Comparing My Vegas to a Pro Hollywood Job

MH_Stevens wrote on 2/15/2007, 8:22 PM
In another current thread I (Analysing a Commercial DVD in Vegas) I had said I was analysing or comparing how a pro movie on the timeline compares to my work and gosh the stuff I noticed. It's amazing and we should all do this who are not 100% competent.

Firstly the lumience spread. The lowest black point I can get with my FX1 and Vegas is about 20 and I try to pull all full whites up to near 100% so with good light I'm in the rang 20-240. Now Brokeback was in the range 10-190. Then look at the gamma curve - I try for a block shape highest at the bottom black and sloping down to the right to the max white. Brokeback was usually like a gausian bell shape. Also I noticed how far the audio was below clipping. I push my loudest sounds up to about -2/3db where the movie sound was like -20 ave. I found it all very interesting and I'm off tommorow to take a completed project of mine and rework it to look more like this. A very enjoyable exercise.

Michael

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 2/15/2007, 9:59 PM
dont forget that the majority of commercial DVD's are created usiong CCE, which is a multi MULTI pass encoder.. Vegas and Main concept opnly ofer 2 pass, where CCE allows up to 4 or even 8 passes.. yes it takes longer, but the results are well worth the wait.. then again, CCE is about 4grand..

aside from the encoder, youre more than likely lookin at uncompressed or 10bit source material, at the least, 8bit 4:2:2 DVCPRo/HD.
For movies, 95% of the time in todays cinema world, youre looking at uncompreseed HD.
Unlike DV and HDV, the colour space is much wider (4:4:4), in addition to native resolution of the master source file more than likely being NATIVE HD Progressive scan or higher.

You can come close to what you see on a commercial DVD, but theres no way youll have that kind of latitude with DV, let alone HDV.. hell DVCPro50/HD comes close but no cigar....

Considering Cost... somethings gotta give.. and when u consider these have more than likely been edited in a 10bit (or higher) NLE, the latitude of the source material, in addition to the latitude offered within the NLE, make Vegas look like a kids toy in comparison.
Yes it can come close, but you wont ever get teh same results until vegas offers at least 10bit, and your source material is either uncompressed or compressed to somethign like DVCProHD (such as an XLH1 connected through SDI straight into FCP)

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farss wrote on 2/16/2007, 5:03 AM
Actually CCE can do hundreds of passes if you've got the time!
However apart from optimising motion that really has little to do with it. I've run DigiBetacam masters through Vegas and onto DVD of material shot on the best cameras money can buy and wielded by the best crews and the results sure look pretty damn stunning, certainly way, way better than my feeble efforts with prosummer cameras.

Thing is, it ALL ends up as 8 bit 4:2:0 mpeg-2. Sure bigger CCDs, glass that costs as much as BMW, a crew that's spent their life honing each one of their skills makes a HUGE difference. However this doesn't mean there's not a lot you can learn from what they do without spending massive amounts of money.

Just take the audio side of the production. OK, you can't afford a composer and a full orchestra however whatever music you've got you can match their levels to. Just getting the mix of a soundtrack right doesn'r cost money, it takes skill, we've all got the tools (Vegas and our ears), it's knowing how much is too little or too much and what's just right and from my efforts it's not easy.

Thing I'm finding is there's no magic set of numbers, you can't just say O.K music at -20, SFXs at -16 and dialogue at -10. Two pieces of music both at -20 can sound dramatically different volume wise but the real issue is how it plays with all the other elements. I'm finding for example that if my music bed is too soft it's just distracting, if it's too loud it's annoying and drowning out the location sound etc. I can use my meters to sort of get it in the right ball park and to judge how much headroom I'm leaving for things that need to be really LOUD but ultimately all the elements have to dance together, get one out of step and the whole thing falls apart and the difference can be only a few dB.

Also I should add that Brokeback Mountain is a theatrical mix, the engineer doing the mix knows he can use a very wide dynamic range because cinemas are very quiet. You can't do this typically for say a news broadcast or a game show, the mix has to suit the listening environment and the mood of the viewer. Even in your living room when it comes to watching a movie you tend to sit still and shut up, the ambient noise level will be lower than when the news is on.

There's probably others here that can give better advice than I can about the video side however sure shooting 35mm gives you way, way more dynamic range to start with but in the end it all has to get crunched down into the same thing. The extra stops that film records gives more choices in post but you can do the same thing by controlling the lighting, getting the image right before it even hits your el cheapo lens. So that's the challenge, the guys shooting film don't need to do as good a job as you do when it comes to lighting. They can bump the shadows up a few stops and get an image, probably all you'll get is noise but you can avoid having to bump the shadows up a few stops by lighting it right in the first place to keep things within the limits of your camera.

So your job with your cheap camera is harder, it takes more skill and more testing. But here's a thing, not only do the guys with the big budgets have decades of experience they spend weeks or months testing, making notes, seeing how it looks, going back and changing something and seeing how that looks.

Thing is it's all too easy to blame your tools, no matter what the craft you're into. Don't think that expensive tools are a substitute for skill, if you don't do the hard yards to acquire the skills then all the expensive tools give you are expensive mediocrity and there's plenty of big budget mediocrity to prove that point and I don't just mean lousy scripts.
mikkie wrote on 2/16/2007, 4:25 PM
"Firstly the lumience spread. "
Remapp your colors... Think if you do some looking you'll find plenty of DVDs that are off spec for broadcast. Also, especially when looking at the audio, remember that at least in the past, everything's done for film in theater.

If fact I have to agree to disagree about the quality of the encode -- many DVDs are film digitized & encoded to mpg2 without a terrible amount of care. Some are, some aren't, but either way not a real rule so-to-speak. One thing they can do that we can't, is vary the encoding per scene, but again only if/when they want to. Out of habit I often look carefully at scenes with fire to see if they alloted the bitrate or perhaps did a machine encode.

I will second what farss wrote about audio, perhaps going further and suggesting there's really not much you can't accomplish on your own. Depends on what you want to do and how much effort you're willing to expend -- some pros still do midi note by note, with or without a keyboard. And a midi keyboard will set you back less than $100 -- less than $30 used. And that's how/where a good deal of soundtracks are created -- sometimes the final is recorded from bands or orchestras, sometimes not.