New Flip Video Plug-in

Adam Woodworth wrote on 2/21/2006, 8:02 AM
Hi Everyone,

I recently noticed that the image flipping capability built-in to Vegas' Track Motion is very slow at simple vertical and horizontal image flipping. Image flipping is a nice thing to have right inside Vegas for those people using 35mm SLR lens adapters on video cameras. The source footage will be both vertically and horizontally flipped, so you need some way to get it unflipped. You can do this outside of Vegas with VirtualDub, for example, but that requires an additional render to new .avi files.

I wanted a way to do it seemlessly right inside Vegas, with virtually real-time playback. So I wrote a simple flip plugin that does this. It allows you to flip the video vertically and/or horizontally.

On a reasonably fast computer with SD footage, playback should be real-time, and it shouldn't affect playback of HD footage too greatly.

Please let me know if you use it!

You can get it here:

http://www.mirkwood.com/vegas/flip

Thanks!
Adam Woodworth

Comments

je@on wrote on 2/21/2006, 9:34 AM
How is this different from just using pan/crop?
Spot|DSE wrote on 2/21/2006, 9:35 AM
It's faster on the render. Significantly faster. Also faster on playback.
Adam Woodworth wrote on 2/21/2006, 9:47 AM
DSE is exactly right. Vegas' built-in code for flipping in Pan/Crop or Track Motion is slow.

Here's an example using 29.97fps (60i) DV source footage on my P4 2.8GHz machine:

Applying vertical and horizontal flip with Sony's Pan/Crop or Track Motion causes playback to drop to 13-14 frames per second.

Using my plugin with vertical and horizontal flip, playback stays virtually right at 29.97 frames per second.

Thanks!
Adam
fwtep wrote on 2/21/2006, 11:19 AM
Does this cause the field order problem that Vegas (at lest in verison 4) caused when flipping horizontally? I know I could test it myself but I figured you might know offhand.
Adam Woodworth wrote on 2/21/2006, 12:06 PM
I'm not sure what problem you're talking about, and I've only tested this in Vegas 6. Can you explain the problem you had? Was Vegas putting the fields in the wrong order when flipping the image?

Could you please test this plugin and see if it works for you?

As with all plugins in Vegas, this plugin works on an entire frame, so the only way it would be able to screw up would be if Vegas was feeding the plugin the wrong information.
fwtep wrote on 2/21/2006, 1:42 PM
When I did my movie (again, this was Vegas 4 but I'm using 6 now), there were a few shots that I flipped horizontally. The project was edited in DV, 720x480 but had to be delivered at D1, 720x486. I rendered out to that size and everything was OK except the flipped shots. For some reason it was a big problem. I tried moving the flipped shots down 1 pixel (at the recommendation of the post house and someone here) but it still wasn't quite right. I ended up having to flip the shots in After Effects.

And now that I think of it, I can't test it here because the only way I can go out to an NTSC monitor is through Firewire (DV camera) or DVD, both of which are 720x480 and for whatever reason, I don't recall that there was a problem at that res.

What I SHOULD have done was do an inverse telecine first (it was shot on film), then edit, then render to NTSC 29.97, but that's just hindsight.