If you like that look, stick with 8 bit and try the color corrector using the Computer RGB to Studio RGB preset as a starting point. You'll get very close to the same look without the constant crashing and at a fraction of the render time.

That's the short-term solution. The real thing you should be looking at is some of the profile settings in your camera so that you get a more saturated look (or whatever else you prefer) as you're shooting.

The look you're seeing may look good, but it's an error. I wouldn't be surprised to see it fixed in the next update of Vegas. If it is, I expect that a lot of people will complain because they like the saturated look better LOL!

Being as I tend to use more than one video track, overlaying text, tracks with alpha, effects, etc. 32bit makes an improvement to the quality of the final output. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on my desktop or laptop, so Darren is not alone in this.

Vegas 8 has been out for quite a while now,, the 32 bit thing has been a huge question mark since the release, (at least for me) if some feature ever needed a white paper this is it. Now maybe sony has not read the many many posts on this subject to clarify, or they have and arent really sure what its use is either. Sounds catchy though 32 bit.. cool

I personally believe that the Adobe demo team mentioned by [Coursedesign] was probably making the same mistake but I could be wrong.

No, saturation wasn't even involved in the slightest here.

...if some feature ever needed a white paper this is it.

I think Sony made the assumption that those who understood when and how to use 32-bit would know it and use it, and the rest would stick with 8-bit.

The differences (and when to use it!) are covered in excruciating detail in hundreds of books on post production, and dozens of DVD training programs.

I'll try to pull some references from my library later, and I also have footage examples.

When used properly and where there is a need, the difference is like night and day. Nothing suBBtle about it.

Editors used to not have to worry about this, it was all taken care of by other people.
Now it's education time for everyone, because the editor is increasingly expected to be a master of all trades and a jack of none.

There may not be a difference in color grading but the transparency effects, fades etc. are definitely different and usually better in 32 bit. I am using Cineform Neo and have the same problem as Darrel. I can render very small timelines but long ones crash Vegas immediately. Sony needs to fix this is stop advertising it.

Marc

With Cineform Neo, I would agree that any difference you are seeing is real.

I can render very small timelines but long ones crash Vegas immediately.

This is what the vast majority of us experience. I have heard one person say that he can render 32 bit HDV with no problems, and given the very obvious problem in Vegas, I am not quite sure I believe him.

Honestly, the scariest part of this is what this reveals about the SCS testing team. Namely that we're it.

Regarding 8bit versus 32bit:

1- Some codecs (e.g. MPEG2 HDV) behave differently depending on whether the project is 8bit or 32bit. They just decided to implement the 32bit version of the codec differently than the 8bit version. IMO this can be confusing since when you change between 8bit and 32bit, it makes more sense if the only difference is between the processing bit depth. But that's not the case, as changing between 8bit and 32bit changes more than just the bit depth.

This is probably what Darren is seeing.

1b- The Vegas video preview can be wrong. It is not always WYSIWIG because the levels conversions might be wrong.

2- What Coursedesign is talking about is probably this:

http://glennchan.info/articles/vegas/linlight/linlight.htm

If you do linear light processing (and the intermediate values need to be 32-bit), then there will be a subtle but noticeable difference.

3-
It is possible for 8-bit processing to cause banding artifacts to appear on gradients (e.g. sky). But if there is any noise in your footage (e.g. the footage came from a camera), then the noise will tend to dither the image and you just won't see the banding artifacts.

Vegas' implementation of 32-bit processing will get rid of banding artifacts in some cases, won't get rid of it in others (e.g. if there is banding in your source, it's hard to polish a turd), won't make a difference for 99% of situations (where you might have banding but don't see it anyways), and in some esoteric cases can cause banding (bad implementation IMO). If you look into all the details, then you'd realize implementation does matter... e.g. an ideal implementation would not create unnecessary banding.
But anyways, most of these banding artifacts are pretty subtle or weren't a problem to begin with.

For most projects, the main benefit of 32-bit would be so that you can do linear light processing/compositing. (For dissolves, linear light processing can be done in a 8-bit Vegas project so a 32-bit project isn't necessary.) Otherwise, most projects won't have a noticeable difference between 8-bit and 32-bit renders, *assuming* that the levels conversions are handled correctly.

4- Sorry if all this stuff is confusing as there are a number of different things going on, some of them which aren't intuitive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.T.A.

