answer from BlackMagic

Vegas video wrote on 10/16/2006, 6:24 AM
question to BlackMagic Decklink SP:
Hi
I´m really disappointed with the kind of support you give to the Premiere and the Sony Vegas.
I´m the owner of a Sony recorder Betacam SP uvw-1800P.
Why there´s no possibility to get DV picture on Sony Vegas but only on the Sony YUV?
Why can´t you export a sound "print to tape - Auto edit " on Sony Vegas the analog way?
Why Sony Vegas has to unnecessarily count over the DV filles when exporting the video to the tape?
Why Are these things impossible for the Vegas but the Adobe Premiere is able to manage them?
If you support the Vegas also, you should make a new drivers which would be able to manage all that.´Cause this way you need the Adobe Premiere for capture to export and the Vegas for cuts.There could be a way to do it.


Answer from BlackMagic:
Hi Hanz,

Thank you for your email which Victoria forwarded to me.

You asked, "Why Are these things impossible for the Vegas but the
Adobe Premiere is able to manage them? If you support the Vegas
also, you should make a new drivers which would be able to manage all
that."

The answer is that Premiere Pro 2.0 has a plug-in architecture and
Vegas 7.0 does not. In other words, when we update our drivers to
include new features, refinements to features or bugfixes, we are
able to provide compatibility to Premiere Pro so that it can
immediately take advantage of these enhancements.

By contrast, Sony Media Software do not provide a plug-in
architecture to Vegas 7.0. It is a closed system and they have
specifically written Vegas 7.0 to use our DeckLink 5.6 drivers which
have now been superseded by several driver versions which might or
might not work with Vegas. We have no control over how Vegas 7.0 uses
the DeckLink drivers and that is why you can only capture to an 8-bit
YUV movie and not to other formats such as DV or our new Motion JPEG
support. We introduced Motion JPEG support in our DeckLink 5.7
drivers and were able to ensure it worked in Premiere Pro. However we
have no way of adding this new feature to Vegas 7.0 and so the only
solution is for Sony Media Software to update Vegas 7.0 to take
advantage of this new feature.

Sony Media Software have announced that they support SDI capture and
playback with DeckLink cards using DeckLink 5.6 drivers and Vegas
7.0a. They have also verified the use of analog video monitoring.
However they have not verified the ability to capture via analog
connections and we do not believe this works well. Unfortunately we
cannot help to add analog capture support as the architecture of
Vegas does not enable us to do that. The export to tape issue is
another one that is outside of our control.

It's great that the Vegas team have included SDI support in Vegas
7.0a using DeckLink cards but unfortunately that support is limited
and there is nothing we can do to enhance the experience for Vegas
users given the closed architecture of Vegas 7.0.

It is for this reason that we have been lobbying the Vegas team to
adopt an open plug-in architecture. This would require a substantial
change to Vegas but, if Sony Media Software were prepared to do it,
we believe we could offer Vegas and DeckLink users a greatly enhanced
experience with many more features to make your workflow easier, more
flexible and fun.

I would encourage you to contact Sony Media Software with your
observations and let them know you would like Vegas to automatically
take advantage of new DeckLink driver features by adopting a plug-in
architecture. If enough people request the same feature, hopefully
the Vegas team will implement this most desirable change in a later
version of the software.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design


What do you mean about that?

Comments

farss wrote on 10/16/2006, 7:04 AM
>>What do you mean about that?

I think what BMD are saying is pretty clear!

Probably the really leading question is why would adopting an open plug-in architecture require such a drastic change, why was the code written so poorly in the first place.
Seems to me that this gets to the crux of a lot of issues, ones that have plagued both the audio and video side since the beginning. Not that I know much and I could well have got my understanding of the situation completely screwed up. Nonetheless until the issue is specifically answered, and in detail, misinformation and inuendendo will continue to plague the product.

Perhaps the way Vegas is coded is better, who knows, to date no one has been forthcoming with examples of what benefit the users derive from the approach taken. It adds no bullet points to the feature list but sure gives the opposition plenty of ammo.

