Thanks Brian. I go to the Blackmagic site every day looking for new drivers and I've been running v1.8.2 since November.

Like I said, every other application deals with the Intensity's MJPEG files just fine. I just can't believe that this should be such a difficult problem for Sony to fix. Who do I have to bribe or pay off to make this happen?

I admire your tenacity.

I suspect a lot of people are over the finger pointing and have just moved on. I'm stuck having to use V7 and old drivers with my Decklink card.

Bob.

If I thought it were impossible, I'd give up.

It can't be that hard to put a checkbox in the Vegas preferences: "Use Blackmagic MJPEG VFW codec" which would disable the internal Vegas MJPEG codec (which does not work.)

What happens if you simply delete or uninstall the Sony MJPEG codec?

Unfortunately, Sony's MJPEG codec is internal to Vegas like their DV codec. Perhaps there is a .DLL that could be renamed/disabled, but I haven't found which one that might be. It could also break something else...

This is sad. I was hoping to finally move to a full Vegas studio here with deck control and full in/out capture etc.. Question: I need to go to either the Decklink Extreme or the Decklink HD Extreme so I can integrate my YUV decks. Are the drivers diffferent on this models and is anyone making these work? I could get away with the Decklink SP for now but eventually I will add other decks etc so I might as well support the full digital streams to Vegas too.

As for the MJPEG usage, I don't get the issue. My VM Plus was MJPEG and could take it out, put an AVI wrapper on it and Premiere and others edited it just fine. So I know this can not be that big of a problem to do. I would continue to do it this way now but the drives on VM are controller purely by VM and accessing the large files on an old ISA buss is very slow to move out. Thanks

Gary.

Gary,

The Intensity Pro can capture either HD or SD as uncompressed or MJPEG from HDMI or analog sources. Capturing uncompressed HD is 120 megabytes per second, MJPEG is about 10% of that rate. Vegas will not recognize or use the Intensity Pro MJPEG files, but every other application will by virtue of the fact that the Intensity installs a VFW-compatible MJPEG codec. For some reason unknown, Vegas will not use this codec.

My preferred editor is Vegas, but using the Intensity Pro files in Vegas requires using uncompressed files which are HUGE! Disk space is cheap, but not THAT cheap.

John

I believe Cineform can capture from the Intensity and their codec works in Vegas, maybe?

Bob.

O.K., here's a completely wild shot in the dark. Is there any way to capture from the Decklink card into a QuickTime wrapper instead of an AVI wrapper? Or to convert it to QT from AVI once captured? (Sounds like a job for VirtualDub!)

'Cause when I downloaded the "Thought Equity" sample stock footage clips that were packaged with VP8, I had to download Blackmagic 8-bit and 10-bit codecs to view them. The downloaded files, which are Quick Time files using the BM codecs, play back beautifully in Vegas without a hiccup.

I imagine you already have these codecs as part of the software package for your intensity card, but just in case, here's the link to the standalone codecs on the Blackmagic site:
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/downloads/codecs/Blackmagic_Codec_WIN.zip

Like I said, a total shot in the dark, but you never know....

John,

Thanks and yes the file size can be huge. I was wanting the RS422a control for my UVW1800, AJD650 and AG-DS850. I have to accept all types of customer tapes etc. I assume all the cards have the same MJPEG file structure then which Vegas does not like. Then as I add other machines to read from/to in the direct world, the card will do that for me. Or at least I was hoping.

And yes drive space is cheaper especially since I remember my Seagate 9gig SCSI drives pared up in VM and they cost over a $1K each and I have 6 of them in my old system. But hey in the mid 90s I could do 4:2:2 at 3:1 compression from my YUV decks on the MJPEG files it made and looked pretty darn good. Now I laugh at a 9gig drive as small and unimportant. How it has changed.

So we are waiting on BD to work with SONY to fix how they handle the files? This is too wierd. Why do other systems read BD files, and those systems can read all the work Vegas puts out but Vegas can not read their files correctly. And something like this would be a boost for Vegas as an editor. And we install other codecs, so why not theirs and move on? I do hope they get this worked out.

Thanks again for the help, hard work and tenacious attitude to keep this in the fore front to get done.

Gary

Brian,
Not a bad shot maybe in the dark. When one of the third party software writers was working on Wrappers for the VM MJPEG files, that was one of the earlier trials he did I believe moving from one wrapper to another to get it into another program we were using back then. Hhhmmmm....too many years ago to remember but it does bring up ideas to look into. Hope someone on the codec team is reading all of this.