Did he ever return?

But seriously, there's more to this, if I remember correctly. Last I checked, Darren, you were using nearly 100 tracks to handle compositing, audio editing, basic cuts, everything - all in one project. And this thread was the first time I'd heard that you were trying to use the 32-bit "bug-like-feature" of Vegas.

I've been a passenger on this road to hell and have heard the same sort of complaints: It doesn't work, fix it or take the gear away, get me out of this mess, I'm going to come to your offices and MAKE you make it work. And this was with people who had divided up the editing, compositing, CC, and audio finishing amongst different programs and machines. In theory, they did it by the book, divided the job into manageable chunks, and still ran into serious roadblocks.

Realistically, you need to start thinking about what it'll take to finish rather than trying to make Vegas be the tool for the job. Dividing up the job into shorter segments sure seemed like a way to "work smarter", but it doesn't sound like it's cutting it so you need to take some other path, like trying to migrate to FCP or AVID, or perhaps finding a hardware system that'll work with Vegas, or perhaps hiring a fixer to look at it with a fresh eye and divide up the project in a way that Vegas can handle it.

I'd definitely drop the requirement that you use 32-bit processing. That seems to be a non-starter.

It's pretty obvious that SCS' system of doing beta testing is sorely lacking and I'd be really wary of the upcoming 64-bit version of Vegas this fall. If I were them I'd have a couple of people on the payroll just making long form projects, or perhaps maybe they should offer grants to people doing projects of interest in trade for getting access to those projects during the process.

I suspect that one thing Vegas really needs is ways to sanely limit and manage projects, in addition to getting a rock solid workflow going with common media formats. I really don't know how they'd go about this. I remember being told during the last big rant-fest at our shop that 844x would work with a limited number of tracks in real time (you could count them on one hand) and anything beyond that would be smart rendered in some sort of clip-by-clip, track-by-track, or track folder basis. Perhaps that's an approach.

Regardless, SCS needs to make it harder to get yourself into such a hole. Presenting 32-bit processing as anything but an "experimental" feature was a big mistake on their part.

Rob Mack

Rob Mack,

Well said. Having run into these problems with memory errors and freeze ups on our feature, I can vouch for the existence of these issues. Our solution, for now, was to break up the project into three reels and stay in 8-bit. I look forward to SCS working out the memory issues, and will make the jump back to 32-bit when that happens; but until then, it's not the end of the world.

During my temporary conversion to Final Cut, I attended a few meetings of the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro Users Group. This group is made up of mostly high-level editors; professionals in Los Angeles, many of them working at studios. During the Q & As at these meetings, there was much discussion of the bugs in FCP. These Final Cut Pro users found workarounds while the Apple people worked on fixes. I rarely heard people talking about jumping ship to another NLE.

My point is, no software is perfect. We all want that to be the case, but it's not reality. Let's all give SCS a break, deal with workarounds as these issues are addressed, and continue enjoying what I consider the most intuitive, capable, fast NLE out there. Fixes will come.

For the time being, I have stopped using 32bit and only use 8bit. Until the fix comes, I use AE for my advanced compositing (mostly title and lower third work) and render to Quicktime (PNG with Alpha). These I drop into Vegas.

The ticket I submitted in November last year was a 5 second timeline that would crash Vegas instantly in 32bit mode. Sony could re-create the issue and said I should wait for the next patch (8c by the looks of it). I am keeping my fingers crossed! The time between 8b and the release of 8c will be about 6 months - that's half a year of development!

I can't help but think that a lot of the issues discussed on this forum are related to something in the core of Vegas 8 and hence the length of time to get them fixed.

I suspect the 32bit processing in Vegas is a work in progress and maybe one that was let out of the bag too soon. If the rumours of support for OpenEXR being added in the next release are true then a 32bit linear light pipeline starts to make a lot of sense.

Bob.

terje,

Aloha. Your not alone. I am and is still having problems rendering in HDV 1080 60i 32 bit mode with the Sony Vegas Pro 8. I just tried to render a 2hr wedding edit with lots of filters and graphics and the software just shut off in about 2 seconds without a warning. I now render with 8bit because for what I'm doing needs that specific setting to render fully.

Debuman

I too have given up on 32bit for the time being just hoping that some day it will work, but i certainly don't think Darrens request to have this feature fixed unreasonable. It's kind of like buying a new car that has air-conditioning but every time you turn it on it just blows hot air. Would you put up with it or use a work-around (roll down the window), Nope, i dare say you'd be down to the dealer quick-smart demanding they fix it.

