Yes please explain further.  Are you using the new smart zoom or are you saying that the event pan crop quality has been improved?  

Just tried the Smart Zoom Plug IN - very nice in quality.

I have the Vp14 trial version but I dont see the ZOOM plugin to be any better then a Pan/Crop. I used a AX100 100Mbps 4K file and put the same file on two tracks on top of each other. On the top track I used the zoom plugin and below a pan crop; this is all in a HD 1080 30p project. I set the zoom to 200 and the pan/crop to 1920x1080 to have the same ration. I personally find the Pan/Crop to have more detail.

Edit: Tried turning off GPU under preferences, just in case that makes a difference but the Smart Zoom plug in REQUIRES GPU to be on, it uses OpenCL. This is the first I see a Vegas plugin requiring GPU to be ON.

Pan/Crop:

Smart Zoom:

I did not use the plug-in. I used the pan/crop. I did not know there was a plug-in. Anyway, the pan/crop looks much better with Vegas Pro 14 than it does with Vegas 13 with the AX53 video I tested with. I cropped/zoomed in to approximately 60%. At 50% it starts to not look very good because the noise becomes too noticeable.

How can there be noise if you don't go below 1080p in 4k footage  ( presuming your project and output are 1080p) ? Zooming in to 1080 shouldn't produce any noise, as it's just contained within the 4k resolution -  unless I misunderstand what you mean.

I beleive the noise comes from the compression in the original footage. It can be enhanced which is what smart zoom plugin offers but it isn't as good as using NeatVideo.

Because of poor lighting, the gain was a bit on the high side which was 18db. Without crop the noise is quietly in the background. But with crop the noise becomes much more noticeable. I also have to zoom in quite a bit which means a loss of stops. And then there are a multitude of light sources and color temperatures. Such is Church video.

Just for info, my CX900 is 12X and my AX53 is 20x. The key is what the 'X' is. So the CX900 is 12 x 29mm and the AX53 is 20 x 26mm. So the CX900 is 12 x 29 which = 348. The AX 53 is 20 x 26 which = 520.

If I take the 520 and divide it by 29 I get 17.93 or rounded up to 18. This means that the AX53 is actually 2X more than the CX900.

Going by the X's, the AX53 would be 8X more than the CX900 but when using the real numbers it is actually only 2X more. My use and comparison proves this.

A person can have a 10X camera that is 26mm zoomed out and another 10X camera that is 43mm zoomed out. One will be 260mm zoomed in while the other will be 430mm zoomed in. So one 10X camera will zoom in more than the other even though they are both 10X

The reason why I say this is because of the challenges I have with Church videos. The more I have to zoom in the more light I lose. This means I will need more gain which causes more noise. But if I can keep the camera zoomed out a bit to get more light with less gain, then I can crop that video and end-up with better quality. As long I stay within a certain range of zoom vs. crop.

I am trying to explain this with as few words as possible.

It is all a balancing act fighting the combination of distance, gain, stops, crops and crazy color temperatures. One huge headache and no-one appreciates it. :(

I hope all of that helps.

One huge headache and no-one appreciates it. :(

No I do. I have similar issues with our annual ice skating performance and have almost given up on recording the evening shows when there is no additional daylight coming into the ice rink. Similar to you, we have to zoom in quite a bit, I usually use HXR-NX3 cameras but I will try this year Sony's new HXR-NX5R which can record 1080p as XAVC-S @ 50Mbps compared to 1080p in AVCHD @ 28Mbps. I think we have even a greater disadvantage; with all the fast motion we have to record in 59.94p, anything else looks horrible when converted to DVD. I hope the XAVC-S footage will have less noise too.

Curious to know if Magix made some kind of improvment to quality of the event/pan scaling.  That would be valuable to me.  There is not much info available beyond the general hyped marketing speak.  

I could do a test by making the project first in VP13 and then open it in VP14, taking still images as before. I just don't have much time left today.

Does anyone have a 4K resolution chart or image that could be used for that purpose?

That would be awesome!  No rush as I can't imagine them upping the upgrade price even higher with so many people taking a pass on it.  

Old Smoke, I use a Sony A7S with XAVC-S 50mb/s for some projects. The codec is really great, and I'd like to think it would be the ideal camera for you if you struggle with low light situations as you describe. Have a look on youtube and check the footage taken with ridiculously high ISO settings - and as good as no noise it you don't overdo it like at 80.000 or so. as the A7S2 is out, you get the older a7S relatively cheap now.

Old Smoke, I use a Sony A7S with XAVC-S 50mb/s for some projects. The codec is really great, and I'd like to think it would be the ideal camera for you if you struggle with low light situations as you describe. Have a look on youtube and check the footage taken with ridiculously high ISO settings - and as good as no noise it you don't overdo it like at 80.000 or so. as the A7S2 is out, you get the older a7S relatively cheap now.

