DVCPro HD - works in Vegas!

Marco. wrote on 1/8/2006, 4:18 AM
I just tested the Raylight demo ( www.dvfilm.com ), a DVCPro HD converting tool from DVFilm. It seems to generate kind of reference file to work with. And it really works even on my poor notebook with 256 MB Ram and 1,4 GHz CPU power.
You can set the codec to decode the file in three different quality settings and the lowest setting allows me to playback the file with Vegas best preview settings smoothlessly with 29,9 fps (though the codec itself reduces the preview quality to kind of "draft mode" then). For rendering I switch the codec setting to best quality.

Cool to able to edit HVX-200 footage in Vegas now!

Marco

Comments

filmy wrote on 1/8/2006, 5:36 AM
Very cool!

Has anyone else thought of something - we are going back in time to offline files. Used to be editors would intake footage at lower rez to edit and than take an EDL for online or they would just replace the higher/full rez files after going to "offline" with the lower rez. We hit a point were some people were saying "no such thing as offline anymore" or "no need for EDLs anymore". Than HD and HDV hit and the buzz word becomes "intermediate" and now we have Raylight which really goes back to the "old days" and allows for low rez files to "offline" edit with.

The other very cool thing I notice about Raylight is it will work with older version of SoFo builds:

>>> Raylight has been tested with Premiere 6.0 (29.97 fps only), Premiere Pro 1.5, Vegas 3.0, Vegas 6.0.<<<
Marco. wrote on 1/8/2006, 5:42 AM
Yes, HD is turning our world of video bit upside-down ... ;-)

Marco
rextilleon wrote on 1/8/2006, 7:49 AM
Yeah, now the only question is whether or not the HVX is really good. Initial reports aren't very good. Anyhow, its nice to know that if you do acquire the camera or you need to edit it, you can use Vegas.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/8/2006, 10:29 AM
HDV should not be a step backwards. As I said in posts yesterday, all this intermediate stuff should be under the covers. There is no reason I need to know about any of this. I just want to edit; I don't want to deal with proxies, etc.
Nat wrote on 1/8/2006, 10:52 AM
According to the site Raylight doesn't produce offline files, it just converts the MXF to a format readable by Vegas (and others) without loss of quality, so you can render your final project from those files. That is pretty neat.
filmy wrote on 1/8/2006, 6:53 PM
>>>According to the site Raylight doesn't produce offline files, it just converts the MXF to a format readable by Vegas (and others) without loss of quality, so you can render your final project from those files. That is pretty neat.<<<

That is not the way I am reading it.

The "manual" for Raylight has the following in it that leads me to the "offline/onlione" and low rez comparisons -

Copy the MXF files from the HVX200 camera to an empty folder on your video project hard drive. Copy the RayMaker application to the same folder. Double-click on RayMaker to convert all the files and follow the instructions.

[SNIP]

Once the Raylight AVI's are created, DO NOT DELETE, RENAME, OR MOVE the MXF files.

[SNIP]

Older, slower computer systems will need the lowest or Red quality setting on the Raylight codec. Computer systems with striped disk arrays, faster processors, faster display adapters, etc, will work well with the medium, or Yellow setting. In either case, the highest quality, or Blue setting is necessary for rendering uncompressed full-frame output, suitable for conversion to another format (like NTSC for broadcast), or for examining/stepping through individual frames for quality or visual effects work. The Blue setting will not work in real time, typical frame rates are 1-10 frames per second.

To me this sounds very much like a combination of 1> editing "offline" than going "online" for the master and 2> simply making a low rez version of the HD material to edit with and replacing it with the orginal HD for the final render.
Spot|DSE wrote on 1/8/2006, 7:09 PM
Wanting to know about proxies or not...you're going to have to if you want to keep up with current trends in HD vid. Whether it's HDV, HDCAM, XDCAM HD, DVCProHD, and the new J2K options coming from Grass Valley, proxies will be with us even more than they were back when Avid first started using proxies.
I'm quite sure it can be made more seamless, but since it's all very new...it's gonna be a while. A year or more, at least.
Low-cost HD in all flavors is two steps forward, one step backward. And a couple years after NLE's and processors catch up, then we'll be demanding 4K in the NLE.
PeterWright wrote on 1/8/2006, 7:25 PM
I haven't found using proxies or intermediates any problem, in fact without them I'd have to shell out big bucks for the very latest / fastest machine which itself would be out of date before long.

With proxies or intermediates, I can happily work with HDV on my perfectly usable 3 or 4 year old machines.