HD Flip Video Question

CVM wrote on 6/26/2011, 9:50 AM

My son has an HD Flip Video camera which shoots MP4 video at 1280x720. He edits on an old machine of mine running Vegas 7 (Quad Pentium with a gig of RAM). Vegas 7 accepts the file type for editing, but even with the preview window the size of a thumbnail and reduced to draft quality, playback and editing are painfully choppy on that machine.

I have been able to 'reprocess' the video clips on my new machine to make them more 'editable' on his machine... even to the same MP4 file type, but resolution suffers. Until I upgrade his machine, do you know of a way I can reprocess the Flip MP4 files but maintain the 720 resolution?

Thanks for your thoughts. It's a pain doing this for him, but unfortunately, I can't have him editing on my machine.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 6/26/2011, 11:11 AM

I have Vegas 7 installed on some fairly old (>5 year) computers. If you can post about 10 seconds of footage, I'll see if I can come up with some hints for how to get good performance with V7 on a slow computer.

Laurence wrote on 6/27/2011, 8:41 AM

I would try the free GoPro / Cineform version of Cineform Studio:

http://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

CVM wrote on 6/28/2011, 1:41 PM

Here ya go, John.

http://vimeo.com/25730188

Thanks.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/28/2011, 8:47 PM

Well I tried all the tricks I know, both within Vegas, and outside of Vegas (the DGAVCIndex/VFAPIConv framserver), but on my rather slow, 6-year-old laptop, I couldn't get more than 6 fps.

I put the video onto my heavy duty editing computer, and it was able to play at 60 fps, but just barely.

What is interesting is that nothing in Vegas makes any difference: you get the same fps playback speed with Best as you do with Draft.

This observation led me to test the file using the VLC media player. I found that it didn't provide playback speed that was much different than Vegas. This means that external frameserving -- something which works so well to provide fast playback of MPEG-2 or VOB files on older computers using Vegas 4-8 -- doesn't help here at all.

The dirty little secret is that 60 fps of HD video is about all even a pretty capable modern computer can handle. The even dirtier little secret is that computers really haven't gotten any faster -- other than increased parallelism -- for many, many years, so this situation isn't going to get much better any time soon unless that parallelism can be applied to playback.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

CVM wrote on 6/30/2011, 9:42 AM

John... thanks for all your work looking into this issue... I truly appreciate it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

Do you think if I install a newer version of Vegas on that computer it would help? More RAM?

Dave

johnmeyer wrote on 6/30/2011, 1:03 PM

I tried it on all three versions of Vegas (7,8, 10) that I have on my "powerful" main editing computer. I just re-did those tests. I put the video on the timelines, set preview quality to "Preview (Auto)," turned off preview scaling, and size the preview window to get 640x360x32 video. I then played the video once (if you play it again, it will cached in memory and you'll get a different result).

I got 60 fps on all three versions.

I did some test using other MP4 files, and found that there can be a pretty big difference between V7/V8 and V10. Here is the result of one test I just did (using the same setup as above, but with a 1280x720 Gigaware camera video that someone sent to me to test stabilization software):

V7.0d: 10-12 fps
V8.0c: 10-12 fps
V10.0a: 60 fps

I then realized that I have the hidden "internal" preference for using multi-core during palyback set to TRUE (default is FALSE) for both Vegas 7 & 8 (you don't have to worry about this in Vegas 10). So, I went back and set this to the default of FALSE and re-did the tests. This was interesting because I then got much better results:

V7.0d: 28-30 fps
V8.0c: 28-30 fps

I closed and then re-opened each version of Vegas (so memory was flushed) and re-did the tests several more times. I then set the preference back to TRUE (to use multi-core) and re-did the tests. I am quite certain of the results.

So, this setting can and does make a difference, although in my case it has the opposite of the expected effect. And, with your video, this setting didn't matter.

So, on a fast computer, there can be a huge difference between Vegas 7&8, and Vegas 10.0a in timeline preview performance. Whether this would translate to a slower computer, I don't know, but I suspect that if you have multi-cores in your "slower" computer, then you would indeed see some sort of improvement.

CVM wrote on 7/2/2011, 12:44 PM

This is all great info, John... thanks!!!!

Laurence wrote on 7/3/2011, 5:06 AM

You could batch convert all the clips to 720p .mxf format. Mxf edits and previews beautifully on a Vegas timeline, and when you're done editing it smart renders into a master without a generation of quality loss.

CVM wrote on 7/3/2011, 9:50 AM

Laurence... please explain! I need to batch convert because doing them one at a time is killing me!

I eagerly await your instructions!

Dave

Laurence wrote on 7/3/2011, 11:23 AM

There are batch convert script called Proxy Stream which is free that will do this. Also there are a number of commercial scripts Ultimate S and Excaliber that will batch convert video formats.

The way I do it is pretty simple: I drag all my footage to a fresh timeline, run a "place markers at events" script, and render it all to a single .mxf clip with embedded markers. I like this better than a lot of separate clips because 1) it is easier to keep track of, and 2) because with long GOP formats Vegas really slows down if you put a lot of clips on the timeline.

Make sure your deinterlace method is set to "interpolate" as well. Vegas previews really slow down when you use "blend fields as your deinterlace method.

Actually, i do a little more than just that. When I convert formats I also normalize any dialog or interviews (left and right channels separately if they are separate recordings). Anywhere that the audio is junk I will cut it out at this point. If it is just useable b-roll audio I will leave it as it is.

I run the "place markers at events" script from within Ultimate S (there is also a free "place markers at events" script available however).

If the footage is cRGB (which I believe the Flip HD camera is), I'll also put a cRGB to sRGB filter on that track. Since I'm a perfectionist, I will set my project properties to 32 bits during this render so that any gradients that I'm converting won't acquire moire bands. Later when I use this converted clip I will set the project back to 8 bit color because it doesn't matter as much anymore and 8 bit projects render and preview faster.

What this will give me is a single .mxf clip in the right color space, audio that's easy to work with, and with embedded markers which let me know where all the individual clip sections begin and end.

This method of working is very efficient and gives me great performance even out of my older Intel Core2Duo powered laptop.

When I use footage from my HDV camera, I smart-render the 25 Mbps .mxf file from the original m2t footage and keep the original mpeg2 compression intact. If I'm using a camera that uses a different compression algorithm, I just rerender into .mxf. It still looks very good.