Gary

Yes, Bob, Cineform will capture from the Intensity. Unfortunately, in order to use the full 1920x1080, it requires NeoHD which is $600.

vegas internal mjpeg codec can be disablet to use 3rd party codecs easly. just have to change a single bit on a .dll. but its not alowed of course to do it... so we hope to sony create a option like the internal dv codec...

I don't think cost of the TBs is the issue, isn't the problem getting enough speed to keep up with the data rates of uncompressed 1920x1080? A couple of TBs of SATA disks aren't that expensive, a couple of TBs of SCSI drives is another matter entirely.

Bob.

@John_Cline

Let me know if you find out anything further about this. I've been poking around for a solution, but I give up more easily than you do.

EDIT: The module is probably aviplug.dll, Version 1.2, build 7293. According to the VP8 Release Notes, the reading of MJPEG files was added with version 8, so one possibility is to take aviplug.dll (V 1.2, build 5812) from Vegas 7 and replace the Vegas 8 version. One complication is that the DLL's entry points and routines may not match up and Vegas would just crash. Most of the Vegas DLLs are not registered with regsrvr32.exe, so Vegas just looks for them in a specific directory. If aviplug isn't registered (and I've looked a bit in the Windows registry and it doesn't appear to be), then a simple replacement with renaming the old dll might work. I'm going to check the two versions of aviplug.dll to see what I can find out. Maybe in the mean time Sony will fix this.

Just a further update. The first ~40 ordinals in in the V7 & V8 versions of aviplug.dll are the same, although the entry points are slightly different. That's enough to make things not work right if you swap the older version of the DLL for the newer one. The remaining ordinals in the V8 DLL all seem to have something to do with MJPEG files.

Has anyone opened any "flavor" of a MJPEG file with Vegas Pro 8a or 8b? I have a licensed copy of the Morgan MJPEG2000 codec and Vegas uses that fine. But of course that's a different codec than MJPEG. I was going to download the Morgan MJPEG codec demo and encode a few files with Virtual Dub, just to see if Vegas would open them, but I'm hesitant about adding codecs to my machine without good cause.

BTW, the Morgan MJPEG2000 codec is an excellent intermediate codec for use in Vegas. www.hv20.com has a nice thread on it's use with VDub, etc:

http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=3246

and how the Morgan MJPEG2K codec stacks up against the more expensive Cineform NEO HDV codec. My experience is similar and the worst thing about the Morgan codecs is the documentation/tech support could be better.

Vegas v8 will open and edit Intensity Pro MJPEG files IF you don't have the Intensity Pro drivers and MJPEG codec installed on that particular machine.

I've used PicVideo encoded MJPEG files for a long time as intermediate files, so I have lots of them and Vegas has always recognized the FourCC code and use the PicVideo MJPEG codec to handle them. Of course, installing the Intensity Pro will then cause the MJPG FourCC code to be handled by the Intensity Pro codec and then all bets are off. Vegas will no longer properly deal with MJPEG files using the Intensity Pro codec. In the meantime, I've been using Vegas on another machine that has the PicVideo codec but doesn't have an Intensity Pro installed to edit MJPEG files (including files from the Intensity Pro.)

I REALLY wish they'd get this fixed.

John

John, thanks for this last post. It'll help me get out of a jam I created for myself.

I know less than nothing about this but would it be that difficult for Vegas to give you a choice of codecs both for decoding and encoding?

Bob.

John, also thanks. I have a somewhat slower backup PC on the same network, so I suppose I can do the same thing that you are doing. I wonder what's so "special" about the BMD MJPEG Codec that Vegas won't read the files.

@farss,

It's not that simple to fix. Although many pieces of software rely on the appropriate codec that either come with the OS or have been installed by the user, for most of it's file I/O, Vegas relies on libraries in one of it's own subfolders. Why? My guess is that most of the libraries are partially disabled versions of various codecs (like for example, the MainConcept encoders). This guarantees not only that Vegas can read these files on ANY system that it is installed on, but also that these "internal" Vegas codecs can't be used by other pieces of software. If a specific internal codec library is not included with Vegas, then it tries to use an "external" codec.

But in the case that John Cline has pointed out, if the BlackMagic Design Intensity MJPEG Codec is installed, Vegas Pro 8 somehow is getting confused as to what to do, since it has its own internal MJPEG codec.

"I wonder what's so "special" about the BMD MJPEG Codec that Vegas won't read the files."

I don't know, but every other video application I use will decode (and encode) Blackmagic MJPEG files using the Blackmagic codec. Avery Lee, the author of Virtual Dub, added the following in v1.7.2 of Virtual Dub: "Added workaround for BlackMagic MJPEG codec not producing key frames." I don't know exactly what that means, but maybe Sony could give him a call and find out how he got the files to work....

John