Rendering Sapphire fx to PNG producing seemingly empty frames?

citlee wrote on 10/7/2017, 7:35 PM

I have just upgraded to Vegas Pro 15 from 13. Bundled with the upgrade was BorisFX's Sapphire Render Unit. I want to use some of the Sapphire effects. I also need to render to VP8 to get an alpha channel in a video, for display in browsers - however Vegas Pro does not support this. As a workaround, I can render to PNG and use ffmpeg (3.3.6) to encode the sequence to VP8. I am seeing ... well I'm not quite sure what I am seeing, besides nothing, which is the problem.

The below file is simply created by creating a new S_Aurora event and shortening it to 2 seconds - it includes the .veg project, the rendered frames, and the encoded webm. Try playing the webm back in VLC (I'm using 2.2.6 on Windows 10 64bit), then try in a browser (either Firefox (56) or Chrome (61)) - I see what I expect to see in VLC, but nothing in either browser, just a blank video.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/94171qvwg7eo839/s_aurora%20demo.zip

I am no video encoding expert, but the PNG frames appear blank to my eyes, yet the resulting video (created with the command included in the zip) seems to play fine in VLC. This happens with other Sapphire effects, too, but this is the simplest demo I can reproduce.

Do you see the same results I do? Any clues as to why this happens? Is there anything I can do to make the individual PNG frames display the effect?

Comments

NickHope wrote on 10/7/2017, 11:14 PM

Do you see the same results I do?

Yes. I see the effect in VLC but not in Firefox or Chrome. But unfortunately I don't have any clue about the solution.

citlee wrote on 10/8/2017, 7:35 AM

Hi Nick, thanks for the reply. Are you aware of any setting anywhere in Vegas or that plugin that would change how the individual frames are rendered? I had a similar issue with the S_GradientRadial plugin where the glow was only applied over the images in the scene, rather than the entire scene as with the Color Gradient plugin set to radial. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a couple of frames:

Color Gradient: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hr2oscba4i3a136/holy_taco_stinger_000027_cg.png
S_GradientRadial: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uaq474j5rlb9l3q/holy_taco_stinger_000027_s_gr.png

The same issue applies - S_GradientRadial version looks fine in the Vegas preview and in VLC when glued together with ffmpeg, but shows exactly as in the PNG frames in a browser.

altarvic wrote on 10/8/2017, 8:00 AM

PNG files contain Alpha Channel and this channel is 100% in each pixel, i.e. an image viewer displays it as fully transparent. I suppose the same with browser. VLC ignores alpha channel, I guess.

set wrote on 10/8/2017, 6:43 PM

@citlee, look for 'Affect Alpha' setting in Sapphire Plug-in controls. Drag it from 0.0 to 1.0. Then, try rerender again. Now you should have a content in the PNG sequences (or other video codec capable for Alpha-Channel).

(Note: Not all Sapphire plug-ins have this settings)

citlee wrote on 10/9/2017, 7:33 AM

@citlee, look for 'Affect Alpha' setting in Sapphire Plug-in controls. Drag it from 0.0 to 1.0. Then, try rerender again. Now you should have a content in the PNG sequences (or other video codec capable for Alpha-Channel).

(Note: Not all Sapphire plug-ins have this settings)

That was it, thank you very much indeed!

Do you happen to know what the correct thing to do to achieve the same effect in e.g. the S_GradientRadial effect, which doesn't have the "Affect Alpha" setting? (see the above screenshot https://www.dropbox.com/s/uaq474j5rlb9l3q/holy_taco_stinger_000027_s_gr.png?dl=1 when viewed on a dark background)

set wrote on 10/9/2017, 7:48 AM

Currently don't have answer for this one...