Bob.
apit34356 wrote on 10/16/2006, 7:30 AM
Bob,
The close software design approach is more from a "product" firmware design, ie camera firmware. A close system usually bares a form of certication that "x" features work 100% of the time and requires less support staff for "unknowns". Since Vegas is a very complex program with the addition of HDV processing, the number of unknown bugs could easily exceed staffing requirements for "fixing and responsing" and destory what public image Vegas has been able to "get". I would like the plug-in approach too, because encoders/decoders function this way. But since hardware can be a "realtime" issue in operating overhead, Vegas software HDV management overhead may be high on cpu and resources leaving little "room".
farss wrote on 10/16/2006, 8:05 AM
While most of what you're saying is true enough I don't quite see how your comments around HDV are applicable.
The BMD (and other cards) provide a lot of hardware to offload work from the CPU, they offer a lot of other features that I suspect the broadcast bods would like as well over and above just the basic capture / PTT.
Certainly a higher level of abstraction can lead to complex issues but it does provide a line in the sand so to speak.
This isn't a trivial issue and to me goes beyond just the issue of what Vegas does and doesn't do. The cost of some of this kit, plus VCRs and PCs to run it on exceeds the cost of Vegas by orders of magnitude. So we can get some pretty unpleasant scenarios happening. Happy Vegas user decides to mortgage the house and make a big stepup up in the world, spends a bomb on Sony decks, a top shelf PC and BMD box and then finds out the whole thing will not work. Was this a lack of due diligence on his part?

Bob.

deusx wrote on 10/16/2006, 9:34 AM
>>> It is a closed system and they have
specifically written Vegas 7.0 to use our DeckLink 5.6 drivers which<<<
So, if that is correct, Sony can ust rewrite that part in 7c to use newer drivers and all is well again. ( rewriting just that part doesn't sound like a major thing )
apit34356 wrote on 10/16/2006, 11:53 AM
Bob, just a remember of design theme, Vegas core functions(encoding/decoding, video display management) are independent of hardware specific requirements. Now, I would love Vegas to use general GCU rendering, but GPU and BMD like hardware are "not generalize nor have a standard" like IEEE 1394. This is similar to Broadcast slow response to move XPRI to a mobile design for a laptop, a little late in the game, to be cutting edge.

I do agree with you about your problem and it does appear that Vegas design is slow at addressing the high-end user hardware control needs. Vegas theme appears HDV for now and it seems the core design powers the "movie Studio" version, so they "kill two birds" with one design. I would like a VegasX beta version that address the plugins,directshow, GCU rendering,4K edits... if "combustion" and FCP pro can do it, Vegas should and do it better,( combustion comparsion is unfair).
[r]Evolution wrote on 10/16/2006, 5:40 PM
Are you using the DeckLink 5.6 drivers?

What are the other options besides the BlackMagic Decklink SP card for us VEGAS users?
farss wrote on 10/16/2006, 6:12 PM
The cards from AJA also now work, perhaps not all of them though.

The BMD cards do work but only for SD / HD SDI transfers, as far as I know there's no support for analogue capture at 4:2:2 and above. Not that this is such a big issue in a practical sense as Vegas's 8 bit pipeline restriction I'm told is not too kind to analogue anyway.
apit34356 wrote on 10/16/2006, 6:30 PM
Bob, do you prefer to run "control" AJA directly in Vegas/NLE? Or in a more "general" capture ulitily that can fully operate the Blackmagic cards?
Coursedesign wrote on 10/16/2006, 7:23 PM
BMD's Deck Control utility can shuffle 8-bit and 10-bit video in SDI and analog formats to and from your harddisk all day long using QuickTime. That's what I've been doing for the last two years, long before Vegas got its very limited BMD support in V6.

After you get the video onto your disk, you can decide whether to edit it in Vegas or PP or something else.

One would have thought that the Vegas developers would have released a replacement for the ancient 1992 VfW (Video for Windows) code by now. VfW was Microsoft's rushed-out freebie add-on to Windows 3.1 in response to Apple's QuickTime.

However, Microsoft's 1997(!) replacement for VfW, DirectShow, is ugly to work with, and is due to be replaced by Media Foundation for Vista. (The appropriately named MF will not be available for XP, 2K, etc., so right there you have a tough choice for Madison. Using MF would mean kissing past versions of Windows goodbye.)

So where does this leave the Vegas user today?

