Si what happens when DVCPro HD100 comes out..

DJPadre wrote on 6/25/2005, 8:32 AM
Im just curious..

considering Vegas 6 now struggles with HDV, which is 25mbps, albeit a higher res, what happens when teh HVX200 comes out?

I mean, Liquid, Edius, Premiere (with Digisuite) Avid, And FCP can handle streams bigger than 25mbps without a problem...

Yeahs vegas can "do it" but how long does it take to render... I mean seriosuly, if u think Vegas renders are long now, imagine running 100mbps, multitracked video layers... i shudder to think as to the "system" requirements..
I mean even now with a dual core, or a xeon, it still struggles...

Now for me, I been using vegas since inception.. yup.. that long..
but for me, i wont be working wth HDV, i will be working with DVCPro50 and DVCPro HD when the HVX finally comes out...

so where does that leave me with my NLE of choice?? Do i need to consider Avid or FCP.. or dread of all dreads, Liquid? Even though Pinnacle were bought out by Avid, i assume they will keep the same architecture of Background rendering.. If you cant beat em, buy em out..

so where does that leave Vegas users who are waiting for the HVX??

Will we see a Mojo-esque BoB for Vegas?? I trully hope so, as for now, i am currently refining my skills with Avid as i can certainly guarantee that if i cannot edit this cameras footage on Vegas, Vegas would be useless to me and all my associates.

Now im just one guy.. so it prolly wouldnt matter to them, however I wont be the only HVX user when its released and if were locked into using a different NLE, that would be unfortunate.

The only problem with Vegas at the moment is the lack of 3rd party support and Realtime DV encoding/decoding. Now if avid can make HD footage scream on multiple layers without a problem, whats the issue with Sony following suite??

The way i see it, from this standpoint, for Vegas to succeed as being a true HDV/DVCPro/DVCPro HD editing system, it will NEED either hardware support, or a databasing buffer system.

Sure it may be faster than FCP, but thats an apple format...
If Sony want to compete and win.. they will have to beat and retain a footing in front of the Axio/Premiere and Avid DNA with Mojo systems.

If this is not the market Sony are targetting, then we've all been duped into believing it is.

More than anything, i dread to think that in 12 months time when vegas 7 comes out, it gets tainted as a high end consumer product simply for the fact that it does not perform or deliver as well as these other systems.....

I love Vegas, dont get me wrong, i use it to make a living, however it simply cannot keep up or deliver high end multi tracked multi titled, multi formatted material FAST.
Sure it can render out, but for a 45 second commercial i did, using 6 video layers 3, PNG titles, a mixture of HDV and SD (I had to convert my DigiBeta 4.2.2. into uncompressed using a Digisuite..)
The render downsampled to standard DV. The master was uncompressed.
it took 12 or so hours for DV. now this is really pushing the system, but i then took the same project and emulated most of the work onto PremPro, running a Matrox Rtx100 everything was downsampled down to SD much like the Vegas edit..
i had to prerender certain parts, then render it out, but it took a whopping 6 minutes in total (for both render types)..
Now to me, 6 minutes of not having access to my machine when its rendering is livable.. but for 12hours ?? not to mention the wear and tear on the HDD's and power consumption of the computer during those 12 hours..

Like i said, I love Vegas and i love the way it works, it does everything i want it to do, but it does not offer timely delivery for intricate projects or HD work

It never has, and unless Sony do something about it soon, it never will...

When Axio is released, i fear that the only people left using Vegas are those with the cash to upgrade their systems to "Vegas" spec (even then it would still struggle to render Multiple streams of HD), or those who are still working with non intensive DV

Heres hoping something is done about it...



