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Videoon 6/19/2012
OT: Microsoft Surface
Too little, too late.
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Videoon 5/10/2012
SSD for Rendering
@Chienworks, That's not exactly correct either, because you have several steps that occur before encoding and file output. First, each clip on the timeline must be decoded. Then, the FX must be applied. What is often overlooked as a bottleneck, is the decode phase. Decoders are often not multi-threaded and even if they support multiple threads, it often is no more than 2 or 4, at most. Why is this so? because decoders are designed to work best with output devices, which generally operate between 50-60 fps. There is really nothing to be gained by writing a decoder that can run at 200 or 300 fps, unless you are doing 3D or working with a specialized monitor. This isn't a video game that we're talking about here, but rather video with a fixed fps. The decoder bottleneck is only reached with extremely fast systems (fast CPUs with multiple cores and hyperthreading, plus a fast GPU and an SSD, etc.), but it does explain why people complain that their renders do not cause the CPU and GPU to "pin" at 100% usage during a render. Generally, though, the disk I/O system is the bottleneck, if one does exist.
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Videoon 4/27/2012
Adobe Cloud
This is the new trend. You "rent" the software, rather then first buying it, then continually paying for upgrades to new versions. I'm old fashioned and I want to see how the Adobe Cloud thing works in practice, so I'm upgrading to the non-cloud version of CS6.
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Videoon 4/16/2012
sot: cs5.5 install AFTER vegas?
I have CS5.5 and Vegas 11 and there are no conflicts/problems. Most of the codecs that they access are independent of each other.
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Videoon 4/12/2012
Now give him a cam and a heavy insurance policy.
If you're into DIY drones, this website makes fascinating reading. All this guy did was build a larger manned version. http://diydrones.com/
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Videoon 4/12/2012
How to convert DNxHD MXF to MOV?
DNxHD MXF rewrapped to DNxHD MOV: http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/124/880578 If you need more help on this, just ask. But why not output the file as DNxHD in a MOV wrapper to start with? Hyperdeck Studio has that an option that if you download the most recent software from BMD: http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail/?os=win&sid=3960&pid=3969&leg=false
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Videoon 4/3/2012
OT: Mac Dive and PC
I bought MacDrive solely because the Hyperdeck Shuttle 2's SSDs need to be Mac (HFS+) formatted. I haven't had any problems associated with MacDrive under Win 7 x64, but don't count on the disk throughput being as good under Windows, as if the disk was formatted as NTFS.
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Videoon 2/17/2012
OT: Anyone with an ATMOS Samurai?
No, but I have a Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 and it records uncompressed QT (MOV), Avid DNxHD (220M 4:2:2 10 bit) MXF & MOV. The MOV files work fine with Vegas Pro 11 and 1080 30p previews in RT, at least for me. There are also rumors of BMD adding another codec (The best guesses are Cineform or Apple ProRes) via a firmware update. The Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 is a dandy little video field recorder IMO.
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Videoon 2/17/2012
Sony Vegas Pro Survey
Cliff's point was that it takes some extra effort on SCS's part to maintain the 32 bit version of Vegas Pro and backward compatibility with Windows XP. I agree, although that wasn't one of my answers to the survey.
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Videoon 1/27/2012
Boycott Vegas 12 unless Vegas 11 gets stable!
As a long time Cineform user, I do agree that Vegas Pro 11 and Cineform are presently not the most perfect companions. But then, you have to partition out how much of that is SCS's "fault" and how much is Cineform's. SCS and Cineform seem to work very closely at ironing out bugs, probably as fast as any two companies do. At one time, the CFHD codec was truly a "gift" that allowed RT editing without doing an "end-run" with proxy files. But, I really wonder how many people here are really gaining much these days by using an intermediate codec such as CFHD? Unless you are either on a slow PC or making multiple generations of the files on your timeline, you are almost better off working with AVCHD or whatever original file format that your camera shoots. That's not intended to be a knock on Cineform, only just a suggestion to those who have projects that need to be done in the near term and are waiting for a solution.
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Videoon 1/27/2012
Boycott Vegas 12 unless Vegas 11 gets stable!
