Vegas Workflow

[Jon Fairhurst]

I tried loading some 5D footage into Vegas on my Q6600 system with a 4-drive RAID, and I don't get real-time playback on a full screen monitor. From experience, I could render out to uncompressed 60i (and, I assume 30p), and I can work with one stream, but not two.

Here are the options that I can think of:

1) Work with limited frame rate. (Yuk.) Pre-render areas of interest.

2) Get Vasst's Gear Changer. Render smaller proxies after capture, manually. (Wide DV?) Work with proxies, until the final render. Not too expensive, but not ideal.

* Get Cineform Neo HD for $600. Ouch. That's more than the NLE! I guess this is the Windows equivalent of ProRes.

* Work from a 4-drive RAID uncompressed. It's fine if you don't do any layering. The problems are disc cost, pre-rendering, and LOTS of data. Not good if you have lots of footage.

* I have Raylight from a previous HVX project. Can we encode MPEG-4 files to Raylight, and use this as an intermediate format? When rendering from "maximum quality" is there loss? Can we use this with Gear Changer to use Raylight only for proxies, but to render straight from the originals?

From RED's zone plate demonstration, we can see that the 5D MkII has chroma aliasing problems with high frequencies in the vertical dimension. It's possible that there is a way to apply an effect to the original footage to re-site the RGB pixels for highest quality. The workflow might be like this:

1) Capture.
2) Trim out the garbage and find the useful material as desired.
3) Apply the vertical HF fixer effect.
4) Render to the intermediate format (Cineform/Raylight/Uncompressed/WideDVSomethiingElse?)
5) Edit away, possibly with Gear Changer

Comments?

[Bill Binder]

Although a bit crippled, vegas includes a free version of cineform. Here's one option then:

1. Drop all project-related clips into a vegas timeline.
2. Use a script that can make a region out of every event (a free script can be found deep in the bowels of the new vaast site, find free scripts or somesuch)
3. Do a batch render from vegas (built in script) to cineform intermediate (choose avi, then pick an intermediate preset, then click custom to tweak it as necessary) that will render out each region to an individual cineform clip (I actually downres to 720p30 cineform at this point because it's plenty good for most purposes).
4. Save the project file for making the intermediate clips (this will make sense in a minute)
5. Start a new project and work with the cineform clips, make sure project settings are correct (match the cineform files)
6. Edit and render out a final master, and save the final project file
7. Once complete, you can throw away all the cineform files, keep the original 5d files and the two project files (the final project and the project you made the intermediates from)

This is free (if you already have vegas), this gives you a real time edit, this allows you to archive only the original files, and leaves you in a spot where if you had to repeat the whole thing you could (just load up the intermediate project file, render out new intermediates, load up the final project file, and render out a new master). Alternatively, you could throw away the originals and the intermediate-generating project file, and just keep the cineform files and the final project file.

Sounds complicated, but it's actually not that bad.

Like you said though, GearShift is another viable solution. And, don't forget, you could go with the Neo HDV cineform app if you were willing to edit/final render in 720p -- that app is only $250 I think. Using HD Link in Neo HDV, you should be able to read in 1080p clips and convert them out to 720p clips, so that might work for you and is only $250 I think. Me personally, I've been using the above workflow without issue.


OOPS, UPDATE:

I forgot to mention that this workflow also has the advantage of being able to do a really rough edit BEFORE creating the intermediate files. I do this, and it's really handy. Say you've got a clip you know you won't use, then just delete it from the timeline. Or say you want to trim certain clips, like you have a ten min. clip but know you only want 1 min. of it. Then trim it. Once you have all the raw footage you know you need, THEN render out the intermediates. That can cut way down on the intermediate render times and extra disk space needed.

[Jon Fairhurst]

Thanks Bill!

I did a quick test, manually setting regions, then manually rendering them, and it worked well.

I tried rendering 1080p/30 Cineform files, but it crashed. Rendering 720p/30 was fine. The results were real-time enough (maybe some frames were dropped, I'm not sure) with two streams, and the visual quality was high enough, that I'm happy with the results.

I'll probably get the gear shifter, because I like the idea of rendering from the originals. Vegas generally uses all cores during the render, so it should work okay. When previewing, Vegas seems to want to use one core on my system.

I tried DVFilm Maker (comes with Raylight), but it failed to render the files. The README has a number of detailed steps that I didn't follow on the first pass. I'll try a more careful pass when I get a chance.

Regardless, the free Cineform method is VERY workable and looks good.

Thanks for the detailed instructions!

[Chris Barcellos]

Saw elsewhere that David Newman indicated HDLink will only work in Aspect and up for using this file at 1080i.. I took that to mean NeoHDV will not work for full 1080i. But I took what I thought was Chung's raw file, and still couldn't convert, even to 720.

It did work inside Vegas though.

[Bill Binder]

I could be wrong, but I believe I was told by Cineform that Neo comes with a decoder that can decode any cineform file, but the ENCODER is limited by which version you buy. That's why I said you could only use Neo if you were willing to drop to 720p with your intermediate and then render out from there.