Comments

farss wrote on 6/25/2005, 9:17 AM
I don't know what sort of system you have but I can render HDV in realtime down to SD 4.2.2 or encode it to SD mpeg-2 using 2 pass encoding with bicubic resampling at from memory 1.5 time RT, the only thing slowing it down is disk speed, with SCSI RAID it'd run probably in RT.
Mojo as far as I'm concerned is a joke, period. Everytime someone walks in the door with one we shudder, I've yet to find anyone that doesn't have major grief with those heaps of junk, I've rescued at least one mojoed project with Vegas. It does sort of work so long as everthing you put into it conforms to what it wants you to work with, try connecting it to a deck Avid hasn't gotten around to and it's very much no show, try dropping any sort of media onto the TL and you've got about a 5% chance it will not baulk.
Avid do build good systems for broadcast and they are very fast. They're also expensive but in that environment that expense is justified. Also in broadcast it's pretty common to have everything in the one format. Some networks down here are pretty much exclusively DigiBeta, there's one that runs a lot of DVCPro.
As a matter of interest, why did you have to convert the DigiBeta and how did you get it uncompressed into Vegas. A SDI card isn't THAT expensive. You do realise that DB is compressed and there's almost no deck that'll let you capture it without it being recompressed.
Also I don't think the HVX200 will record DVCPro 100, if it did it'll only be to P2 cards and they'll fill up pretty quick. Couldn't see much advantage in it anyway, HDV is higher spatial res.
Bob.
[r]Evolution wrote on 6/26/2005, 10:19 AM
Vegas is a High End CONSUMER product that can do LOTS of professional tasks. You can definitely get awesome results with it, but once you start getting into formats and projects that require you to have REALTIME operation, encoding, or anything over 25mbps... you're simply NOT going to get it with Vegas.

Vegas is truly remarkable and using it pays my salary... but knowing the equipment and workflow of most big production houses... Vegas just does NOT fit.

I'm sure Sony will build it to be what they feel it should be. I just wish they would let us (the end user) know what it should be used for/ what their intentions are.

Xpri is Sony's Big Dog! Not Vegas.
Spot|DSE wrote on 6/26/2005, 10:41 AM
Umm...we're all realtime over here with HD....using CineForm. That's the whole point of the workflow, using CineForm.
On a fast (very fast) machine with the right RAID setup, editing 4:2:2 YUV for output to HD/SDI works great too. And as Convergent Design continues to up the ante, the workflow becomes even better.
If you're gonna designate Vegas as a "consumer" app, then you need to toss Premiere, AVID Express, FCE, Canopus Edius, and many other apps in there too. Xpri is an excellent back-end for Vegas, the two work in tandem fairly well.
It's true that Vegas doesn't offer a HAL, but the industry trend clearly shows that in this market, few tools will. As processors grow faster and machines run smarter, it's not necessary.
Vegas isn't Avid DS, but it's hardly a consumer application, at least from where I stand.
Coursedesign wrote on 6/26/2005, 1:53 PM
once you start getting into formats and projects that require you to have REALTIME operation, encoding, or anything over 25mbps... you're simply NOT going to get it with Vegas.

Sounds very reasonable doesn't it, but it's not correct.

I get realtime with uncompressed 4:2:2 video, this cranks at 218 Mb/s (including audio, just like DV).

In this case, the CPU doesn't have to uncompress/recompress every frame worked on, so it's "easy street" so to speak.

What it needs instead is a fast disk subsystem, but this is pretty easy and inexpensive with today's 10K SATA RAIDs.

DV needs to do Discrete Cosine Transforms and more on each and every frame, and even with today's CPUs this takes time.

So, it's not about the video data rate.

Vegas does everything needed for big production houses, except film conforming etc. It's just not designed for working with sprocketed strips of celluloid at all.

Btw, DigiBeta is compressed about 2:1 but this compression is close to lossless (compare DV25 at 5:1).
musman wrote on 6/26/2005, 3:10 PM
Interesting thread. I too would like to see Vegas concentrating on more professional formats like digibeta, DVC Pro HD, etc. More hardware is unlikely to be integrated as far as accelorators go, but hopefully we'll see more Decklink and Kona 2 type things soon. Also, from a lot of editors I've spoken to lately, hardware solutions like the Xpri are really nearing their demise with the faster processors available.
Also, unless I'm wrong Vegas is the only NLE that currently takes advantage of multicore processors. So I'm a bit confused how any other NLE would be significantly faster than Vegas and why Vegas couldn't handle digibeta, DVC Pro HD, etc. FCP claims to be able to handle this material and it doesn't have multicore processors to do it. So, I don't understand why Vegas, equiped with a fast raid, etc, can't handle these professional formats. Am I missing something?
Coursedesign wrote on 6/26/2005, 3:56 PM
It's only a codec issue. If you don't have a certain codec for your NLE, you can't edit natively in that format.
DJPadre wrote on 6/26/2005, 8:23 PM
got some interesting replies here, but my whole point being that im not refering to raw playback from the timeline, im talking about multiformatted multitracked video overlay processing.

sure enough we can get it to stream unaffected work, but add afew colour corrections and curves and youll notice the difference.

what im refering to about a BoB is to accelerate the encoding process, not a HW support card which allows for various connections. Thats all fine and good, but it still does not alleviate teh grunt rquired to process this footage.
i can live with dropped frames during preview, but rendering is still a big issue. God knows how FCP users can work the way they do when they have to render almost everything jsut to preview...

anyways.. my biggest concern was with the processing of these larger formatted materials and having the ability to deliver those in a timely fashion.

