Problems Burning a Timeline to 3D Blu-ray Disc

tnw2933 wrote on 6/20/2011, 8:05 PM
For nearly two weeks I have been trying to burn to Blu-ray disc a 20 minute 3D video (side-by-side full) in Vegas 10d. I have done this with another project of about the same length with only minor problems. However, this project has been nothing but trouble.

The clips were all shot with the Sony HDR-TD10. The project has no effects other than a single Sony Levels effect with a small gamma adjustment at the track level. All transitions are simple cross dissolves of 1 second duration. All of the 5.1 sound has been removed and replaced with a stereo music track.

During the first ten attempts to burn to Blu-ray disc from the timeline, the "rendering video" phase would simply cease at some apparently arbitrary point. Task manager would show Vegas still running, but my cpu usage dropped from 90-100% to <10% and frames were not increasing in the Preview Window of Vegas. I would have to force quit Vegas 10d, reboot, and try again. The same thing (rendering suddenly ceasing with no error messages but never at the same point in the project) happened time and time again at various durations into the "rendering video" phase.

I finally decided to start over and re-edit the entire project. Today I was thrilled to get an iso image created and from that I burned a Blu-ray DVD. However, when I play that back on my Sony 3D Blu-ray player feeding my Sony VPL-VW90ES projector, some 4-5 of the 50 or so clips in the project play back with an apparent loss of left-right eye synchronization so that the entire clip is flashing wildly and almost unwatchable. Note that this phenomenon is not only seen in 3D on my Sony projector but is also found when I play the Blu-ray disc that I have created back in PowerDVD as a 2D image.

The flashing and loss of synchronization of right and left eye images is confined to single clips in the project. The moment the action moves to the next clip, it stabilizes and is beautiful until another instance of a clip producing this behavior is encountered. In total about 5 clips our of the total of 50 or so clips in the project show this behavior.

Has anyone else using Vegas 10d to edit clips from the Sony HDR-TD10 seen this peculiar behavior? Do you have any idea what is causing it?

I have reviewed the clips showing this behavior by playing them back on the Vegas timeline, and I can not see a single thing wrong with them. I have even examined them closely in anaglyph mode in the Vegas Preview window and I can see no problems. I can see nothing that distinguishes the clips showing this behavior from all the other clips that don't show the behavior.

The only thing that I know to do is to re-burn the project to recreate the iso image and hope that the weird loss of synchronization on certain clips does not repeat itself. If that still shows the problem, then I guess I shall just have to try burning portions of the project to a Blu-ray iso image while fiddling with the clips that show the weird behavior until by serendipity I solve the problem or just give up.

I would appreciate hearing if any of you have encountered this problem in your 3D editing in Vegas 10d and I would especially appreciate hearing any suggestions for solving the problem.

I am running Vegas 10d under Windows 7 SP1 Professional 64-bit (with all Windows updates) on an 8-core 2.8 GHz machine with 12 GB of RAM. The media drive is a dedicated SATA 1 TB HD and the iso file is being created on the C: drive which is also a 1 TB SATA HD. The video card is an nVidia GTX285 with the latest nVidia driver for windows 7 64 bit.

Tom

Comments

tnw2933 wrote on 6/21/2011, 12:25 PM
I don't know whether to interpret the lack of responses to my post as no one else is having any problems editing Sony HDR-10D MVC clips in Vegas Pro 10d or whether I am the only person crazy enough to be trying to edit this material in Vegas 10d.

Based on my experience with Sony Vegas 10d and material from the HDR-10D over the 3 weeks that I have been trying to edit this material in Vegas 10d, I would certainly not recommend Sony Vegas to anyone for editing 3D material from this Sony camcorder. Not only is the 5.1 surround sound totally screwed up in 10d but the overall stability of the program with clips from the HDR-10D on the timeline is abysmal and burning to 3D Blu-ray disc has failed far far more times than it has been successful.

