Indie Filmmaker - Wish List - Vegas 7.0

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 4/15/2006, 7:15 AM
Try Raylight. Doesn't matter if DVFilm made it or Sony made it, it works. Very well.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/15/2006, 7:20 AM
There are currently 2 raw .mxf clips for download on our site for those that want to experiment, or if Sony wants to host others...we've got several hours of footage at this point. Just that they're big files is keeping us from hosting more.
FWIW, maybe it's because I'm familiar with the CineForm HDI that I see the Raylight as a similar HDI workflow, except MUCH faster. It would be nice to have real-time conversion to Raylight on import from P2, or some kind of drag n' drop conversion from the P2 viewer to the Raylight droplet rather than copying the Raymaker.exe file to each folder.
GoodnightFilm wrote on 4/15/2006, 8:30 AM
With regards to hogging their own codecs, Sony is just as guilty as Panny...how many NLE's support the HDCAM codec? Perhaps both Sony and Panny could make this a better world by allowing all NLEs to use both of their codecs for free! The reason this won't happen is because of Xpri. I think Sony should kill off Xpri and integrate Vegas with their NLE hardware...push a Vegas-based turnkey system to the F900 Hollywood crowd. Then, Sony can release a low-end version of the hardware (e.g., Mojo)...now you're talking. A company pushing two completely different NLEs, a so-called high-end one (Xpri) and a "prosumer" one (Vegas), will distract from the single-pointed focus it takes to effectively win the war. Why not have Vegas lead the way?

Re:24fps. It is a beautiful thing when implemented correctly. Kudos to the Varicam-method of the HVX200 and the "true" 24p of the JVC HD100U.
apit34356 wrote on 4/15/2006, 9:16 AM
"kill off Xpri" no way! Xpri real time edit is what network broadcast needs. Sports and news are fast pace worlds.
GoodnightFilm wrote on 4/15/2006, 9:25 AM
i just remembered a feature that i'd like to see make its way into Vegas. Better motion tracking "ala After Effects"...inotherwords, auto-tracking based on image data. any chance this will be in 7.0?
Patryk Rebisz wrote on 4/15/2006, 10:51 AM
i think the real discussion here is about psychology. I think Sony buying Vegas made Vegas into main stream app that's being supported by a giant... thus there is a high expectation from the software and at this moment that expectation is fullfiled but without any whisles.... It's like going to see a Hollywood expensive comedy... the same comedy would be funny if done on low budget but with all the money behind it looses its "innocence." I remember discovering Vegas and being blown away by its capabilities -- all that goodness comeing from a "small and unknown company." I'm not sure i would have the same impression if i was introduced to Vegas right now as all that goodness is coming from a huge comany.
apsolonproductions wrote on 4/15/2006, 11:24 AM
I think I may buy raylight just to see how it does. The plug-in is pretty cheap but I think after hearing the news that Vegas 6d is to be annouced at the NAB and not vegas 7 and it will NOT support DVCpro50 or DVCpro100, I am going to switch back to Avid for editing. I love vegas and I'm going to use 6 to edit my SD event footage but for my HD stuff its going to have to be Avid pro HD upgrade for now. Who knows the raylight plug-in might impress me to the point I stick with vegas for HVX editing.. :-)
rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2006, 12:21 PM
Maybe an automatic detection when you bring the MXF files into Vegas. It'd detect that the files are mxf, check to see if the intermediates exist, and if not, create them for you.

I tried out the demo last night with DVfilm's example. The conversion was really fast and the playback on my modest machine was quite good.

Another thread should be started for the Raylight topic.

Rob Mack
rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2006, 12:34 PM
I think that's a good point. Having the Sony name on the software seems like it's creating some unmanaged expectations. If I were to list expectations that need better definition:

--What is the target market for Vegas?
(Prosumer, I assume)

--What other NLEs do they want to compete with?
(Do they really want to compete with PPro and FCP, or should they cede the bottom tier of "Proffesional" NLEs to those applications)

--Should users expect to get all the features they could possibly want integrated into Vegas?
(I think the answer should be no. Better to introduce a "pro" product, which could just consist of a bundle of codecs at additional cost, or it could consist of some add-on tools, like a really good capture app, media manager, additional filters, a project manager. Make the "Pro" set an add-on to Vegas, not an entirely new NLE.)