"The ticket I submitted in November last year was a 5 second timeline that would crash Vegas instantly in 32bit mode. Sony could re-create the issue and said I should wait for the next patch (8c by the looks of it). I am keeping my fingers crossed! The time between 8b and the release of 8c will be about 6 months - that's half a year of development!"

Half a year in calendar time. Depending on the internal allocation of resources between maintenance and new development, this may be only a few days' worth labor.

Any guess when 8c will be released?

Im not even going to bother installing 8 until 8c is out, even though I bought 8 the first week available.

8C and DVDA5 was promised for June at NAB

TeeJay said "It's kind of like buying a new car that has air-conditioning..."

The car analogy gets a bit tired, especially if you make comparisons to well tested automotive technology with decades of history in the marketplace, tested by an industry that eventually accepted that they had some resonsibility for safety.

So let's make a different car analogy. This is more like buying Piaggio's first attempt at all wheel steering in their only foray into the car market...and the only reason they're in the car market is that the biggest manufacturers only make SUVs which don't fit in anyone's garage. And on top of that, you're expecting to use the car as a back-country ambulance.

It's not that I want to let SCS off the hook on this, I don't. They should have labeled the 32-bit feature as "experimental" and they should have made a dialog box pop up every time you enable 32-bit so that they could get you to agree that you understand it's experimental. But they didn't, and it seems obvious that they aren't doing the sort of QA that they need to do. They probably need to pull the feature out of 8c.

In fact, I totally agree that customers should be ripping SCS a new orifice on this, but I also think that, especially in Darren's case, where he already has a project that is nearly impossible to render, that he has no business going down the 32-bit path when other users right and left say it just doesn't work.

And demanding that SCS fix it *now* is well and good, but I know from a few years in production that you don't fix gear (or crew) during a shoot, you replace it and move on.

Rob

Vegas 8 is to Sony what Vista is to Microsoft.

Thanks for all the comments.

Yeh Rob, I hear what you're saying about 32bit ... and I'll render in 8bit if I could ... sure I can break the project down even further ... Bob has kindly offered to have a crack at rendering my project (thanks Bob) ... and if it's something dumb that I'm doing I'll be the first one grovelling on the floor asking for forgiveness ...

However ... let's not forget the following from the SCS website for one second.

'Features include ProType Titling technology, multicamera editing tools, 32-bit floating point video processing, customizable window layouts, color-coded snapping, improved HDV/SDI/XDCAM support etc. etc. etc.'

How about my 100 audio tracks ... and the suggestion of 'limiting the end-users imagination' ... ??

'Use unlimited tracks, 24-bit/192 kHz audio, punch-in recording, 5.1 surround mixing, effects automation, and time compress/expand. Apply customizable, real-time audio effects like EQ, etc etc etc' ....'

The problem for me in all of this is .... that Vegas has been such a GREAT product for many years ... I get this first great opportunity to make a feature ... and SONY f**ks the software ...

It's been six months ... if Vegas Pro 8.0c doesn't work ... that will be enough for me ... I'll then start looking at other NLE's ... for the first time in a decade.

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

A couple of points:

HDV hasn't been around for 10 years. Every NLE has had it's share of speed bumps dealing with long GOP mpeg-2. I've not had many issues with it even in 32bit coming off media that doesn't have errors as part of it's natural recording system, DR60 and SxS cards are fine. Tape is a traumatic.

SCS added a 32bit pipeline in V8. In all honesty unless you own shares in a power utility or a farm in Iceland as it stands at the moment it's a bullet point for marketing only. I made the mistake of using it once, nothing crashed thankfully but what a waste of time.

Looking at the feature list for V8, I'd read that like the spec for a high performance car. Sure the car will do 300K, corner like it's on tracks and stop on a dime. Slamming on the brakes while cornering at 300K though will result in a fatal crash.

Bob.

DGates: "Vegas 8 is to Sony what Vista is to Microsoft."

What?
That has to be about the worst, most inaccurate analogy I have heard yet.
Vegas 8 has some technical problems, which hopefully will get fixed. Vista simply has a popularity problem.... 2 different things. Last time I heard (in one of these threads discussing NAB) Vegas usage was up 50%