Enjoying what you see *while* you work

LarsHD wrote on 5/23/2009, 12:46 PM
Source footage 1920x1080. Making 960x540 proxy files now so that I can edit an enjoy smooth plyback at full frame rate. If Sony and Cineform get things working can continue to work with 1920x1080 directly. For now I use uncompressed AVI 960x540. Why? Because I can use Pro9 that handels stills during dissolves much better than Pro 8. Which means I can work on projects at full 30 fps and not get annoyed...

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With Pro 9 32 bit I can add still photos 3000x2000 size to the timeline and run dissolves between these and the frame rate stays at full frame rate. This is great!

With uncompressed AVIs at 960x540 size I can have the project run at full frame rate also during dissolves. This is also great!


OK, what's my message with this post?
I'm trying to get to the following....


When working with productions that involve style, fashion, architecture, emotions, music etc. I think it is simply not acceptable to sit and work with anything that stutters or shows a frame rate below what your project is set up for. I think this must be the goal to view yuor project while you edit *at full frame rate*. With Pro 9 it does seems we are getting closer to this goal.

(Except for the highly disappointing and time consuming Sony-Cineform codec failure!)

I have viewed the excelllent Sony training videos. Thanks Sony for producing these! During dissolves etc. I often see on their videos that their projects are going down from 29.97 to 15-20 fps etc. Is this because of some screen capturing software or is it really that bad in reality? From what I hear and read it seems that many accept to work in editors and seeing frame rate reduced significantly during dissolves. That's sad.

I think more focus should be on achieving full frame rate for projects.

It simply is annoying and feels really bad to view artistic work stuttering while viewing. I get so turned off. It's like drinking an expensive wine and finding pieces of sand or something in it.... Or trying to relax at a beach but it's just a *little* too cold in the winds for you to completely relax... You're trying and pretending it's ok, but it really isn't... And you give up and say *****.... I give up...

Full frame rate. Pro 9 seems almost there...


Lars





Comments

farss wrote on 5/23/2009, 2:43 PM
Just my opinions:
Dissolves are rarely used by editors.
You'd have to watch a lot of movies before you'd see one.
Dissolves on many NLEs MUST be rendered, you just get a blank screen until you render them.
What you're doing is more in the realms of motion graphics than editing. Unfortunately from my experience with the most popular application for working with motion graphics everything needs to be rendered. Admittedly it seems to do a better job of not loosing what it has rendered to RAM than Vegas and the process is dynamic, you still can quickly run out of RAM and the oldest frames get dumped from the cache.
You're not alone in your quest and complaints though.

About half way down Stu Maschwitz's blog here he discusses some aspects of this. As you can see you can get what you want, today, at a staggering cost using Autodesks products. For us mortals though the industry is yet to provide an affordable solution.

Bob.
LarsHD wrote on 5/23/2009, 2:59 PM
Just my opinions:
Dissolves are rarely used by editors.

Lars: Working with architectur, fashion and some slow, slow nature things etc. dissolves are used quite a lot. Dissolves should work fine and look good and be pleasant to work with. This is a tech forum...


You'd have to watch a lot of movies before you'd see one.

Lars: Movies. I'm sure many vegas users make movies... But for those who want to use dissolves and who make their money on productions having dissolves, then dissolves should work. I do stills and video for a living and use a lot of dissolves...

Dissolves on many NLEs MUST be rendered, you just get a blank screen until you render them.

Lars: I'm working right now on 30 fps in Pro 9 in a project with lots of fashion stills and some moving material. I think I can count to around 60 dissolves so far...

What you're doing is more in the realms of motion graphics than editing.

Lars: No.

Unfortunately from my experience with the most popular application for working with motion graphics everything needs to be rendered.

Lars: Times are changing. Now we have fast computers and dissolves should not need to be pre rendered...


Admittedly it seems to do a better job of not loosing what it has rendered to RAM than Vegas and the process is dynamic, you still can quickly run out of RAM and the oldest frames get dumped from the cache.
You're not alone in your quest and complaints though.


Lars: Thanks. I also work a lot with music. I would hate to add strings to a ttrack and need to wait 3 mionutes to hear them play... ;)

About half way down Stu Maschwitz's blog here he discusses some aspects of this. As you can see you can get what you want, today, at a staggering cost using Autodesks products. For us mortals though the industry is yet to provide an affordable solution.

Lars: Again, Vista 64bit, Pro 9-32, 8 gb ram, Q6600 and Raid-0 10k rpm drives seems to give the possiblity to run projects with live no-losing fps performance. It's just bugs that need to be fixed. If the application communicates well with the streaming disks and if the right codecs etc are used it seems to be very close to a real time performance here. Pro Type Titler though seems not a very real time application.... :) But dissolves and adding "normal" plain text is surer here in real time.

Lars


Bob.
Hulk wrote on 5/23/2009, 3:13 PM
Realtime preview has been the holy grail of software NLE's since their inception. To be complaining about VP9's preview performance in that it "stutter" during certain operations strikes me as kind of strange. Of course it does. 10 years ago we couldn't perform a dissolve with DV (SD) at better than 5fps. With a good setup VP9 will work with DV for *most* operations in realtime.

When we moved to 1080p, with 4.5 times the pixels as SD, we took a step backward in preview performance. Add to that the added complexity of AVCHD and it's a wonder that Vegas can actually edit these formats at all.

Now with that being said we all realize that there is room for improvement in the preview department as far as VP9 is concerned. There are many threads on this board to that effect. Let's give the Sony guys a chance to digest all of the info that's coming at them.
farss wrote on 5/23/2009, 3:25 PM
"When we moved to 1080p, with 4.5 times the pixels as SD, we took a step backward in preview performance. Add to that the added complexity of AVCHD and it's a wonder that Vegas can actually edit these formats at all."

Indeed and keep in mind that yes, there's 4 times the number of pixels however with say mpeg-2 you can need to decode around 12 frames to get the current frame. I'd say current HD codecs are 50 times more demanding than SD DV.

There were a few log GOP SD formats such as IMX, they too I've been told were a beach to edit.

Bob.
LarsHD wrote on 5/23/2009, 4:58 PM
I'm sitting right here and now editing. With dissolves from one still / moving / still moving / stil / still etc. It *IS* working in Pro 9. Occsionally I get liek a "sticky" still or image. Right when the dissolve is about to start the preview hangs 1-2 frames it feels like.

Yes I know this wasn't possible at all only a short while back.

But we are really close to it working real fine now. At least for dissolves and "normal" text coming in.

Editing AVCHD footage directly isn't every nice at all. But that really doesn't matter does it? If there is good way to convert the camera footage to something that maintains quality 99% and then let it run butter smooth in the editor that's fine.

It is such a joy to edit. Then grab a coffee, lean back and just hit play and view what you've just edited. Not having to render to view it smoothly.

Real time smoothness while editing is great. Feels great! Inspiring and creative. Let's you focus on the content and not a constant pain...

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I think it is really important the SONY understands how great it is when things are flowing smoothly! Clearly todays hardware can work with this(except perhaps advanced text and advance transition etc), normal dissolves and normal text should DEFINITELY be running 100% real time with no FPS sacrifice. Don't settle for less.


Lars