[Jay Bloomfield]

Originally Posted by Bill Binder

I could be wrong, but I believe I was told by Cineform that Neo comes with a decoder that can decode any cineform file, but the ENCODER is limited by which version you buy. That's why I said you could only use Neo if you were willing to drop to 720p with your intermediate and then render out from there.

NEO HD has a maximum encoding rez of 1920 x 1080. NEO HDV has a maximum rez of 1440 x 1080 (1.33 PAR). The former is recommended for h.264 files, but the latter will still work, as long as you set the resize option to 1440 x 1080 in Cineform HDLink. You could also drop all the way down to 720p, as you stated. BTW, the basic limitation is being able to decode the original file, so you better have a good h.264 encoder installed. Adobe Premiere CS3 or later comes with the MainConcept h.264 decoder and a nice freeware decoder is CoreAVC HD. And then there's QT. Nero also provides one, but I don't recommend installing Nero, just to get the decoder.

[Mike Calla]

Bill, can i ask you question - Why do you use the Cineform files as proxy's? I thought the Cineform files themselves would be good enough for a final render?

[Matthew Roddy]

I'm with Mike on this question.
As I understand it, the Cineform files are significantly better all the way 'round for editing, grading and finishing. I'm wondering why one would go back as well.
I know I'm missing something...

[Jon Fairhurst]

Not mentioned is the 30 fps vs. 29.97 fps issue. I suppose it's best to keep everything in 30fps until the final render. That way you can go back and forth between any proxies/intermediates and the original without having to worry about keeping track of rates.

Regarding inters/proxies, I personally prefer to do the final render from the original (or uncompressed video), rather than from an inter, because it potentially removes a processing step from the equation. An inter can never have higher quality than the original - just higher efficiency.

Also, the original is 1920x1080. The free Cineform inter in Vegas only supports 1280x720 (and maybe 1440x1080), but not full res video.

That's not to say that Original -> Cineform -> Final isn't good enough for a given product.

Then again, I recently finished a "scientific" video production. Step 1 was to decompress everything. I then converted everything to a common size and frame rate (1080p). The next time I saw any compression was at the final render. Oh yeah, and it was boring. ;)

IEC - News releases > nr3708 - World's most boring DVD and Blu-rayTM to measure energy efficiency of new generation TVs

BTW, I used Vegas for all editing and level matching. I used After Effects for all size and rate conversion on that project.

[Oleg Kalyan]

Jon, thank you in advance!

DO you get a 16-235 in vector scope and wave form, (what produces common for many camera clips crushed blacks and clipped highlights) or full 0-255 in Vegas?

[Ivan Pin]

Vegas interprets 5D Mark II clips incorrectly. So, others NLE on PC platform.

Let's test 5D Mark II RAW-sample from dpreview: http://s3.amazonaws.com/movies.dprev...kII/Video2.MOV

Let's use Vegas Pro 8c standard project "HD 1080-24p (1920x1080; 23,976 fps)" with "Frame rate" set to 30. Also let's set "Preview Window Quality" to "Best-Full".

Vegas interprets origin .MOV-file incorrectly: blacks is crushed down; details on highlights is lost (see the sky):


Let's use Carbon Coder utility to covert origin .MOV-file to .AVI, CineForm HD v3.6.2 (1920x1080, progressive, 30 fps).
Now Vegas interprets .AVI-file more correctly: details in black areas; details on highlights appears:


And let's look at Vegas histograms.
Histogram of origin .MOV-file shows gaps on color channels and abrupts on end's:


Histogram of coverted .AVI-file without gaps:


As I see, The Carbon Coder utility is the only tool with correct interpretation of 5D Mark II video on PC platform.

[Evan Donn]

Originally Posted by Ivan Pin

As I see, The Carbon Coder utility is the only tool with correct interpretation of 5D Mark II video on PC platform.

Try MPEGStreamClip (Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows) - I used it to test conversion to ProRes on back-to-back histograms in FCP and get very similar results to the samples you posted. It's free and available for mac & pc.

[Bill Binder]

Originally Posted by Mike Calla

Bill, can i ask you question - Why do you use the Cineform files as proxy's?

Not sure I ever said I did? I might of said one or the other but not both (proxy or intermediate)? Anyway, no matter, when I use cineform, I render out from the intermediates (no proxies). Good render times too that way. But I've also experimented with poxies (a la gearshift) too. I do a lot of web stuff, and I feel cineform is perfect for that when needed. For those purposes, I edit in 720p30, but then I'll frameserve out the final render at half that size for flash encoding for the web, nice clean resize to 640x360 from those 720p cineform files. At that point, for archival, you have to decide whether to keep the originals or the cineform files. I tend to throw away the intermediates and keep the originals and retain my ability to repeat the whole workflow again in the future if needed.

[Oleg Kalyan]

Evan,
Thank you, it really works! Great news!

[Mike Calla]

Originally Posted by Bill Binder

5. Start a new project and work with the cineform clips, make sure project settings are correct (match the cineform files)
6. Edit and render out a final master, and save the final project file
7. Once complete, you can throw away all the cineform files, keep the original 5d files and the two project files (the final project and the project you made the intermediates from)
.

My Bad, Sorry Bill! - I should have read more carefully. I now see (#7) you keep your original 5D clips and project files for archival purposes. And you do render from your intermediates(#6)