Mov files and VPro 15 or older versions incl. VMS

Cornico wrote on 1/7/2018, 4:44 PM

By helping a member on our Dutch forum I discovered something I did not know.
Was this unknow or can I somewhere reed things about this?

The problem was , and many times here mentioned, that more than a certain amount of mov files freezes Vegas and crash the program afterwards.

In my case it was from the 18th event that was added, caused that one was a green screen and the next ones were black and Vegas could not play the ones that were already accepted and than the program crashed.
That happened in all my Vegas versions VMS 10-14 and Pro 10-14.
In Vegas Pro 15 no problem at all, I could at once add 30 files and again and again without any problem.
I discovered that the way VPro 15 handled those files is different from all the other versions: the so4compund plug was used for decoding the files and in stead of a variable framerate of ~~ 30, VPro 15 say constant framerate is 30 fps.
Is this the reason there are no problems in VPro 15 ? It seems so.
Here are the file properties in all the earlier versions, incl. VMS
and this are the file properties in VPro 15

Comments

Marco. wrote on 1/7/2018, 4:46 PM

Actually you already mentioned the difference. Older Vegas versions needed Quicktime to decode these files and Quicktime's 32 bit architecture caused some memory trouble.

Marco. wrote on 1/7/2018, 4:54 PM

I oversaw that point. No, don't know what's about the different frame rates of same file.

What does MediaInfo say about its frame rate?

Marco. wrote on 1/7/2018, 5:20 PM

So according to MediaInfo the former Quicktime decode is buggy in regards of proper frame rate reading and it is working correctly now in VP15 if Quicktime is not used.

»What could be the reason the quicktime 7 plugin is still in the VEGAS Pro 15.0\FileIO Plug-Ins?«

I think not all of the given Quicktime types could be decoded by the so4compound plug. I'd guess MOV wrapped codecs like DNxHD still would need Quicktime.

NickHope wrote on 1/7/2018, 9:32 PM

So according to MediaInfo the former Quicktime decode is buggy in regards of proper frame rate reading and it is working correctly now in VP15 if Quicktime is not used.

Seems like the opposite to me. MediaInfo only reports the maximum frame rate as 30.000, but the average is 29.97, which is what QT it decoding at.

MediaInfo variable frame rate readings are mysterious and often best ignored, especially in relation to debugging Vegas playback.

I think not all of the given Quicktime types could be decoded by the so4compound plug. I'd guess MOV wrapped codecs like DNxHD still would need Quicktime.

There are numerous others such as Motion JPEG, Photo JPEG and Animation.

Marco. wrote on 1/8/2018, 4:00 AM

Seems like I was too tired. I misread the MediaInfo screenshot and thought the file actually had 30 fps fixed frame rate. Nick is right.

Marco. wrote on 1/8/2018, 5:11 AM

Maybe so4compound plug causes it. Did you try deactivating it?

Musicvid wrote on 1/8/2018, 5:51 AM

Once again, MediaInfo is just plain wrong.

Lacking proper flags it counted framerate as 29970/1000, a nonsense number that is a nearby rational estimate of 30(1000/1001), which is irrational.

The source may be fixed frame rate; i can't tell. But MediaInfo routinely reports clock rounding jitter* and unflagged source as variable, when in many (most?) cases it is not.

MediaInfo counts this way. Vegas 14 counts that way. Vegas 15 counts yet another way. That tells us the source was not flagged properly because no one got a report from the file metadata.

Like trying to unbake a cake. Go figure. Happens quite a lot.

Marco. wrote on 1/8/2018, 6:12 AM

I definitely would transcode this file before importing into Vegas Pro or Movie Studio, no matter which version. To me this is a typical case of "out of standard".

Musicvid wrote on 1/8/2018, 6:56 AM

*Here's an example of a very common frequency rounding error made by MediaInfo.

The file itself is plain yogurt 30*(1000/1001) ~= 29.970 fixed frame rate

The clock math itself goes "something" like 30*(1000/1001)/90000=?

Frame Rate / Clock Frequency = (Rationalize that.)

MediaInfo rounds the actual bitrate to its nearest rational neighbors, and interprets the jitter as the range of a variable bitrate, the nonsensical result is illustrated above.

Again, this guesswork happens when the decoder (Vegas, Quicktime) or MediaInfo doesn't get anything useful from the file metadata,

It seems MediaInfo could easily trap the error because the jitter range is fixed in a non-variable bitrate file, but then I don't write code.

Musicvid wrote on 1/8/2018, 8:21 AM

Here's a true variable bit rate reported correctly by MediaInfo. Note the characteristically low minimum bitrate.

Marco. wrote on 1/10/2018, 7:11 AM

I just found a simple re-wrapping to MOV (which could be done via Vegasaur from within Vegas Pro) would make Vegas Pro 15 to read the frame rate as 29,97 fps.
 

NickHope wrote on 2/20/2018, 11:38 AM

This is fixed in VEGAS Pro 15 build 311. "AVC/MOV 29.97 files from the iPhone 6s are now handled properly". The file in Cornico's link now decodes at 29.970fps.