Resolution bug not fixed :(

LarsHD wrote on 5/14/2010, 4:00 AM

I was working with a production that involved still images with some 3D motion (scanned legal documents etc).

In Vegas I noticed that once I introduced 3D the imported PNG or TIF files and zoomed in a little resolution got really bad (no just not because of zooming in - pls continue to read...).

I then double checked in PPPRO CS5 and in Avid. Here the black and white documents were crisp and nice aven when doing a little 3D and zooming in (documents aroynd 4000 x 3000 pixels).

************************************************************
So I described this problem and filed a bug report.
SCS confirmed the bug and said they were indeed able to repro it.
A new version came out yesterday. Bug isn't fixed.
************************************************************

Working with 3D and still documents and moving them around etc isn't so unusual I think... so having this bug is truly annoying. It renders Vegas useless for this kind of tasks.

Does anyone know of a workaround or have seen this problem and have a solution?

Or do I simply have to use other NLE's in order to get the job done properly?

(Fast voving video footage and a fast 3D thing usually works ok because it is difficult to judge the actual quality... And video footage doesn't contain the resolution of a 4000x3000 sharp scan of a black and white document).

Lars

Comments

farss wrote on 5/14/2010, 4:27 AM

"Or do I simply have to use other NLE's in order to get the job done properly?"

NLEs in my opinion are not the right tools for moving things around in 3D. Better done in a compositing application.
Also when it comes to text in particular the way / order in which things are done can be important. Text is oftenly created from vectors rather than bitmaps. Moving the vectors in the 3D space and then rasterising can avoid problems with resolution and aliasing than can occur if the text is rasterised and then the pixels moved around in the 3D space.

I understand that in your case you are comparing apples to apples and both Vegas and Ppro were set the same task from the same source. Precisely why Vegas does a less than ideal job of the task is a mystery to me but I've certainly been very much aware of the substandard quality of what Vegas can produce. You might get better results trying the same task in a 4K project and then downscaling that.

Bob.

LarsHD wrote on 5/14/2010, 10:36 AM

Bob, intersting idea ( 4 k ). While this indeed improves the resolution performance I see 2 new problems:

1. The project is already 1920x1080 and the 3D documents (scanned legal documents) are supposed to fit into what I've altreday done..

2. Doing any motion in Vegas at 4k make real time playback totally impossible... So I can't see what motion "choreography" I'm putting together... Hitting Shift+B on this 4k project only renders a few frames... So this sin't working either...

I find it interesting that I get better resolution here. Why?

Also of course, having to struggle with this, I may be better off trying to move over the entire project from Vegas to Premiere Pro CS5, it may actually be easier than trying to keep it in Vegas. There are so many stills and each still need a slightly different 3D treatm. and on PPro I can do that real time and see what I do.

I guess this is just another example of where the "nice and intuitive" Vegas interface is of no help....

Lars

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/14/2010, 3:09 PM

How are you zooming? By moving the 3d layer closer to the camera or by pan/cropping in?

I'm pretty sure that 3d motion is based on the project resolution which is why it looks better @ 4kx4k. Pan/crop is based on the event resolution.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/14/2010, 3:55 PM

Does it have to be 3D motion?

Pan/Crop accesses the media resolution, TrackMotion accesses the track resolution.

You always want to use pan/crop because it will access the footage that you have and as you move in/out, and around on the footage, the Pan/Crop tool is able to utilize all the resolution of the footage.

Track Motion takes the footage that you have in the track and treats it as the resolution of the track (ie Project), so if you have a 4Kx3K file on an HD timeline, and you use the trackmotion to move it closer, then you're first scaling whatever is displaying in the pan/crop down to the project resolution, and then manipulating that project resolution representation of the media.

Extreme example:
Imagine putting 4K on an SD project
Then using track motion on the SD project to zoom in on the media
You're actually going to be working with 720x480 pixels that are being generated from the 4K pixel file.

If you use Pan crop, then you're accessing the 4K pixel file and you can zoom in and it won't degrade until you go past a 1:1 pixel zoom/display.

Dave

willqen wrote on 5/14/2010, 4:15 PM

Lars,

You could temporarily adjust the value of Dynamic RAM, so you could get longer playback during the motion portion of your timeline, or do the Shift + M thing, selectively render the motion playback portions. Hey doing it that way, you could pre-render several areas at once, and get a good look at your project . . .

Will

farss wrote on 5/14/2010, 5:37 PM

"Does it have to be 3D motion?"

If you're trying to simulate a camera moving in a 3D space then yes, I'd say so.
The engineer in me says no, I'm sure there's a way to make it come out the same using your approach.
The few creative cells my brain posseses revolt at the idea though. They know how a real camera works, they want to work that way, they don't want to relearn all that trigonometry from high school.

Bob.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/14/2010, 9:38 PM

By no means an invalid desire, but Vegas doesn't do that, it locks the camera in place with an arbitrary value for the Field Of View (FOV) and doesn't let you change it or the camera's position. It only allows you to move the world past the camera.

