EX1 on a shoot

[Bob Grant]

Originally Posted by Piotr Wozniacki

Well, I guess it's vital to all of us, as it suggests the smartrendered mpg2's are not fully compliant. BTW I have a higher class ATI card with newest drivers, but this is of secondary importance as we cannot control how customers will be playing back stuff...

Fully compliant with what?
If you can put it back into the SxS cards and have the camera play it or copy it onto an XDCAM disk and have a player play that then it's mission accomplished.
If you're talking about HDV footage I'd say much the same thing, it's a m2t file which is not the same as a mpg file, I think. If I'm right then it's probably more good luck than anything else that it plays at all.

[Alister Chapman]

I was told that FCP and Vegas (and other NLE's) re create the full GOP sequence around edit points by creating empty zero length I,B and P frames so that the GOP still has the correct number of frames. Thats how they manage to have render free cuts only edits and sequences where only transitions and effects are re-encoded.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Bob Grant

Fully compliant with what?
If you can put it back into the SxS cards and have the camera play it or copy it onto an XDCAM disk and have a player play that then it's mission accomplished.
If you're talking about HDV footage I'd say much the same thing, it's a m2t file which is not the same as a mpg file, I think. If I'm right then it's probably more good luck than anything else that it plays at all.

I wouldn't leave it to luck, Bob. Before I started using Vegas, for a couple of years I smartrendered SD MPG2 files with Ulead editors (MediaStudio and/or VideoStudio), and never had any problem at all with the output files - be it MPEG2's played back with a software player, or VOBs on my DVDs.

Therefore I can only hope for the mxf's being smart-rendered by Vegas in a more smart fashion that the m2t's are now. And since I'm going to intercut my V1E stuff with the EX1 - I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a truly "smart" no-recompression capabilities of my favourite NLE:)

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Alister Chapman

I was told that FCP and Vegas (and other NLE's) re create the full GOP sequence around edit points by creating empty zero length I,B and P frames so that the GOP still has the correct number of frames. Thats how they manage to have render free cuts only edits and sequences where only transitions and effects are re-encoded.

That makes sense to me. In my earlier post, I was writing what came out of the FCP XDCAM white paper PDF file. That would explain the minor re-compression they speak of. Having to re-encode where effects are applied makes a good case for getting the look in camera if at all possible.

Just goes to show that where there's a will, there's a way.

-gb-

[Bob Grant]

Originally Posted by Piotr Wozniacki

I wouldn't leave it to luck, Bob. Before I started using Vegas, for a couple of years I smartrendered SD MPG2 files with Ulead editors (MediaStudio and/or VideoStudio), and never had any problem at all with the output files - be it MPEG2's played back with a software player, or VOBs on my DVDs.

Therefore I can only hope for the mxf's being smart-rendered by Vegas in a more smart fashion that the m2t's are now. And since I'm going to intercut my V1E stuff with the EX1 - I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a truly "smart" no-recompression capabilities of my favourite NLE:)

This is getting way outside any discussion of the the EX1, probably belongs in a Vegas forum.

But seeing as how you raised the point.
Firstly when I've dug into just how good any mpeg-2 smart rendering is there's always someone who finds the gottcha in what comes out the end. Womble is oftenly touted as being very good for DVD mpeg-2 and then someone says it's fine for 98% of the DVD players, on some specific players they get a problem with some cuts.
My understanding is given the nature of mpeg-2 it's impossible to build a system that is 100% bulletproof to the extent of not having to produce some difference between the structure of the input stream compared to the output stream, especially when we're dealing with a long GOP. If the spec says a 15 frame GOP how can one cut out frames and still maintain every GOP as 15 frames. Maybe as has been suggested by inserting dummy frames but will everything cope with these dummy frames. Even Hollywood authored DVDs have issues, it really is a jungle.

Certainly, you mightn't have had a problem with what ULead did, that doesn't mean it's 100% compliant because as we know even things that are 100% compliant will not play on some DVD players.

Now in your specific case, as I understand it the mpeg-2 stream recorded by XDCAM is quite different in some ways to HDV, the audio being one thing of note. So I have no concept of how one could intercut the footage, smart render it and guarantee that anything will play it seemlessly.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Bob Grant

This is getting way outside any discussion of the the EX1, probably belongs in a Vegas forum.

Certainly - my apologies to those not interested in my digressions.

Originally Posted by Bob Grant

Now in your specific case, as I understand it the mpeg-2 stream recorded by XDCAM is quite different in some ways to HDV, the audio being one thing of note. So I have no concept of how one could intercut the footage, smart render it and guarantee that anything will play it seemlessly.

My bad - I obviosuly went too far in imagining both V1 m2t's and EX1 mxf's on the same timeline being smart-rendered. So to gracefully conclude this digression of mine, let me just express my hope the mxf's will smart-render fine in Vegas - I guess everybody in this forum/thread shares that :)