--Give people a better idea about release dates. Set an expectation there.
(The problem is that users are expecting a release at NAB. If that's not going to happen then it needs to be squashed now. Set a new expectation. After all, a one year development cycle for Vegas is pretty fast and it's not unreasonable for a release to come out later in the year. Those who are threatening to jump ship, fine. You go where the tools you need are. And if Vegas 7 comes along later, addresses a lot of people's issues, I think that many of those users will come back. As long as the issues are addressed. Face it, you really can get the edit side of work done faster in Vegas than in most other systems.

Rob Mack
GoodnightFilm wrote on 4/15/2006, 12:53 PM
i like where this thread is going now. yes. what is the target market for Vegas??? please, please, please, Sony, let it be to go after FCP and Adobe!!! it's waaay too good to give up and become a bottom dweller NLE. i think you've got something great here...it was visionary of the dev team to break from the old editing metaphors--that plague the other NLEs--and devise an intuitive editing approach. just add the things the indie filmmaker/pro editing community needs and presto...we're back in the game.

on another front, wow...what a dissapointment that v7 won't be released at NAB (just read that here on the forum). :( sony, hurry up...you've got editors leaving for other NLEs because of your inability to realize the importance of dvcpro50-dvcprohd. shame on you! at the very least, announce something...something big...to keep hope alive and let the professional community know that you care about them and not just "prosumers."
farss wrote on 4/15/2006, 3:43 PM
Exactly right and it's an awesome system.
The comment above shows how little grasp many have of the real world of broadcasting, you know those guys, they're the ones you'd like to sell your movie to.
Xpri isn't an expensive system and at NAB last Sony dropped the price 50% making it very affordable. Sure it'll still set you back zillions per desk but put together a Vegas system that'll do the same thing and the price difference will be minor.
In the world of broadcast infrastructure is a big cost factor, well over $1M just in cabling, add switchers and routers, another few $1M. Throw in enough HDCAM SR decks to keep everyone working and there's another $1M.
When you consider that, the decision whether to buy an Avid or Sony system is pretty much small change, sort of around the same level as which brand of coffee to put in the CafeBar.

Bob.
mvb wrote on 4/15/2006, 4:38 PM
It would be nice to have real-time conversion to Raylight on import from P2, or some kind of drag n' drop conversion from the P2 viewer to the Raylight droplet rather than copying the Raymaker.exe file to each folder.

These are good suggestions and a drag'n'drop version of RayMaker is in the works.

rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2006, 4:48 PM
Okay. Some of my post was talking points. Here's the other side of it --

Vegas is a prosumer NLE. It happened to be really good and is attractive in the professional space but it doesn't really have the features that most professionals are used to, like project management and hardware support.

You can say the same for Premiere too and I think the two parallel each other. Adobe has been making a lot of effort to bring Premiere into the professional realm and they've created a pretty powerful system that seems kind of awkward to use but is definitely targeted at professional use.

Vegas is, by definition, a software-only NLE. There are great advantages to that but the primary advantage is cost to users. You can set up a system very cheaply that will be capable of working with any camera a consumer is likely to own. Besides cost, there is reliability to Vegas - face it, there's a lot less that can go wrong when you don't have specialized hardware.

Vegas has appealed to the low end of the pro market - wedding and church production. Vegas is also really well suited to production for the internet, and it seems to me that it's initial developement came at a time when that was a hot thing to pursue.

Vegas is very nice to work with. We're starting to use PPro/Axio systems at work and I'm finding the time it takes just to get a clip onto the timeline is huge compared to Vegas. I'm not an editor at work so I have no mandate to get up to speed with PPro but I do have to extract stills from the photage nearly every day. I'm not looking forward to ppro because I'm always slammed for time but I'll have to apply myself to it anyway.

