To the SoFo coders -- simple questions

vitamin_D wrote on 2/10/2003, 1:39 AM

Hey,

I've just been kicking some footage around in Vegas 4, and I noticed that footage from the timeline and Trimmer window preview over firewire differently. I'm curious -- why does Vegas need to recompress frames when footage is on the timeline and not when in the Trimmer? I'm not speaking of footage with changes made in any way -- and the media I'm using is Vegas captured and rendered NTSC DV going out to a Panasonic AG-DV1000/Sony PVM 14M2U through the 1394 port on my SB Audigy. Regardless at what res I select in the preview window (from Draft (Auto) to Best (Full), I get the same thing -- different looking footage and the occasional flicker of lag when on the timeline -- nothing of the sort from the Trimmer or Media Pool preview (which implies to me a Vegas dependency and not a problem with the hardware). I have my guesses...

As an extension, how does Vegas compare to XpressDV WRT previews over firewire? That is, expressed in hard numbers, how do the two compare -- fields, frames-per-second, resolution, etc?

Will Vegas be able to import a wider list of industry standard EDL's with the aid of the new scripting environment? If so, in what way(s) will this solution be lacking, and in what ways will it shine? I have read about the possibility of EDL-imports-as-scripts posted by respected members of the Vegas user community and was wondering about the veracity of the claims...looking over at the Script forum makes me have my doubts.

Is there any way I can acquire my activation codes so that I can keep them for my personal records and for re-installations? I'm thinking of moving to XP soon and will be doing this on a reformatted drive -- accepting the unknown nature of other things (whether I'll have an internet connection or not, for example), I'd like to be able to re-install the program without the need of re-registering.

Can I get a straight answer about the improvements made between beta build 74 and release build 115? :D Dithermaster wrote something to the effect of "No one has mentioned my favorite improvement yet" somewhere, and while I appreciate Easter egg hunts as much as the next guy, c'mon -- spill the beans. Can I get a (comprehensive, clear) list?

Do you all generally agree on tastes in beer? I really like the improvements in V4 and wouldn't mind shipping you all a few bottles of trappist ale. How many coders are there, anyway -- these are 22oz bottles, and the beer weighs in at a nice 8.5-11% ABV -- just one or two sips makes even the most furious Avid/FCP user seem pretty comical...

Thanks,

- jim

Comments

dreamlx wrote on 2/10/2003, 5:41 AM

hi,

don't you have the videoscope or another of those displays open ? As video seems to get recompressed even if there are no filters on it if those are open.

bye,
david

SonyDennis wrote on 2/10/2003, 10:45 AM

Jim:

Those are simple questions? <g>

Firewire preview from the timeline with no FX / transitions / pan/crop / track motion / compositing should be "direct" like in the trimmer. Anything else gets recompressed. And like dreamlx pointed out, having the scopes on during play may affect this.

I can't make any comparisons to XpressDV because I don't have it. When we're previeing directly, we should be doing full resolution, 30 fps DV, no quality loss from your original. When we re-compress, the resolution depends on what you have set in the Video Preview, and the frame rate is totally up to your machine.

It is believed that we've exposed enough functionality via scripting to do robust EDL import and export. If we missed anything, we'll fix it, because being able to do this is important to us. We're working with a few people who are looking into making these scripts. I suspect the hardest part is dealing with the intracacies of EDLs rather than how to get/set information in the Vegas object model. You haven't seen anything in the demo scripts yet because it's not a trivial problem

Activation codes are machine specific, so if you are on a re-formatted drive, you'll need a new activation code. The serial number is the thing to keep in a safe place (off your machine, in case your machine goes castors-up).

I don't have a bullet list of every single thing that changed since the beta, or I'd post it, sorry.

///d@

vitamin_D wrote on 2/10/2003, 12:04 PM

Thanks for your responses.

WRT realtime previewing, you've satisfied the question to the best of your ability, I gather, but I would like to see what someone knowledgeable could say about FCP's and Avid's "realtime" previews by comparison. As I understand it, FCP eliminates half of the fields-per-frame in order to speed the process up, and I was wondering if this was the case with Avid as well.

Similarly, it would be of interest for me to see how the differing approaches -- compression vs. field loss -- degrade overall visual quality. As an enduser I'm more than happy with the SoFo approach, but then I'm not trying to convince myself :)

As an aside, closing the scopes window did the trick to solve the occasional preview shimmer.

I'm very happy to hear about EDL support. Thanks for clarifying that.

Beer, anyone?

- jim