Seeking Advice: Documentary Editing in Vegas Pro

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/25/2010, 11:03 AM

I'm in the process of initial post for a documentary I've been commissioned to edit.

Would like to correspond with those who shoot/edit this kind of work and use Vegas as their post production environment for this kind of situation..

If possible, I'd like to hear experiences on the pros/cons of using Vegas Pro (I utilize Master Suite apps) - I'm having to make a decision on my post environment right now and before I begin by jumping in with Vegas Pro, I want to hear what others have to say about their experiences - both positive and negative - and what challenges you ran into using Vegas Pro. Workflow tips, etc would be greatly appreciated as well. Someone who I correspond with regularly has had issues with Vegas Pro that I haven't yet experienced ( and has since moved to a different NLE) so I want to hear more so I can make an informed decision.

I currently have over 300GB of m2t files delivered via hard drive and transferred to my raid and will be selecting and cataloging clips based upon a transcribed dialog manuscript to edit with. The clips to be used will be transcoded to Cineform AVI's to edit with. I have tested using vDub using smart deinterlace and resizing clips from 1440x1080i to 720p Cineform AVI's with excellent results. I determined that this uses less hard drive space and reduces overhead on system resources as a whole and on Vegas Pro itself while maintaining excellent image quality.

For those who would suggest another post production environment - provide intelligent reasons why I shouldn't edit in Vegas Pro. I will not be collaborating with anyone else on this project. The producer is all about Edius, but he's not editing the project and he trusts my judgement in my NLE decision for editing this project - just as long as it can be done efficiently and on time.

My primary editing workstation isn't cutting edge, but it's solid and hasn't given me any real reason to upgrade as yet. AVID trial would randomly crash due to unsupported hardware (Graphics Card), whereas Edius and PPro seem stable based upon initial testing (Edius is limited to 8bit color space only and PPro CS5 can't even test HD footage due to trial limitations). Each environment has its pros and cons - not having to relearn is another reason for staying in Vegas Pro, but if required, so be it.

Editing Desktop: OS: Win7 x64 | CPU: Q9400 | Mobo: Intel DG33TL | 8GB G.Skill Dual Channel RAM | Boot/Apps Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Audio Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Video Source: WD Black 2x750GB RAID 0 | Video Card: nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

I have a WD 1TB Black drive to archive/backup project files and clips daily.

I prefer Vegas Pro not out of fanboism, but due to the intuitive interface and ability to manage audio efficiently. I will be grading as well and having 32bit float mode for final output is necessary IMO. I've tried contacting Spot privately for his insights but have yet to hear back from him.

Any input from others with this kind of experience would be appreciated.

Cliff Etzel
Solo Video Journalist | Micro Documentary Film Maker
bluprojekt | SoloVJ Blog
--------
Desktop: OS: Win7 x64 | CPU: Q9400 | Mobo: Intel DG33TL | 8GB G.Skill Dual Channel RAM | Boot/Apps Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Audio Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Video Source: WD Black 2x750GB RAID 0 | Video Card: nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Laptop: Dell Latitude D620 | C2D 2.0Ghz | 4GB G.Skill RAM | OS: Vista x64 | Primary HD: WD 320GB 7200RPM | Video HD: WD 250GB 5400RPM

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Comments

farss wrote on 6/26/2010, 8:07 PM

"If you can convince these guys to get ONE seat of MC4 or MC5..."

Pretty certain they'e already convinced, Avid will give it to them for free. They still need the computer to run it on. Never underestimate the politics involved with a govt. funded public broadcaster.

Bob.

PerroneFord wrote on 6/26/2010, 8:39 PM

LOL! I work directly with a Govt. funded public broadcaster. They even have a remote office in my building. You should see the 1980s switcher they have here in the building. At least we got a fiber backhaul to the station.. but it's MONO! I need to take a picture of that control room one day...

Avid computers are getting cheaper by the year man. Especially with the MX02 mini providing the monitoring. Basic machine, couple hard drives, CUDA card, and you're good to go. A certified machine is of course another matter. I've got two and they sure weren't cheap.

