DIvX is not a viable professional solution. It's not even a good non-professional solution. But if that's working well for you, that's awesome.

Perrone, in what way is it non-professional? Image quality looks exactly the same to me; uncompressed avi.

If it looks good to you, keep using it. But DivX is:

1. Proprietary
2. Outdated
3. VERY lossy
4. Not supported in any professional workflow


So as I said before, if it's working for you, great. But it is nothing close to a solution in a professional workflow.

Paul: could you pls write a few words as to how that assignment is done?

I am strictly a 2D animator, which means I hand draw all my images via the Wacom tablet into a bitmap animation application (TVPaint) which I export to Vegas as an uncompressed (BGR24) avi, from where it shows up in Vegas with QT icons. But now, after blocking QT from processing my avi's and wav forms (and occasionally an mp3 file or JPEG still images) my avi's show up in the Vegas Project Media window as DivX icons.

Otherwise I see no change in image quality or playback speed or quality. Should I be concerned? PerroneFord on the Sony Forum wrote that Divx is unsuitable for professional applications because it is:

1. Proprietary
2. Outdated
3. VERY lossy
4. Not supported in any professional workflow

To me the imagery looks exactly alike and plays back the same way. I make this judgment just by eyeballing the frames, but since I've drawn every one of them I have a pretty good sense of what is the same as my original work and what has suffered losses.

My last step in my professional workflow is to convert all my Vegas clips into a single PNG image sequence for either filmout transfer to 35 mm film, or beta tape transfer for TV broadcast. Should I anticipate quality problems during this last step?

NOTE: I copied this from a thread called "I found a way to speed up loading of 9d" which became a continuation of this one with Perrone on the DVinfo forum:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-happens-vegas/476857-i-found-way-speed-up-loading-9d.html#post1514837

Hmmm. I'm about to jump into the car but this is sounding like you're doing something very different from what I assumed from the first post.

You imply a couple of things:

-- Since you're talking about icons it sounds like you can't see your file extensions
-- You're saying that AVI files had QT Icons? Now the same files have DivX icons?
-- It sounds like what you're doing is changing the file associations, not the actual files.
---- Normally, neither of these programs would be the default handler for AVI files.

While I don't think that this is really the preferred way to fix it, it's illuminating.

Rob

DIvX is not a viable professional solution. It's not even a good non-professional solution.

mpeg-2 & mpeg-4 fall under the exact same reasons yet people want support for that! 7 years ago anybody editing mpeg-2's would be laughed out of most forums.

Two things:

1. Editing Mpeg2/Mpeg4 still shouldn't be on the timeline according to many people.

2. Mpeg2 implementation has improved VASTLY in the past 7 years as has the ability of hardware to process it in real time.

DivX is still no different then editing in any other compressed format. I'm sure there's people who say DV shouldn't be on the TL either.

As for mpeg-2 better then 7 years ago... 7 years ago you could buy mpeg-2 hardware acceleration for editing & render. Now you don't need that, cpu's are fast enough. As far as I can tell most hardware acceleration was dropped except for specific circumstances. If DivX works better then mpeg-2 then mpeg-2 should be dropped in favor of DivX.

So far I'm not sure that paul's saying he transcoded anything to DivX. It sounds to me like he just changed his file associations so that the DivX player is handling his AVI's rather than letting Quicktime be the AVI handler.

All of which sounds pretty wrong to me. Neither of them should be the default handler.

Rob

You are correct. He and I hashed that out yesterday. The footage has not changed at all. Simply the default program to handle the footage was changed.

And you are correct. Neither DivX or Quicktime should be handling these AVI files.

I've tried everything and the only thing that fixed the slow loading and memory errors for me was reverting back to 9c/32.

FWIW I still have 9d 64-bit installed.

I don't understand "DivX or QT shouldn't be handling any of these files" when the reality of my system says QT can't handle your avi's but DivX can and so can wmp. DivX works for me exactly the same way wmv works except DivX has a player that gives me more controls on playback.

Again, this is how I work: I create my clips in TVPaint, a bitmap graphics animation application, at a 1080p resolution. I export these clips into a designated folder as uncompressed avi's reduced to a 720p resolution for easier handling by Vegas. (Later on, when the entire film is completed I will export my clips as 1080p avi's and swap them for the 720p ones while opening Vegas.)

I open Vegas, in the Media browser I navigate to my 720p folder where I can see all my avi's sitting as either QT icons, WMV icons, or DivX icons, all depending on which player I choose. I load these into my Vegas timelines and edit. Right now I am working on 7 projects; 6 30 second TV commercials and one 20 minute (eventually to become one hour) film for independent distribution.

I can go into my Vegas File menu and switch to any of these 7 projects and they pop up within 2 or 3 seconds -- the 20 minute one maybe takes 5 or 6 seconds. Any version of Vegas before 9d could never load my projects at this speed. My playback is steadier than ever before. I keep my project window at Best(Full) and my 27inch secondary monitor set to Scale output to fit display and still play at full 29.97 or 24 fps speeds with excellent sharpness; again something I could never do until 9d.

The only effects I use are many dissolves, a time code display and frequent titles, plus about 6 to 10 sound tracks, so this must make it easy on Vegas. Maybe Vegas is perfect just for animators. I've worked with DPS Leitch, Premiere and Showtime in the past and none of these NLEs can compare in performance to Vegas for reliability and speed.

P.S.
I should have mentioned that up until I upgraded QT to the latest version 7.6.6 just a few days ago, I could use QT in Vegas with no problems. Only after the recent upgrade did Vegas 9d suddenly slow down for me the way everyone else was reporting so I switched my assignments of AVI carrier to DivX, which performs just as flawlessly as WMP.

Paul, if it's working don't fix it. Part of the issue was in figuring out what you were really doing. The initial assumption was that you were transcoding clips. That's not the case. The fact that you went from Quicktime Player to DivX Player as your default AVI player raises other questions. The standard native Windows player would be WMP.

Are you running on a Mac by any chance?

Rob

Rob, no, I'm working on a PC,
custom built, Pentium CPU 3.40GHZ
3.41 GHz, 3.25 GB of RAM

Okay, just had to ask because I didn't understand why AVI files would ever have been associated with Quicktime.

So if I'm understanding this correctly Vegas 9d is performing better/loading faster for you after switching your AVI file association from Quicktime to the DivX player. How does 9d perform if you switch the default player back to what's normal for Windows? That would be WMP. If Vegas behaves about the same then I'd conclude that your problem was with Quicktime, which is not surprising since Vegas isn't exactly gazelle-like with quicktime files.

This's not a problem most Vegas users (or Windows users) would be having. It's kind of unusual to make quicktime the default player for AVI files.

On the other hand, if making DivX Player the default player (instead of WMP) solves Vegas 9d's problems with loading and playback then it points to a software problem in 9d. No surprise there either.

So, solving a problem with Quicktime that most users wouldn't be having? Meh. Solving a problem with Vegas on a standard setup (by making it non-standard)? It's informative but installing a DivX player to fix Vegas isn't very appetizing. A more formal solution needs to come from SCS.

Rob

>> I didn't understand why AVI files would ever have been associated with Quicktime. <<

It's been a while but from what I recall, Quicktime is one of those apps that will "hijack" a lot of your media file types if you go along with its prompts during the install, or if you get over-enthusiastic with the MIME type settings etc..