By the way, I keep hearing our editors say that we're using an Axio system. They aren't saying "Premiere". Interesting take on the "stigma" issue.

The current freak-out about NAB is annoying. Can you get your current work done in Vegas? If not, move on. Do you think your next project needs something else? Then move on.

Do you really need a new version of Vegas by the end of the month? I'd say that most of the people freaking out about the next new release aren't busy enough. There are exceptions, of course but most are just snapping at bubbles (dog owners, anyone?). There will indeed be a new release of Vegas (sometime) and, yes, it's about time for Madison to set some expectations about that, and better yet, distract us into something less destructive than the current whining.

Keep in mind, it'll be Vegas and DVD Architect. If the release is later maybe it'll address things that an April release couldn't address. This is a year for HD discs in two flavors with OS support for the both, fairly stringent Vista requirements for audio and graphics hardware that will set some stable expectations for Vegas to shoot for, a new Direct X, networked home media appliances...

NAB is an artificial milestone for us. The real milestones are whatever your requirements are right now for work you know you'll be doing. If you know you need a feature that you can only find in Premiere or Avid or FCP and you need to move forward right now then do it. Vegas is cheap. You could quite easily move on from it or come back to it later if it starts to meet your needs again. But get a grip. There's no urgency to get the newest feature if you don't actually need it.

Rob Mack
GoodnightFilm wrote on 4/15/2006, 5:07 PM
> let the professional community know that you care about them and not just "prosumers."

Mr. Mack, I guess you answered that question.

> Then move on.

Hmmm. Thinking. I do love Vegas though...would love to use it to edit my first feature length film! Let's wait and see what happens with 7.0.

Remember, I'm only trying to help out...DVCProHD support is of essence.
rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2006, 5:58 PM
As a work around, you can put a shortcut to RayMaker.exe in your "Send To" folder. Then you right click on your mxf file and send it to raymaker. If converts the file and saves the conversion in the same folder. Just tried it.

I don't know if you can select multiple mxf files and send them all at once. I did try sending it a folder, though, but it didn't check for mxf files inside the folder.

Rob
farss wrote on 4/15/2006, 7:35 PM
Whilst I don't have any HVX 200 footage or a camera I have no doubt at some time I'll have to deal with or be asked to deal with footage from the HVX 200.
Whilst Raylight sounds like a very good solution this is still far from full blown support for the HVX 200 or for that matter generic support for MXF.
Rather than piece meal support for cameras surely what we need is full blown MXF support?
Then we have the HVX 200, F330/350 and the InfinitiCam covered.

One of Vegas's greatest strengths has always been as the glue in post, let's keep it that way. I know this is not the way everyone works, rather they buy a camera and then look for an edit solution but there are many of us who work the other way around, we don't shoot anything, we're the guys people come to when they've shot something on a camera cause that's what the client / DOP/ Grandma told them to do.
I'd gladly pay at least double the current price of Vegas for a tool that painted a much broader brush, heck make that 5 times more. That's still WAY cheaper than running and learning 5 different systems just to cope with anything that comes my way.

Bob.
rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2006, 10:04 PM
Don't get me wrong. Vegas has prosumer roots and is still considered a prosumer application, but they're genuinely aiming for professional adoption. Otherwise you wouldn't be seing any sort of SDI input and rs242 deck control.

Personally, since you already know and like Vegas but are finding it lacking, I suspect that you could very well work with other NLEs and still come back to Vegas when it's the right tool for the job.

I work for a guy who cut his teeth on Media100 when it and Avid were first introduced. He's had long conversations with them about features and workflow, and they adopted a lot of things he and other customers asked for. But behind all that there were times when they just couldn't see the need for one thing or another and it can take a lot of effort to convince developers of something that just seems so obvious to the daily user. They have their own visions, their own mental constructions of how things should work, and they have time and resource budgets.

We did a lot of beta testing on the 844x as well. New engineers, same problem. They couldn't see the need for obvious things.