For heavy virtualization of cameras and environments, you're not going to beat a "real" compositing tool such which can be had as cheaply as AE, and goes up from there.

But, if you don't want to spend the money to have the tools that are necessary, or you don't want to jump to another application, then you just have to do it the way that it has to be done in the tool you're using. (would be nice if they changed the way that whole business was done in Vegas to be sure, but since it's that way, I'm afraid it's got to be done with P/C in order to preserve the resolution).

Dave

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/14/2010, 10:09 PM

or switch to a true 3d app. I know blender allows you to not just put videos in it's NLE but you can also add 3d scenes with different cameras so you can have the exact same scenes with different camera views rendered out.

LarsHD wrote on 5/14/2010, 10:58 PM

OK... thanks for some really kind and good advice here. OK, it's good too know that 3D doesn't access the source resolution but only the "track resolution". If that's so then it makes sense what I'm seeing here.

In PPro there's both the scale *and* the "distance" adjustment, so the sidtance from my virtual camera and the "document" can be altered. There's nothing real comparable in Vegas right? Or is there?

Lars

apit34356 wrote on 5/14/2010, 11:58 PM

Lars, consider the parent 3D track as the virtual camera position, which you can key very easily. Dave probably can explain it better, but it works. For some reason, scs avoids the defining of the virtual camera location by saying "there's the virtual camera setup"( some IP issue I'm guessing)

LarsHD wrote on 5/15/2010, 12:15 AM

So the poor resolution when working with the 3D Alpha on this project may in fact just be the result of either me not doing this in the right way or the nature of Vegas and it's a question of finding the right procedure for doing this task perhaps?

At the same time it's funny that SCS confirms the bug and say they can repro it. Hmm. Maybe it isn't a bug... per se..?

farss wrote on 5/15/2010, 1:29 AM

If you want to persist with doing this in Vegas the only answer I can think of is to do the 3D in a 4K project and nest that into your main project.
Remember to set the 3D projects default render quality to Best. The 1080 project is then fed the 4K frames and does the scaling from the 4K frame.

If you've got a lot do my suggestion is going to get tedious. In that case and if the 3D motion is just for effect and doesn't have to follow a script me thinks better done in AE where a simple expression can create random panning and tilting and then use a script to batch all the pages would be the go.

Bob.

LarsHD wrote on 5/15/2010, 4:58 AM

Bob, it looks like Adobe AE is the best choice indeed here. It's around 100 documents and thta's *a lot*... Second best may be PPro where at least I can see things in real time as there's other footage behind / dissolved etc. etc. Iti's so linked with music, dialogue and the flow that I would really integrate the 3D motion work in the program. Had it been 3-4 documents it would have been easier... but it's over 100... :( And no way to batch or treat them the same. Each unique... ´

I haven't tried AE CS5 yet but may down'load that trial now to see how that works before I decide. But in principle of course you're right, this is what AE is for amongst other things..

farss wrote on 5/15/2010, 5:13 AM

100 pages!

That's quite a task and made harder it you're trying to time the 'camera' moves to the music. I'm still running AE CS3 and unless I've missed something I have never got it to playout audio without doing a RAM preview. My system is seriously underspeced though.

Bob.

LarsHD wrote on 5/15/2010, 5:34 AM

Perhaps I should outsource this and take a vacation instead...

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/15/2010, 6:48 AM

I was just going to say "maybe you could find someone else to do this one..."

:D

What is it exactly? I can do 3d & get you avi/mov/etc.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/16/2010, 2:15 PM

Yep, the way to do this is to use Pan/Crop to move around on the document, you'll see much better performance doing it that way, because Vegas doesn't have to calculate positioning of the track in 3D space ( which it has to do for the entire length of the track btw ), and you also won't have to do the double scaling that vegas does. Why they count it as a bug is strange to me, as it's been the way that Vegas performed for a long time. Pan/Crop to go zoom in on anything, unless the resolution is identical to the project, in which case it doesn't matter, except that if you're doing 3D track motion, you're forcing vegas to do a LOT more work than is necessary, the entire length of the project.

I'd be curious if you would mind sending me a truncated version of your veg file that I could look at and give you some tips on, since it seems that you are struggling with the proper workflow within Vegas to some degree.

Dave

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/17/2010, 2:14 PM

bump to make sure lars sees this

LarsHD wrote on 5/17/2010, 2:24 PM

I will try this in Vegas later. Thanks for the ideas, they make sense. I decided to do it this in PrPro as I could take advantage of the 3D plugi in motion presets that makes it easier to copy the motion into all the various events and then only make individual adjustments. Also I can see in smooth real time what I do.

I'll look into how it works in Vegas later.

Funny if I was able to file a bug report with SCS and get it confirmed as a bug and it isn't a bug? From your description it does sound like this is the nature of Vegas and the way it is supposed to work...(?)

Oh well.

Best & thanks
Lars