Tom
tnw2933 wrote on 6/23/2011, 7:06 PM
Here is an update on my efforts to prepare a 3D Blu-ray disc of my 20 minute project in Vegas Pro 10d, the trials and tribulations of which I have described above. I am happy to say that I have at last succeeded in getting a perfect 3D blu-ray disc of this 20 minute project. The Blu-ray disc looks splendid on my Sony 90ES projector with beautiful color, rich detail, and absolutely no video anomalies at all.

Here is a brief summary of how I proceeded to identify the cause of the problem, what I did to solve the problem, and a few repeatable bugs that I have encountered in Vegas 10d.

I took the 20 minute project and removed all but the first five MVC clips shot with the Sony HDR-TD10. The fifth clip showed the video anomaly which can best be described as looking like a jump occurring between one frame nearer the camera and one further away. The solution turned out to be quite simple. I had a Vegas stereoscopic filter on this fifth clip because when I had viewed that clip on the Vegas Preview screen in anaglyph mode I felt I needed some correction for ghosting. This video anomaly could NOT be seen on playing the clip back from the Vegas timeline, but when I watched the Vegas Preview window during the "rendering video" phase of building the Blu-ray disc, I could clearly see the frames jumping forward and back in a very peculiar fashion. Simply removing the stereoscopic filter completely solved the problem with a normal video being seen for this clip in the preview window during the rendering video phase. I quickly determined that the other five clips also had a stereoscopic filter added. Removal of the stereoscopic filter from those clips totally eliminated the video anomaly on rendering. Interestingly enough, upon viewing the blu-ray disc of the project on my Sony 90ES with active shutter glasses, there was no ghosting at all on these clips and so the stereoscopic filter that had been causing the render problems had never been needed in the first place.

Now here is the interesting part. The very first clip on the timeline of this project also has a stereoscopic filter on that clip with the same type of corrections to remove ghosting as the other five clips and yet when that clip is rendered it shows no problems even though the stereoscopic filter has been left in place. I cannot explain this at all. In a previous Vegas 10d project of HDR-TD10 footage, I had several clips with a stereoscopic filter in place to remove ghosting seen in the anaglyph preview and they caused no problems during the video rendering at all.

Here are some other problems which are apparently bugs in Vegas 10d at least when it comes to editing MVC footage from the Sony HDR-TD10. Normally I can remove a clip from the timeline by simply selecting it and pressing "delete" on the keyboard. When I did this with the timeline from this project, it crashed Vegas every single time. I quickly learned that I could get around this problem by opening up space on the timeline by dragging clips to one side in order to isolate the undesired clip from all other clips, then select it and hit delete.

The tendency of the Vegas 10d program to simply cease rendering without cause, error message or apparent reason simply disappeared. I have no idea what caused it in the first place, but for a few days now I have now been able to select "burn to Blu-ray disc" on several occasions without any problems occurring even with projects requiring several hours to render the video and build the Blu-ray disc image.

Tom
H Gregg wrote on 6/27/2011, 1:21 PM
I have a very similar problem - I'm shooting with a mirror rig using two Sony HD camcorders. The project is at 25p and renders OK side by side at this rate. But when I render to 24p, I get the flickering you describe. I solved it by removing the S3D adjust at Media level then reapplied it to each Video event. Sony have since admitted that this is a bug and presumably will be attending to it. However when I try to burn 3D Bluray from the timeline Vegas gtes so far then stops with an error message.

I have a question for you - did you remove ALL the Stereoscopic 3D adjustmenst from your clips? I obviously can't do this as one image is flipped by the mirror rig.
tnw2933 wrote on 6/27/2011, 5:23 PM
Yes,

I removed every single S3D filter from every single clip in the project. Initially I removed the S3D filters from three of the five clips that had exhibited the problem, but then the remaining two clips showed the same problem after the rendering video and disc image creation had taken place. The problem was not really flickering but rather consisted of one frame jumping forward and the next frame jumping back along 3D space. It was unwatchable.