Unfortunatelly there no good and affordable zoom lenses that can match an actual video camera with a build in 20x zoom lens. The HXR-NX3 has a 28.8 to 576.0mm zoom lens and so does the new HXR-NX5R. Another reason is autofocus and that is not as good and fast as on the cameras I mentioned, I tested the A7S2 in that respect already.

My a6300 has a very good autofocus but the 1080 60p footage is underwhelming; the 4K 30p footage is stunning for that little camera.

"I could do a test by making the project first in VP13 and then open it in VP14, taking still images as before. I just don't have much time left today."

Did that, not on a 4K chart, just a photographers test chart, there's no difference.

SVP13

MVP14

"I could do a test by making the project first in VP13 and then open it in VP14, taking still images as before. I just don't have much time left today."

 

Did that, not on a 4K chart, just a photographers test chart, there's no difference.

SVP13

MVP14

Smart Zoom ... a tiny bit sharper, not sure it's worth it really, the pan-crop is easier to use.

JN_

How much did you zoom in?

@OldSmoke -- unrelated (probably) -- I bought a used NX3 9 months ago and have had a horrible time with (a) soft images.. I always have to apply a sharpen filter in Vegas to look decent, and pushing all the way in with auto-focus frequently has blurry images.... and (b) it seems to have a hard time getting red/pinks to read properly.  (evident when matched to my other Sony, Canon and JVC cameras).  Have you had any similar experience and solutions you might recommend?

@OldSmoke -- unrelated (probably) -- I bought a used NX3 9 months ago and have had a horrible time with (a) soft images.. I always have to apply a sharpen filter in Vegas to look decent, and pushing all the way in with auto-focus frequently has blurry images.... and (b) it seems to have a hard time getting red/pinks to read properly.  (evident when matched to my other Sony, Canon and JVC cameras).  Have you had any similar experience and solutions you might recommend?

 

RedRob

I use the NX3/1 in 1080p (59.94) @ 28Mbps mode for my event recordings and find it to be reasonably good. Yes, it is a bit soft because at 28Mbps there isn't much we can do. I have not experienced anything with regards to red or pink colors. I actually prefer it over the Canon HF G30 I owned for a while, it always had a kind of magenta to pink tint, especially when recording red and brown. My AX100 tends towards a slight cyan but all of that can be corrected in post. Have you gone into the PP settings and try to correct it?

Autofocus is actually pretty good, even at low light and it only lost it once during a 45min. figure skating event. I dont own the NX3/1 but if memory serves me correct, it has a focus assist where you can adjust focus while in auto focus mode? If you are like me and dont use the zoom rocker but rather the lens ring you may have touched the focus ring and it went off for a bit.

Sorry I cant be more of help.

Update .. The frame grabs I uploaded earlier were NOT from rendered out files, they were from within vegas, using the 4K UHD test file.  Obviously I should have rendered out to say, FHD, then do frame grabs from a pan-cropped sample of output file and also from a Smart-Zoomed output file.

I did the above mentioned later and found that the Pan-Cropped frame grab (both now 2K clips) was better than the Smart-Zoomed frame grab.  I did it twice, same result.

I zoomed in about 3 to 1.

Old-Smoke, feel free to do maybe a more rigorous test.  If you get a different result, fine, I'm surprised at this.  If you are doing a test maybe use FHD as source files, I used a 4K UHD clip from  a Panasonic GX80, and rendered out to FHD because this is what I normally do, and of course I'm obviously interested in the result for a workflow that I will use frequently.

JN_

You actually confirmed my findings, smart zoom isnt better but slighly worse then Pan/Crop in VP14. I will do the VP13 and VP14 Pan/Crop comparision but I doubt there is any difference. Most people will be interested in UHD to HD crop or zoom and that is what I will test. I dont think you need to render out, just save a still from the preview window to a file, make sure the preview is set to Best/Full.

So you used the new Smart Zoom plug-in?

I love the smart zoom for use with 1920x1080p video in a 1920x1080p project. I can see a big difference when I toggle the "enable" option and it's zoomed in. I especially love it for use with stereoscopic projects where I can zoom past the violation areas and have it look optical-zoom like. I like it much better than using floating windows and cropping with the stereoscopic adjust plug-in.  Much simpler panning and zooming with that plug-in than with the event pan-crop interface.

When comparing Pan/Crop with Smart Zoom I think you must clearly distinguish between video and photo/grafic media and its original sizes. Pan/Crop will handle photos/grafics at its source size even if you use giga pixel photos/grafics. Smart Zoom as an OFX plug-in will always start on size determined by your project setting.