FM Baumann plug-ins

gripp wrote on 1/2/2012, 5:24 AM

I would like publicly to correct any wrong impression that may been inferred from my previous post suggesting that the FM Baumann plug-ins might have been causing spurious flashes and colour abnormalities when rendering using VP11.511.

Frederic (Baumann) very kindly spend the whole of yesterday investigating this for me, and concluded that this is an issue in the management of multi-threading of OFX plug-ins withing Vegas itself. There was no fault whatsoever in his software.

The resolution he suggested for me was to amend the Project Properties within Vegas 11, and change Pixel format from 32 to 8-bit. I'm not sure why I had it set at 32-bit in the first place. My previous "flashing" problems have now disappeared.

I have now upgraded the FM Baumann plug-ins (White Balance and Exposure) to the new GPU versions, and find them both excellent and an invaluable part of my work-flow. Often, they are the only two FXs that I need.

I should add that I am simply a customer, and in no way connected with FM Baumann software, but I speak as I find and can thoroughly recommend these two additions to the Vegas tool-box. Additionally, Frederic is extremely helpful and a pleasure to deal with.

BTW, I have had to abandon 511 and revert to 425.

Comments

Frederic Baumann wrote on 1/2/2012, 6:19 AM

Hi,

Many thanks for this very nice comment, I am pleased to help as far as I can, and it's a pleasure to deal with you as well :-)

Maybe I can add a few comments on the problem itself: I could reproduce it with other OFX plug-ins (not FBmn's), including some coming from Sony themselves, and from other independant vendors. This led me to conclude that the problem is coming not from the plug-ins, but from the OFX host itself, i.e. Vegas.

I will report this to Sony, providing the sample project showing the issue with Sony plug-ins, hoping to have a feedback shortly.

The problem seems to be that when an OFX plug-in is used on several clips, rendering to a file is done with random errors: one some frames the plug-in is not applied, in some others, it is "partly applied" (some color components seem to be unaffected), and some other frames are simply transformed to full black.

This especially appears on transitions between 2 clips: on some frames of the transition, the FX is applied on only 1 of the 2 visible overlapping clips. It looks like a multithreading issue which is wrongly addressed, only in floating-point mode.

The good news, according to my tests:
- the problem never happens on 8-bit projects
- the problem never happens when the max number of threads is set to 1
- the problem never happens when the GPU rendering of Vegas is disabled

Hope this helps,
Frederic - FBmn Software