Now we've jumped that ship since Media100 has been looking like a dead end to us and weathering another Apple hardware change just wasn't in the cards for us. Premiere pro with Axio cards seems like the right way to go and we're running three systems now. But again we find that there are some things that seem obvious that adobe isn't considering.

The point is that you're always going to find this. Every NLE has been down a long road starting from certain assumptions and there are always things that seem obvious and essential to you but aren't even on the radar for the developers of your NLE. So you weigh the pros and cons and decide on the tool that you'd prefer, and then you pepper them with constant feedback and hope you can get what you want by the next release.

And sometimes it helps to present an idea on this forum, if you can get others to adopt the idea.

"Mr" Mack
rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2006, 10:21 PM
I have to agree. To me it just makes the point that there's a market for "pro" add-ons for Vegas. Paying 150 bucks wouldn't be unreasonable for a panasonic codec license, or for an On2 license to write FLV files for flash 8, or for a better capture application. In fact, I think that's the going rate for the On2 exporter

I could see the Panasonic license costing more but as long Madison sells it as a "Panasonic License" then it just makes Panasonic look expensive.

Rob Mack
GlennChan wrote on 4/15/2006, 11:49 PM
7) ITU R601 was designed with B&W reception in mind and display on CRTs. ITU R709 is designed with LCD and plasma displays in mind. It doesn't support simple conversion to B&W and conversion to 601 is not foolproof as not all values within 709 will map to 601.
I think ITU-R Rec. 601 were a set of recommendations for digital video formats. It wasn't designed with B&W reception in mind... I believe almost everyone was broadcasting in color when they came out with the first set of recommendations.

I don't believe Rec. 709 was designed with LCD and plasma in mind. It's just a general recommendation for HD digital video formats. It does specify 709 phosphors (implies CRT, with CRT gamma), which are supposed to be the standard for colorimetry. I don't believe there are any CRTs on the market with 709 phosphors.
Rec. 709 also changed the luma co-efficients because of a theoretical improvement in quality. This presents a minor problem when converting between rec. 601 and rec. 709 video. To do a proper conversion requires some extra signal processing. If the proper conversion is not performed, some color inaccuracy will result.

The different luma co-efficients also changes the size of the respective color gamuts. In practice, I don't think this is a big deal. But it is possible to generate colors in the extremities that can get clipped.

Rec. 709 and Rec. 601 also have different transfer functions. Rec. 709 defines a linear transfer function near zero.
see http://www.poynton.com/notes/colour_and_gamma/GammaFAQ.html#gamma

8) The limitations of capturing color using only 3 sensors are now clear to me. The idea of using more than 3 sensors isn't just marketing hype although just how the extra data would be used is still a bit of a mystery.
The best sensor would be one that mimics humans' sensitivity to the various wavelengths of light. Following the CIE research, this can be problematic to achieve since red response is 'negative' for certain parts of the spectrum.

this article sort of explains it.

I believe the Sony F828 (digital still camera) implements that technology... I don't hear much people talking about that feature though.
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscf828/page12.asp
That's the dpreview.com review of that particular camera.

farss wrote on 4/16/2006, 8:29 AM
7) I may have misread the following:
In the ITU-R BT.709-4 recommendation Luma is defined as:
Y' = .2126R' +.7152G' +.0722B'
For NTSC (SMPTE170M) and SD-SDI (ITU-R BT.601-5 or SMPTE-259M) the
Luma matrix is defined as:
Y' = .299R' +.587G' +.114B'
From these equations we can see that the HD Luma will contain a different 'mixture' of
color than the standard definition equivalents; the result is a slightly different overall
image colorimetry. This change was made to compensate HD video for the inevitable
display on flat panel monitors instead of CRT's. Standard definition video was designed
to be viewed on monitors using CRT technology with phosphor dots splattered on the
screen.
The color matrix was created to make monochrome video (luma only) appear 'black and
white' - void of any color- when displayed on a monitor. If HD video is simply downconverted
and not color compensated the HD signal will appear on a CRT to have a
higher green content and not purely monochromatic. This becomes problematic when
viewing color as well. As the Cb and Cr components are added to the Luma the resulting
display will not be of the correct hue.