Serena wrote on 6/26/2010, 9:22 PM

Cliff,
Two things haven't been specifically mentioned:
1) what is the required final format? Broadcasters are quite specific about acceptable formats and you would not want to work to a lower standard.
2) while your producer/director may have complete faith in your style/capabilities, in fact there are many opportunities for disagreement on detail (e.g. farss and the boxing bell) and politics (which can force bad cutting decisions). Feedback on these things will also involve timecode!

A third mention is time. If you can spend a lot of time for small reward then you can get there with almost any workflow!

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/26/2010, 9:42 PM

Todays lesson - The so called "organic" way of editing in Vegas Pro is a misnomer. That so called organic style of editing in Vegas Pro goes against established methodologies for handling large amounts of content in post production. I just about threw Vegas out with the bath water, but after having a glass of wine, I settled down and realized I was lazy in my editing - something Vegas seems to instill due to the nature of it's editing methodology.

Perrone Ford and kkolbo have become two invaluable sources of experience to me as I travel this path into feature length documentary post production.

farss put the fear of God in me with his posting in this thread, but through discussion with both Perrone and Keith, I've come to realize that as long as I keep my ducks in a row - ie; staying conservative and maintaining a tight ship in organizing my clips into bins and using sub-clips with plenty of head and tail, etc, I will minimize any issues that could arise. Cineform Neoscene is your friend. Anyone who thinks they shouldn't be working with DI's is fooling themselves. The minimal effort in transcoding and using DI's for post are well worth it - especially when it comes time for grading your project. Spend the $129 for Cineform Neoscene and don't look back.

Cliff Etzel
Solo Video Journalist | Micro Documentary Film Maker
bluprojekt | SoloVJ Blog
--------
Desktop: OS: Win7 x64 | CPU: Q9400 | Mobo: Intel DG33TL | 8GB G.Skill Dual Channel RAM | Boot/Apps Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Audio Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Video Source: WD Black 2x750GB RAID 0 | Video Card: nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Laptop: Dell Latitude D620 | C2D 2.0Ghz | 4GB G.Skill RAM | OS: Vista x64 | Primary HD: WD 320GB 7200RPM | Video HD: WD 250GB 5400RPM

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/26/2010, 10:07 PM

Serena - right now - the producer is looking at direct sale of a DVD. How that will go is anyones guess. I am being compensated, but not as much as typical market rates. I'm ok with that as it's a means to earn some $ while working on this project.

The rest is an ongoing dialog, but it is professional and respectful. The script so far is what I'm to go by. Talking head stuff for the most part. The idea is then to look at the rough edit and determine B-roll footage to be shot - or if need be, re-shoot some of the content (Something that is going to need to happen already from the looks of the footage). Again, I'm ok with how this process is going right now...

Cliff Etzel
Solo Video Journalist | Micro Documentary Film Maker
bluprojekt | SoloVJ Blog
--------
Desktop: OS: Win7 x64 | CPU: Q9400 | Mobo: Intel DG33TL | 8GB G.Skill Dual Channel RAM | Boot/Apps Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Audio Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Video Source: WD Black 2x750GB RAID 0 | Video Card: nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Laptop: Dell Latitude D620 | C2D 2.0Ghz | 4GB G.Skill RAM | OS: Vista x64 | Primary HD: WD 320GB 7200RPM | Video HD: WD 250GB 5400RPM

ushere wrote on 6/27/2010, 1:22 AM

good luck cliff!!!

The idea is then to look at the rough edit and determine B-roll footage to be shot - or if need be, re-shoot some of the content (Something that is going to need to happen already from the looks of the footage).

scares the hell out of me. it's one thing picking up a new graphic or re-recording a vo (as long as you didn't have to outsoirce, but the above sounds rather as if there wasn't a shooting script? you're just editing i gather? if you're expected to start shooting as well, i'd be looking at a little more than pocket money.....

leslie

MarkWWW wrote on 6/27/2010, 4:57 AM

> Example: something as simple as going to the "Edit Details" Window (Alt+6) and being able to export that information to bring into either a database or excel spreadsheet would be huge IMO. The only option for that right now is to do a screen grab, import that into Photoshop and then crop and save as an image file - pretty lame really, but it is what it is.

