FCP uses Optical Flow to create intermediate frames as necessary to do frame rate conversion, here from 25 fps (CineFrame 25) to 23.98 fps (progressive).

This takes a lot of calculations, and that certainly accounts for most of the hours spent on rendering this example. I don't understand why he put in a simultaneous frame rate change, because it is not relevant to evaluating the SmoothCam feature.

The code for SmoothCam was taken from Apple Shake, and that program is quite speedy when stabilizing footage.

So why use Optical Flow? It improves quality substantially, compared to the frame blending etc. that Vegas is limited to currently.

Optical Flow is also available in Premiere Pro and After Effects, as well as in all high end NLEs.

Madison really needs to consider Optical Flow to stay in the race, now that the key competitive "low-end" NLEs have it.

[ProRes 4:2:2] sounds like the Sony 4:2:2 YUV codec.

Only in the color sampling.

ProRes 4:2:2 compresses 7x-10x, with nearly the same quality.

Reviews indicate that ProRes 4:2:2 is similar to Avid's DNx codecs in compression, although not quite matching the quality yet.

Very interesting comments Bjorn (Coursedesign).
We can only hope that Vegas 8 has some of these as new features (along with a better titler, better capture app, 10-bit colour, etc., etc. etc.

Mike

The code for SmoothCam was taken from Apple Shake, and that program is quite speedy when stabilizing footage.
Uh, what? SmoothCam in Apple Shake is very, very slow because it does optical flow analysis on the image.

Shake also has motion trackers (1-point, 4-point), which are relatively fast compared to the optical flow method (but then again, ANYTHING is fast compared to it). It might be good to see that in Vegas. They are fast and in some situations they work better than the SmoothCam method.

2- When you stabilize footage, you have to zoom in. If you don't, you get black lines on the outside (that move around corresponding to the camera shake). So that's why you lose headroom. Hopefully that explanation makes sense.

Reviews indicate that ProRes 4:2:2 is similar to Avid's DNx codecs in compression, although not quite matching the quality yet.
I'm not sure what review you read, but there was one review with faulty testing methodology where there was color shifting (in ProRes) due to a quicktime bug.

4:2:2 chroma subsampling is a form of compression in itself and in rare cases can cause visible (though usually subtle) artifacts, so it limits the highest quality you can get.

What ProRes is good for is that you can edit HD without a hefty RAID array. Cineform might do the same thing for Vegas, but I haven't played around with their solution enough.

Would anyone say that ProRes is more like Cineform's codecs?

There isn't all that much info about ProRes yet. It seems to combine some interframe compression (like Cineform) with something else, quite possibly wavelets.

SmoothCam in Apple Shake is very, very slow because it does optical flow analysis on the image.

It uses Optical Flow for frame rate conversion as well as for stabilization, either is very computationally intensive (esp. for HD).

If you do both frame rate conversion and stabilization at the same time, it will obviously take a lot more crunching, so I thought this was a poor choice for reviewing "SmoothCam" alone.

When you stabilize footage, you have to zoom in. If you don't, you get black lines on the outside (that move around corresponding to the camera shake).

With the exception of if you are able to paint in the missing parts. This can be made easier through careful production planning, and Shake has some perhaps non-obvious features to help with this (Auto-Align and Tracking Paint).

Prores should be more similar to DNxHD than it is to Cineform. Apple has a white paper on Prores. It is DCT-based, VBR, and is intraframe from what I've been told. What I was saying is that Cineform may do what Prores does... HD editing without a hefty RAID. It would be interesting to see the relative quality between Cineform and Prores.

Apple's White Paper on ProRes is a typical marketing document, and it doesn't say if it is intraframe or not. There is some talk about how H.264 is intraframe, but not a peep about ProRes.

I agree that it would be very cool to compare it with Cineform. Cineform would have to be significantly better to compete with the free ProRes, unless they can sell on the benefits of it being cross-platform, which ProRes is not (oddly enough).

There are even some little boxes that can hold a single PCI-X or PCI-E card, with an ExpressCard cable to a MacBook Pro this can be used to capture HD-SDI, making it a potential portable solution for shall we say "visually uncompressed" HD capture from a Canon XL-H1, or any of the growing number of semi-affordable cameras with SDI outputs.