Vegas 6, SDI and 10bit video?

farss wrote on 5/7/2005, 3:11 PM

Assuming I can capture 10bit video over SDI how will Vegas deal with this, will it read all 10bit of the data and do it's internal calcs using all 10bits or will it truncate to 8bits and then perform the calcs.

I see no way to output 10bit video so I guess we're still stuck with a pretty serious loss in the process, at least knowing all available data is being used would be something. I was hoping that V6 would free us of the 8bit limit but it seems not.

Yes, I understand that 8bits are 'adequate' for most things but I'm looking at working with 35mm film scans for digital projection in cinemas.

And please don't anyone give me yet another lecture about how much storage space and bandwidth I'll need!

Bob.

Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 5/7/2005, 9:16 PM

I use this since last year in V5 with BMD's capture uility (and a "BM Extreme" card :O) :O).

10-bit video stays 10-bit in Vegas as long as you stick to straight cuts and assembly. In this case the output will stay in the BMD 10-bit codec (which is really phenomenally good).

If you do transitions, effects, color correction, etc., Vegas does these in a higher bit space and then truncates the output for each to 8-bit. The solution for this is to work in Combustion ($1K), AE Pro ($1K) or Digital Fusion ($4K), and if desired, even Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse ($575) for high(er) end color correction/grading, and then splice the output clips in Vegas.

Makes you long for a Nitris DS, but alas that is at a different price point (about as much as an XPRI, which btw only supports 8-bit also).

GlennChan wrote on 5/7/2005, 11:12 PM

I don't think Vegas renders at higher than 8-bit internally.

Take a BM codec clip. Add the B&W filter, set it to 100%. Add "color corrector filter", set gain = 0.5 Add CC filter again, gain = 2.0
Toggle those CC filters, and you should see banding occur in the histogram.

Or try offset = -16.5, offset = +16.5 (banding occurs)
versus offset = -16, offset = +16
again, apply the B&W filter before the CC filters.

2- Really interesting: Copy video preview to clipboard. Set the preview to display clipboard contents- the histogram changes!

I think this may have to do with color shifting with the Black Magic codec...
Whenever you apply effects to it, the colors shift (probably due to color space conversion?).

farss wrote on 5/7/2005, 11:19 PM

Thanks guys, some good, some not so good news there.
I'm seriously thinking of investing in Digital Fusion, it's down to around $1K at the moment with a cheap upgrade to the next release. Damn it though, another thing to learn.
I did get time to get a decent demo of it at NAB, has lots of nice features, most of which I doubt I'll ever get to use seriously.
Bob.

GlennChan wrote on 5/7/2005, 11:24 PM

Those results were with Vegas 5. Things may be different in 6...?

farss wrote on 5/7/2005, 11:37 PM

Would be really nice to get some input from Sony on this now wouldn't. If I can get this to fly they might even get a sale of a rather expensive deck or two.
Bob.

GlennChan wrote on 5/7/2005, 11:53 PM

Ok I think this is a false alarm. Vegas 6 seems to handle everything properly.

Internal rendering still seems to be 8-bit though?

Try:
B&W Filter @ 100%
Color corrector: Offset = -0.5
Color corrector: Offset = 0.5
Look at histogram.

rs170a wrote on 5/8/2005, 3:45 AM

I know absolutely nothing about doing any of this so I'll simply mention a thread that discussed this on the Cow the other day. Tim Duncan and B.J. Ahlen both appear to be doing this successfully.

Mike

farss wrote on 5/8/2005, 5:36 AM

Thanks for that.
Bob.

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/8/2005, 7:29 AM

If you search the posts, you'll see we've been doing this here for a while too. We don't have Digibeta, but BetaSp and a Thomson LDK cam with SDI. Works great.
At DV Expo, I was able to successfully capture Digibeta to the VideoForce machine that we were using; you need fast RAID to do this, but you already know this. :-) That machine had an 8 disk SATA RAID 0 on it.

farss wrote on 5/8/2005, 8:01 AM

I'm certainly aware of what's been done, even before V6. Thing I'm seeing now though is once you step upto DB and beyond there's a whole world of new issues.
Even the audio side of DB gets much more interesting, like being able to record more than two tracks of decent audio, this is a pretty common need too.
We really the Madison team to throw us more than the few crumbs they have so far. I'm pretty excited about where Vegas is going but I need a few more fixes :)

Bob.

Coursedesign wrote on 5/8/2005, 11:12 AM

"I'm seriously thinking of investing in Digital Fusion, it's down to around $1K at the moment..."

Umm, that sounds like the DFX+ version which is 8-bit rendering only.

Digital Fusion has the best wire removal thanks to a magic brush, Combustion is easier to learn and does some other things better, AE Pro is the hardest to learn but has the most plugins (although DF & Combustion runs the key ones).

Vegas is stated in Sony documentation to do internal calculations for color correction etc. in higher precision, then output the result in 8-bit to the timeline.