8) If you wanted a system that could handle all colors that the human eye can perceive then the theoretical sensors used in the CIE model would seem the best. However that model is only based on average human perception. An ideal system would reproduce all colors regardless of human perception. I cannot even begin to imagine how such a system would function. Perhaps sensors that measures wavelength and intensity but that might be violating some law of physics.
The problem I have with these modelling systems is how well they stack up in when we try to reproduce reality, not just color swatches. They seem more attuned to how much can we ditch and still get away with it. I'd like to see a simple test, two windows, one of the real world and one a reproduction of the same thing. When we can't tell the difference in a double blind test then we've achieved the goal.

Bob.
GlennChan wrote on 4/16/2006, 12:13 PM
This change was made to compensate HD video for the inevitable
Chaging the luma coefficients is not related to whether the video will be displayed on LCDs or CRTs.

The Rec. 709 luma co-efficients are theoretically a little more accurate than the old ones. They are like that to compensate for how we perceive luminance... green is seen as being brighter than red or blue. i.e. in the color bars test pattern, you have red green and blue at 75% of the maximum the monitor can display. We see that the green bar is brighter than the red bar, which is brighter than the blue bar.

I believe the engineering bodies tend to develop standards with engineering ideals in mind, more so that aiming for practicality. For example, the SMPTE standard for monitor brightness is 35fL... but the most expensive CRTs you can get (sony BVMs) have trouble reaching that brightness level. For digital cinema, the standard for brightness is 16fL... but most theatres will be run at 12fL or less to extend the life of the projector lamp.
The Rec. 709 colorimetry was defined with CRT phosphors in mind. CRTs with 709 phosphors are, by definition, the standard that other displays should be designed towards. I don't believe you can buy a CRT with 709 phosphors however.

farss wrote on 4/16/2006, 3:35 PM
I should have provided a reference to what I was quoting, very slack of me not to:

http://www.videotek.com/WhitePapers/Conforming_RGB_and_Composite_Gamut.pdf

I didn't realise at the time I was reading it that it's from someone who has an interest in selling something, therefore it may be somewhat biased to a certain agenda although I think it's generally technically accurate.

Bob.
GlennChan wrote on 4/16/2006, 6:07 PM
In my opinion, some of the comments made in that article have a bizarre premise/context. Because of this, it's hard to tell whether or not the statements are accurate.

The color matrix was created to make monochrome video (luma only) appear 'black and white' - void of any color- when displayed on a monitor.
Monochrome video, by definition, is already black and white / void of chrominance ['color']. To me, the statement is just bizarre. It says that the color matrix was created to make [black and white] video appear 'black and white'.

What the luma co-efficients do is define how much of R/G/B contribute to luma. Luma approximates how bright we see colors.


2- Some of the other claims are slightly inaccurate.
The color spectrum of the raw RGB signal found at the image pick-up of a video camera, is unlimited and contains 15 to16 million color combinations.
With 10 and 12-bit A/D converters, more than 16 million color combinations are possible (i.e. 2^30, 2^36).
There are also cameras which use a complimentary color scheme (i.e. 1CCD designs), or Sony's RGB+E scheme.

farss wrote on 4/17/2006, 6:32 AM
Kind of confuses me too. But maybe it's worded badly. I think regarding 1) what he's talking about is getting a luma only signal to display as only monochrome and I know that's no simple task. In the early days of color broadcasting it was typical to have B&W monitors beside color monitors and to get them to look the same from a B&W source was nigh impossible, even if the white point of the phosphors matched. I know the film guys have the same problem, print a B&W neg to color and it's not quite B&W anymore.
2) I think he's perhaps referring to when it's converted to 8 bit RGB or else he may be referring to the limitations of the dynamic range of the CCDs themselves.