You can easily copy and paste the information in the Edit Details window to an Excel speadsheet. To do this,
1. In Vegas, open the Edit Details window and chose the kind of items you want to show - probably "Events" and "All Fields".
2. Press CTRL+A to select all the data
3. Press CTRL+C to copy the data to the clipboard
4. In Excel, press CTRL+V to paste the data into your spreadsheet.

This facility can, as you say, be very useful.

Mark

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/27/2010, 8:04 AM

MarkWWW - you are a saint!

Just did as you described and went into OpenOffice.org Calc and it brought all info over into formatted Columns.

I was able to highlight all fields by clicking on the black tab above the #1 and to the left of the column titled "Track". It highlighted all fields and it came over into the spread sheet perfectly.

Thanks for this little hidden Gem!

btw - is this a part of the documentation og Vegas Pro? I'd never would have known to do this. I have the electronic download version so I did get a printed manual - maybe i need to print the PDF version.

Cliff Etzel
Solo Video Journalist | Micro Documentary Film Maker
bluprojekt | SoloVJ Blog
--------
Desktop: OS: Win7 x64 | CPU: Q9400 | Mobo: Intel DG33TL | 8GB G.Skill Dual Channel RAM | Boot/Apps Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Audio Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Video Source: WD Black 2x750GB RAID 0 | Video Card: nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Laptop: Dell Latitude D620 | C2D 2.0Ghz | 4GB G.Skill RAM | OS: Vista x64 | Primary HD: WD 320GB 7200RPM | Video HD: WD 250GB 5400RPM

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/27/2010, 12:59 PM

Up til 12:30am lat night testing and retesting - Not so happy camper here: Cineform's HDLink has a major bug that I've replicated with multiple clips.

Since Cineform's batch process is done through their HDLink Utility, I was testing some other things (quality settings). Laying each 5 sec clip on the timeline showed a severe discrepancy in clip lengths!

We're talking by a measure of as much as 45 frames between the quality settings. What use is that to anyone who will need to log time code? So now Cineform is dead for this project until I open a tech support ticket with them on Monday.

To use a comparative measure, I rendered the same 5 sec m2t file using Canopus' Encoder in Edius Neo 2 to HQ fine - their encoder was better, deviating only 3 frames, but it still deviated.

Then I used Mpeg Streamclip and rendered the same 5 second clip to AVID's DNxHD 145 10 bit codec - It rendered the clip perfectly with no frame drift.

Unless Cineform can resolve this serious bug quickly, I'm going to have to revise the workflow, moving all m2t clips to DNxHD and using Mpeg Stream Clip for batch encoding - a tim eincrease due to the having to encode to the DNxHD codec.

For the amount of money that Cineform charges, you would think this issue wasn't present. Im my testing, AVID's free codec and using the free Mpeg Stream Clip utility renders perfect DI's that truly cross platform.

This is could be a major coup if my test 6 minute project has no issues using DNxHD clips.

Anothe rinteresting thing: 3 clips same length and PAR: 1440x1080i m2t, CIneform AVI and a DNxHD clip rendered to 145 10 bit - similar to the Cineform clip encoded on high.

Additional observations on my machine: Playback on Vegas timeline: m2t utilizes 90% CPU, Cineform 70% CPU, DnxHD, 45% CPU - I then laid all three tracks together thus creating 3 tracks of mixed format clips - average of 68% CPU utilization.

My conclusion here is two fold: SCS fixed issues in 9.0e using Quicktime .MOV files and Avid's codec is the most efficient on system resources.

More to come later today...

Cliff Etzel
Solo Video Journalist | Micro Documentary Film Maker
bluprojekt | SoloVJ Blog
--------
Desktop: OS: Win7 x64 | CPU: Q9400 | Mobo: Intel DG33TL | 8GB G.Skill Dual Channel RAM | Boot/Apps Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Audio Drive: Seagate 160GB 7200RPM | Video Source: WD Black 2x750GB RAID 0 | Video Card: nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Laptop: Dell Latitude D620 | C2D 2.0Ghz | 4GB G.Skill RAM | OS: Vista x64 | Primary HD: WD 320GB 7200RPM | Video HD: WD 250GB 5400RPM