There's no such interface to be seen on the BOB they're showing, but they don't show the bottom and one side so maybe it's there somewhere hidden.

It doesn't really matter too much, even if they're misrepresenting the product, the real topic is hardware acceleration for Vegas and what it ought to do.

Rob

Rob,
I think the "what it ought to do" part is the most critical. No hardware is going to cope with "unlimited tracks". This I feel is where Vegas becomes a victim of itself, it tries to be both an editor and a compositor and a multitracker. That sounds and looks great until you get to HD and/or start pushing the envelope.

Bob.

Very true.

My employer and I were talking about this over lunch in relation to Axio and to 844x. 844x was very realtime in his view but when we got down to the details, it was realtime down to the level that they'd promised realtime, and only that far. So there were very specific things that it could do in real time.

844x had a lot of compositing power and in some ways struck me as similar to Vegas.

I wish I had time to think about what I'd want in a hardware accelerator, but I don't.

Rob

It's almost never that I have a client sitting next to me, but yesterday it happened. I figured there'd be no problem reviewing the recent HDV 24p@60i footage on Preview-Full or even Half.

No such luck. In this case, the entire V8 GUI just disappeared off the screen, several times.


Multi-track, yeah right, I'd be happy if V8 would play back one track without a hiccup.

Usually it works well, but HDV is definitely putting the stress on it.

Is anyone using Cineform intermediates having this much trouble with preview? I consistently am getting 24p or 29.97fps with Preview-Half setting with only a dual core. If I have video tracks below, I sometimes mute them. Once, when editing 3 tracks in Excalibur MultiCam, a customer wanted to see the process. I did have to cheat and use the Excalibur option of pre-rendering the 3 cams into an avi so I could edit without jumpy footage. But other than the MultiCam situation, I don't usually have trouble with previews using Cineform intermediates.

Don't you think with HDV this will be like the past problems initially with DV, and eventually the hardware will catch up? In the meantime, there are cheats to use.

The Cineform intermediates are a bit jumpy in the full/best preview position but I use the preview to render to see complex areas. Vegas really needs hardware help for playback. Vegas playback will be like trying to exceed the speed of light---never catch up.
JJK

as good as cineform is, the whole idea is to work smarter, not harder.... prerendering takes time, time is money

Good, Quick, Cheap. Choose any two. It's old but still true today.
Throw enough money at it and you can get a camera with lots of quality that records directly to Cineform and for what it is the workflow is very slick. But it isn't cheap.

Or get a really fast PC and transcode during capture.

Bob.

Pretty much, most dual core CPU PCs will transcode HDV to Cineform during capture in almost RT. With a quad core CPU it's no sweat. I can't speak to what happens with HD (1920 x 1080) captures, though.

I don't quite understand 1394 (ieee). Why is it that I see that USB2.0 shows a faster transfer rate on specs? Is this a misunderstanding on my part?

whats wrong with Esata also?

Aug

So we've been complaining about preview frame rates for years. Is it safe to assume that the Vegas engine cannot incorporate hardware acceleration to imporve this? One would think that if it were a possibility, that SCS would have tried something.

Or, SCS is not at all interested in the broadcast market and perfectly happy with their market share.

JAB

Vegas has always been hardware agnostic.

It depends on the speed of your cpu. The upside to that is you don't have a piece of hardware that will grow obsolete and you can take advantage of improvement in computing power. If you have a lot of RAM, you can do RAM renders too.
Lots of folks use Vegas for Broadcast work. What kind of projects are you doing and what about the Vegas preview prevents you from doing it?

Hi Aug,

1394 (at 400mbit/s) existed first - then later came USB2.0. This standard was orinigally suggested as 360mbit/s, but it looked bad, slower that its competitor...

So the USB consortium (including MS) wanted to show off and be better than 1394, that originally originates from Apple. So they changed the spec to 480mbit/sec.

USB actually is 480Mbit/s, BUT the system overhead is enormous, it's a slave-master protocol, and is only half duplex (data cannot be sent and received at the same time).

Wit 1394 (at 400Mbit/s - 800Mbit/s also exists) - you can achieve easily data transfer rates of 42MByte/s, with USB 2.0 you get something like 32MByte/s - best case.

Dont you agree, 480Mbit/s sound better and more advanced than ONLY 400Mbit/s, but the truth is something different. Firewire wins by more than 30%!!.

My Firewire 800Mbit/s external drive transfer 77Mbyte/s...

With eSATA you can achieve even faster speeds...

"don't have a piece of hardware that will grow obsolete"

PC components grow obsolete within weeks... however look at a matrox RTx100 and how many event videogs STILL use these to this day... Ive seen digitsuite systems still in use running lowly 350mhz dual cpu.... and these are STILL in use..