As for Vegas itslelf, its still a kick ass editor, always has been, but as i write this, i render a 15 minute clip which is taking 1 hour and 37 minutes..
Coursedesign wrote on 6/26/2005, 9:49 PM
im not refering to raw playback from the timeline, im talking about multiformatted multitracked video overlay processing.

The more highly compressed a video clip is, the more work it is to encode it and decode it, and this needs to be done for every frame for every effect, etc.

If you work with uncompressed, this generates a lot of disk activity but if your disks can keep up, it can be faster than realtime with today's CPUs.

Encoding MPEG-2 for example from uncompressed is realtime with the right (non-extreme) hardware.

Multitrack compositing can be realtime too, it's primarily a disk issue. With a decent RAID 0 it isn't that hard to shuffle 5-6 streams at least with uncompressed.

Look at your hardware if you're dependent on rendering performance. Render long projects while you sleep.

If you're in a newsdesk kind of flow, you may need something else, but then you'll suffer with other things. Hardware support is expensive because of low manufacturing volume and it becomes obsolete real quick too.
For the extra money you can get a dramatically faster computer instead.

But perhaps this is more a psychological issue? We all want instant gratification.

If it's really important, pony up for a dual-core Athlon64 or Dual Opteron 275 machine with a 10K or 15K disks in RAID-0.
farss wrote on 6/27/2005, 2:57 AM
DJPadre,
perhaps you should think about a faster PC? The performance you're getting seems to indicate a lack of grunt in the boilerhouse.
Bob.
DJPadre wrote on 6/27/2005, 7:52 AM
oh i know THIS particular machine is due for a rehaul, but it seems people are getting close to that frame of mind that im bashing vegas (which im not)

as for upgrading and building a new system with NCQ sata drives with a dual dualcore setup and 8gb ram.. well, maybe ill get to that when the return pays itself off... right now the technology is not worth the cash unless im making instant money from it, and im not, so when that happens and when they refine teh teething issues, i'll look into that.
In the end however, were still left with a system which requires extreme levels of cpu power and memory and drive speeds heading toward scsi levels, which is no bad thing, but it all comes down to the $$..
As its all tax deductable, thats not a problem as anything we do can be written off as a business expense, but the point im making is that for the 2 extra grand im spending on memory alone, i could get an Edius NX for HDV (yuk) which will process my HD on the fly...

Thats my point i guess.. at what point do we purely rely on software and processor grunt when there are systems available to us (albeit with crappy NLE's to go with em.. )

Id be interested in some Mobo Brands and CPU configs as well as HDD configs so as to investigate the claim of being able to have 5 streams of processed HDV and render faster than realtime (hell even half realtime is good enough).

It seems that if this is the only way we can get some decent performance from the program, maybe we should set up a database of workable Configurations which people can refer back to and people can refer to when building specific turnkey Vegas systems.. coz right now all im hearing from buyers is what ive literally posted in my initial post..
Coursedesign wrote on 6/27/2005, 8:25 AM
NCQ on sata drives (or scsi for that matter) won't do anything for you unless you have serious multi-threading going on. NCQ was created for server use, where you have many simultaneous requests for different data sets. In a typical desktop app, there is only one disk request at a time, so sorting multiple requests by the data location on the disk won't do anything.

There are indeed some applications with a lot of parallelism where it might help a bit, but it's no panacea.

I just upgraded one machine last week with more memory. At $79 per 1GB stick (Corsair), I would have had to buy 25 GB worth to get to two grand.

The best bang for the buck in an editing system today is probably the AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ CPU. See separate thread here about these, they really kick butt.

Be careful with claims of "editing HD in realtime." I remember being temporarily dazzled by Apple's demo at NAB, then I started asking questions...

I built my entire uncompressed workstation for not much over $2K, including a P4 3.2E 800 MHz FSB (this was a year ago!), 2GB of ultrafast Corsair CAS 2-2-2 RAM, a Supermicro chassis and P4+SCT II mobo, 4 X 10K SATA Raptor drives, Pioneer 108 DVD burner and more. I added a Decklink Extreme card that cost me just a bit over $800, but others might be fine with one of their less expensive cards with fewer I/O options. Add a bunch of firewire external drives for backup and shuffling media between machines, and it's still not that bad.