@farss, I think that you and I are in a lot more agreement than the people reading our posts realize. As to Premiere Pro, I have used it all the way back to the educational version 1.0 (!!). The 32 bit PC flavors of PPro were far more bug-ridden than Vegas Pro ever was. But the comparison to those 32 bit PPro versions and either the Mac or the recent 64 bit versions is like night and day. There's a user that patrols the Adobe forums, Harm Millard, who is in my mind, the "Good Samaritan of PC Hardware". He spends a lot of time helping other PPro users with hardware and performance issues. Adobe has a separate sub forum now for hardware-related questions and this is why I suggested several months ago that SCS restructure their forum lists and add a Vegas Pro hardware sub forum. A number of people here didn't like that idea, because they were worried that those hardware-related posts would "get lost" somewhere and the bulk of Vegas Pro users wouldn't visit that sub forum. There is one other design issue with Vegas that could be addressed by SCS. And that would be to separate compositing into its own app, ala After Effects. With such a split, you lose the convenience of an "all in one" solution, but you would probably gain some additional stability.
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Videoon 1/26/2012
Boycott Vegas 12 unless Vegas 11 gets stable!
I completely agree with that point. That is SCS's responsibility. But I wonder how the Vegas Pro community would feel if for Vegas Pro 12, it was only 64 bit, supported only Windows 8, had no way of accessing 32 bit codecs/plugins and only used GPU processing on nVidia graphics cards of the Quadro or 500/600 series? I'd bet that Vegas Pro would be plenty stable with those kind of limitations.
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Videoon 1/26/2012
Boycott Vegas 12 unless Vegas 11 gets stable!
I'm not even saying that something is wrong with their system. I am saying that as your hardware and OS ages, it is not like a fine wine. The likelihood of compatibility problems with new, more-demanding software increases. SCS could drop 32 bit support, just like Adobe did with Premiere and After Effects. That would cut down on complaints substantially. But it would also cut the potential user base down too. In that sense, the issue is within SCS's control. Personally, I think that Adobe made the right decision to drop 32 bit support. Adobe also focused it's efforts on using nVidia GPUs and left people with AMD hardware without support from the Mercury playback engine. Was that a bad idea? It certainly made it easy to list the GPUs that Premiere Pro officially supported for the MPE. People have to recognize what MUTTLEY said is true. You can't write software with main goal of being compatible with every possible OS and hardware configuration. It's like what Abe Lincoln said: "Your can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can't please all of the people all of the time."
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Videoon 1/26/2012
BlackMagic HyperDeck and Vegas Pro?
Bob, Here's my cut at a rewrap workflow: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/tapeless-video-recording-solutions/504548-hypderdeck-shuttle-2-supports-dnxhd.html#post1710713 I've checked the workflow and the rewrap to MOV works almost instantaneously. I'm also considering buying the Hyperdeck Shuttle, now that it does DNxHD. I already have a C300 SSD, so I'm in the $300+ price range, without the mount and a small LCD monitor.
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Videoon 1/26/2012
Boycott Vegas 12 unless Vegas 11 gets stable!
The "problem" with Vegas is the problem with any commercial software written for the PC. The author of the 3rd party software cannot control: 1) the OS version that the software will run on. Notice that in a limited way, Adobe did that by dropping the 32 bit version of PP & AE and just focusing on 64 bit Windows (and the Mac of course). 2) the hardware configuration on which the software will run. 64 bit software running with a fast processor, a lot of physical RAM and a recent generation GPU is going to be more stable. 3) the loose nut behind the wheel, or in simpler terms what the user does with the software. Although I empathize with people claiming that Vegas Pro 10 or 11 is "buggy", I personally have never encountered those bugs. I'm not denying that they exist. I'm just saying that given my hardware configuration (a one year old dual core workstation, 40 GB RAM, a GTX 580 and Win 7 x64) and the type of editing that I do (no 3D, Red or ancient MPEG files or files needing odd codecs), Vegas works fine. I do remember before I bought my present setup, just about every video package (I use both PP & Vegas + a lot of utilities) used to crash unexpectedly. If it was solely my decision, I would ditch Premiere and use Vegas Pro solely, just because I find VP more intuitive. And it certainly wouldn't be constructive for me to recommend that everyone just go out and buy a whole new computer. But those people that are complaining about Vegas should think a bit more of why they are having these problems and how much of that is within the control of SCS.
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Videoon 1/22/2012
ot: ssd updates?
@Birk, You are absolutely right about winsat. It is just the Windows Assessment Tool without the GUI and is passive. All it does is calculate various scores on an 8 point scale for each hardware subsystem. For disks it's: winsat disk -drive <drive letter w/o :> As to SSDs, I've had no problems in over a year. I have a 120 GB SSD as my Win 7 x64 OS drive and a 240 GB SSD for removable video storage. The former is an OCZ Vertex 2 and the latter is a Corsair C300. Both have WEIs in the high 7s and are probably limited in speed, by the fact that they connected to the mobo SATA 2 controller and not SATA3. And johnmeyer is right, use ATTO for disk performance measurement. But if you have an SSD, don't get carried away, because these assessment tools are only meant to be used sparingly. Running them once or twice a day, for example (Why anyone would do that, I don't know.) would definitely shorten the useful life of an SSD.