Tom
H Gregg wrote on 6/28/2011, 7:02 AM
Hi Tom - it sounds like the same problem that I have (except that because I'm using a mirror rig one on the images 'flips' horizontal - which is why I get flicker). It appears that when there is a transition - Vegas randomly loses the S3D adjustments when converting the clips the the 23.976 frame rate that BluRay works with. Have contacted support about this? If not I suggest that you do - the more people that mention this problem, the more they are likely to get to work on a fix. I could send them a link to this thread if you like as I am already in correspondence with them about it.

It can't be right that you have to remove S3D adjustments to view it - 'cos that stops you setting the depth correctly.
tnw2933 wrote on 6/28/2011, 6:49 PM
I have not contacted Sony support about this because I am using clips from the Sony HDR-TD10 which uses the MVC format. I suspect that the Sony stereoscopic filter was never meant to handle MVC clips, but rather to handle two separate left and right eye streams of video as you are doing. Further evidence of this is that when I put a 3D stereoscopic filter on a superimposed title to bring it forward of the plane of the video, it seems to render with no problems.

Once thing that still has me puzzled by is that I have a stereoscopic filter on the first MVC clip in the project and it has no problems rendering it correctly. Every other clip in the project, however, that had a stereoscopic filter adjustment on it produced an abnormal render during the formation of the Blu-ray disc image.

Tom
H Gregg wrote on 6/29/2011, 1:59 AM
I have sent this entire thread to Sony.

I'm not sure, but I think the MVC clips should be handled fine by the S3D filter - otherwise how could you adjust the parallax to move the image back or forward from the screen plane?

If you want to view on your 3DTV there is a workaround: Make all your 3D clip adjustments with the S3D filter and then render all at the original frame rate (I'm using 25p) as side by side half. Then take this render and drop it into a new project - then burn it all to BluRay from the timeline. You might want to turn off smart resampling to avoid 'trails'

The only problem with this is that you have to set you 3DTV manually to 3D side by side - which sort of defeats the object of having a 3D burn from the timeline!

H
tnw2933 wrote on 6/29/2011, 1:05 PM
I don't know whether the MVC clips from the Sony HDR-TD10 should be handled by the S3D filter or not, but I do know that the only clip where they were rendered correctly during the Blu-ray disc image formation was the very first clip in my project. I had four other clips scattered throughout the timeline and when I burned to Blu-ray disc all of these were rendered with the video anomaly and removing the S3D filter immediately eliminated the problem.

Your workaround is interesting, but doubles the render time, which is already substantial. Some 2.5 hours for a 20 minute 3D project and that is on a 3.1 Mac Pro 8-core with 2.8GHz processors running Vegas 10d under Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. I would have to render the timeline containing the S3D filters on clips at full frame side-by-side 29.97 fps in some codec (Sony AVCHD?) and then place that on the timeline of a new Vegas project, and select Create Blu-ray disc image, which would then re-render the video in the MVC format, and hope that everything worked. It's an interesting suggestion, but a very time consuming workaround.

My Sony VPL-VW90ES projector automatically recognizes the full frame side-by-side format that is created when I select burn to Blu-ray disc. I just insert the Blu-ray disc in my Sony 3D blu-ray player, and it starts playing and the 90ES immediately displays the 3D image watched using the projector's active shutter glasses.

Thanks for sending this thread to Sony.

There are several things that need to be fixed in Vegas 10d before it is really ready to edit the MVC clips produced by the Sony HDR-TD10 camcorder and these include the terrible audio bug when 5.1 DD clips from the TD10 are brought on to the timeline, the crashing of Vegas 10d that occurs any time an MVC clip overlapping another clip (as in a dissolve) is deleted using the delete key, and the inability to reliably use the S3D filter on MVC clips in the timeline.

Tom