rendering a video in mpeg2 or AVC throws away information so you can have a smaller file.
So, you’re always negotiating a tradeoff: if you want the detail left intact, you’ll have a bigger file. If you need a smaller file, you’ll eventually end up with artifacts and lost data.
If you have the HD space, you can render to a lossless format or even a high-bitrate compressed format. If you can live with a little quality loss, you can compress a little further.
What’s the quality loss look like? Maybe some fuzziness on sharp edges, maybe some noise, maybe blocky parts. Sometimes that stuff matters. Sometimes it’s not such a big deal.
For me, if I’m pre-rendering something that’s really important for the project, I’ve been rendering it to DNxHD or Quicktime Animation. For slightly less mission-critical things, I think I’ve used Cineform. For no-big-deal stuff, I’d squashed it down to MP4 and not worried about it.
Hope that’s some help.
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edit: re-reading your question: Re-rending something that’s already been compressed — eg. editing a DVD rip or, worse, something grabbed from YouTube — will be more obvious. The old computer truism is “garbage in, garbage out.” With compression, it becomes “garbage in, stinky garbage out.” You can try to minimize damage by re-rendering to a high-bitrate format, but you’ll never get those lost details back.—
Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Yes, that’ll be my workflow moving forward. When I was doing videos primarily for YouTube and the like, the tutorials seemed to universally tell me to set the scopes for 0-255 so what showed in the preview window was “real”, then apply the computer -> studio RGB filter at render time if the destination desired it, which YouTube does.
That was all fine and good for short videos. Now that I’m trying to render a TV series, setting all my levels to a scope where 0 is black and 255 is white is coming back to bite me in the behind.
Going forward, I’ll be living and dying by the waveform at 16-235 unless I’m specifically instructed to it differently.
Colors, I get it — when I went about adding saturation etc., I watched the vectorscope to be sure everything was legal. The Broadcast Colors plugin is just to catch anything that ended up out of range outside of my scrutiny.
The main question I was trying to ask: If the broadcaster doesn’t know if it’s using RGB 0-255 or RGB 16-235, which is the best one to choose; and if 16-235, what do you recommend to push projects that are already completed at 0-255 into that range?
In lieu of a clear answer, I’ve put a Levels plugin (Computer RGB->Studio RGB) on the master, with the Broadcast Colors plugin after the fact to catch any strays.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Cannot, or should not? As in, will it not work, or is it something Sony would be very upset about were they to find out?
The idea is tempting, but all the projects were made in Vegas 12, which leads me to think opening them in 11 would be a non-starter.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Create a project with your default settings and properties, and put an empty 20-second item in it. Save with a name like “my default project.” Open that and Save As… when you want to start a new project.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
John, I’ve done that. I’ve used the waveform monitor at every step to keep my levels between 0 and 100.
What I did not do is change the waveform monitor to make 0=16 and 100=235. I’ve been working in 0-255 space.
Thus, my whites are 255 and my blacks are 0. If the broadcaster is expecting 16-235 instead, my blacks while crush and whites will be blown out.
As you know, the Broadcast Colors filter (which I will use to catch any illegal colors that made it into the project) also lets me catch any illegal luma values. You’ve said before that it does so by clipping, as opposed to adjusting them like Levels does.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com