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Videoon 1/12/2012
Fotoshop by Adobe'
Too much! That's a creative masterpiece.
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Videoon 1/6/2012
Is this present 25 Year 3D Cycle died?
Yep, it's the glasses. Each person needs a pair. The technology is just not there and the present 3D techs may never evolve into anything that's commercially successful. That's not to say that some new innovation won't change that.
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Videoon 12/20/2011
16 Core limit - I've got dual hex Xeon - 24 cores
"This has an interesting point however. As I have 12 actually Xeon cores, which support 2 threads each, if I have 16 threads, it will be split across the 1st 16 cores, which is only 8 physical cores, so I am not actually using all of the CPU cores, as 4 cores are basically idle, and the rest are doubled up. " What utility are you using that tells you that? AIDA64? Windows 7 built-in performance monitor? Basically with 2x Xeon 6 cores, and Vegas @ 16 threads, you should have 8 of the physical cores running one thread and 4 physical cores running two threads.The hyperthreading may not exactly work that way, since the OS uses some of the CPU power in parallel to Vegas. I have a dual Xeon SR-2 system and I've never seen a physical core completely idle under heavy to full load.
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Videoon 12/16/2011
OT: Any truth to a possible Apple buyout of Sony?
I'm a Windows/PC guy all the way, but Apple will do just fine without Steve Jobs. The key to their success is snazzy marketing, crisp customer service plus attention to quality control. And these days, if your hardware is made in China and your quality control is weak, your products are complete junk. What people don't understand about electronics components is that they are "binned". Every component is individually tested and then assigned a bin letter (like A through D, etc.). The big guys like Apple get all the A-binned stuff and the rest of the industry gets the crumbs. You can see it in the way that Intel markets CPUs. The ones with the highest stock clock speeds (for a given design and generation) are the A-binned CPUs.
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Videoon 12/16/2011
wot: floaters (in the eye)
I got one after being whacked in the head playing volleyball. The next day when I woke up I saw flashes out of my field of vision and a vague blurry spot in my field of vision in my right eye. I went immediately to the eye doctor, because I thought that I might have had a detached retina. He checked me for glaucoma, diabetes and basically said it was PVD (Post Vitreous Detachment). As he explained it, a small piece of the inner lining of the eye breaks away and floats around in the vitreous humor (which is like jelly). It is usually just a very tiny piece of protein, which may eventually settle out and disappear. Or, it could be permanent. The only treatment is to drain the vitreous humor and refill the eye with air or saline solution. He also said that unless the floaters were really bad, no reputable ophthalmologist would ever do that surgery since the risks of blindness are high. He also said that there was a fad to use lasers to try to break up the floater, but that approach never panned out. Now they are looking at experimental drugs that might do the same. The doctor told me the same thing that someone else said. Eventually, the brain gets used to the difference between your two eyes and blocks out the floater.
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Videoon 12/2/2011
Effect of Low Shutter Speed on Stabilization
As always, johnmeyer gives us an informative perspective on an issue. Besides, assuming that you are shooting at 30p, below 1/30 shutter you just get frame accumulation. That creates a nice special effect with relatively motionless shots of flowing water, if you like that kind of thing. Above roughly 1/500 (some even say 1/250) you start to get staccato "Saving Private Ryan"-like motion. Think about it. At 1/000 sec for example, you have a gap of ~(1/30)*(999/1000) of a second between frames. The shutter speeds in video cameras are pretty much limited by their frame rates and although they have settings for high and low shutter speeds, they are just for creating special effects (which personally, aren't that special). If you want less motion blur (and hence more effective stabilization), the usual solution is to buy a camera that shoots at 50p/60p or grater. I'm a little surprised at the results in the OP, but that may just be a result of stabilization algorithm in VP11.
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Videoon 11/23/2011
OTish: What do you use to check codecs on files?
Further, GSpot will not report any 64 bit codecs.
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Videoon 11/16/2011
Deleting audio without deleting video
I always regret it when I permanently delete part or all the audio in a project. The alternative to complete deletion is obviously just to mute the audio channel in question. To "delete" parts of an audio track, set a volume envelope and make the volume zero between the points where you don't want sound. That way, if you change your mind, the "damage" is easily undone.
jabloomf1230
Offline, Member since 1/26/2005