VfW prevents any serious Vegas interface progress at a time when the other professional NLEs have already launched their corresponding API replacements.

farss wrote on 10/16/2006, 8:17 PM
I don't have a problem with my Decklink card. Down here BetaSP and other analogue formats are pretty well dead so I bought a relatively cheap basic Decklink card and it's worked since V6.0

I did try using the BMD capture utility which works OK but Vegas seemed to have some serious issue with the resulting QT file, at some points during mpeg-2 encoding the field order flipped briefly so I gave up on that. The Vegas 6.0d capture to Sony YUV works fine for me.
All that aside though I know that BetaSP is still very much alive and kicking in other parts of the world and this analogue capture and the lack of 10 bit support is a major source of heartburn for many users.
What's more disconcerting is I'd reckon the ones who've come here to complain are just the tip of the iceberg. I'd suspect they're unlikely to follow BMD's advice and spend their time jumping up and down here, if they even know this place exists!

apit34356 wrote on 10/16/2006, 8:36 PM
BMD HD codecs for Quicktime are rocksolid.
Coursedesign wrote on 10/16/2006, 10:15 PM
I did try using the BMD capture utility which works OK but Vegas seemed to have some serious issue with the resulting QT file, at some points during mpeg-2 encoding the field order flipped briefly so I gave up on that.

It's not 100% clear from your description, but it sounds like a common Video for Windows problem, where VfW struggles with MPEG-2 frame reordering (neither DirectShow nor QuickTime have this problem).

I agree with you that we're likely to be only seeing the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people just got up and left, as they had work to do that they couldn't do with Vegas.

A bit embarrassing when that is about not being able to use their ultra-nice new $25K Sony camera with Sony's NLE.
x_gogoa wrote on 10/17/2006, 4:28 AM
i understand hanz and his problem.

here in croatia, we have 4 national and several local tv stations. since they have full analog chain from deck in their marketing depp to transmitter there are no difference if my final cut is on digi or betacam sp. moreover, budgets for video and audio post are so poor that i can't afford digi deck with sdi i/o only.

i don't want to be pathetic, but xdcam/digi betacam is not my reality, my reality is vegas, decklink extreme (w analog i/o) and betacam sp.

and when colleges of mine, one final cut pro guy and other premiere pro guy ask me: "can you capture and print to betacam sp?", i said: "yes! of course! i can capture, i can print trough decklink control panel. i can edit, also, hm, well, qt files with bmd codecs! can you imagine guys!? we were with v6 and 4.8.1 drivers for a year and half, but now we are with v7 and 5.6 drivers."
"wow!" one siad.

vegas support decklink card. what does it mean "support"? does it mean full support or only half? i know, even birds know that vegas support sdi i/o only. "we support only left channel of your stereo card". that is also support. :))
but on blackmagic site, no single word 'bout v7 and 5.6 drivers.
i found that info on forums. what kind of supporting is that?

gordan
apit34356 wrote on 10/17/2006, 5:35 AM
Bob, don't forgot that the vegas team gets direct input about TV networks interest from a few local stations and national broadcast programs that are using vegas. I'm sure that they want more "control" options, but they do demand 100% stable operations.
Hopefully, your's and the few stations requests are in the vegas plans for beyond HDV.

farss wrote on 10/17/2006, 5:52 AM
There is a partial way around this problem.
The SD Connect from Convergent Design will give you component to SDI conversion and if you look at the cost of that box plus the basic Decklink card compared to the Decklink Extreme you're probably in the same ballpark.
Now that gets you from component in/out of Vegas with 9 pin control and genlock. Problem will still be Vegas's 8 bit pipeline. However I think from memory the SD Connect can be configured to do the conversion to 8 bit which would be better than just letting Vegs truncate. The SD Connect does it's thing at 14 bits so the output is pretty damn good. Using it to go component to DV25 over 1394 compared to the same conversion in a J30 is noticeably better..

Please don't take my word for any of the above, please, please do some careful research. The guys at Convergent are very helpful and pretty clued up on Vegas so an email or a post in their forum at COW would be a good starting point.

Bob.
farss wrote on 10/17/2006, 6:30 AM
Another possible avenue you could look at are the AJA Xena cards. V7 added support for them, whether or not that includes analogue capture via component I don't know for sure. AJA talk about conversion to 12 bit, I have no clue as to what happens to that inside Vegas and the AJA site makes no mention of support for Vegas which is worrying and all the Vegas Feature list mentions is "New! AJA Support" which could mean anything.

Bob.
apit34356 wrote on 10/17/2006, 11:31 AM
Bob, thanks for the reminder about AJA Xena cards. I was wanting to study the 12bit conversion process for vegas 8bit stream.