Vegas Pro 11 released

Cool! Downloading now! :-)

Wolfgang..nice catch!

The Release Notes do not make it clear if 3D exporting in MVC format is included. There is ony one way to find out and I am downloading it now.

Wolfgang- I believe there is a typo or bug in the render as section.

In the MVC 1920 x 1080 24P with 5.1 audio the rendering options to customize lists only 25.000PAL and 29.97 NTSC. Shouldn't there be a 24.000 FPS listed?

BTW- my 8800GT video card is not supported The only card I can find that may work on my motherboard is an ATI Radeon HD5750. I may order one of these to test out as it may be quite awhile before I have a new computer here.

Although your comment is pretty general, weren't you questioning if there is a render as format that will generate a file that can be uploaded to the TD-10 for display? If so, I'm afraid that is not included in the MVC templates. The one I mentioned above may work but I believe it is a typo in the custom configurations. I haven't tested it yet. I'm working on the 3DBD burn process as that has changed a bit.

I'm gonna keep following you guys! Thanks,
Dan

Very disappointing no menus for 3D Blu-ary. Even worse no export of mvc in m2ts container. The rendering interface is the worse I have ever seen. PowerDirector 10 has my vote at the moment.

Don:

Poor choice of words on my part. What I was trying to ask is if either VP11 or DVDA can create 3D Blu Ray disks as PD10 can. It seems the answer is no.

I agree. The rendering interface is a mess, a step down from VP10E. I was hoping for the ability to create 3D Blu Ray menus and disks as PD10 can. Doesn't look like it.

You also can't create a 3D image and burn in one step.

Unless I find something exciting in VP11 or something that really disappoints in PD10, I am going to devote my time to learning more about PD10 and save on the cost of upgrading to VP11.

Sometimes the best gifts come in the smallest and least expensive packages.

Happy to report that the video output to BD-R rendered and buirned OK with no trouble. I had this awful sick feeling that they would screw things up with the sound in DD5.1 like they did with Vegas Platinum v 11. What worked in V10 on Platinum, got broke in V11. Fortunately that did not happen in Vegas Pro.

The price of the upgrade is lower than prior upgrades. Must have been that they didn't have an upgrade to DVDA.

BD with menus- Interesting that in the Burn Disk sub menu there are two new selections that are grayed out. "BluRay Disc with Menus and DVD with menus" I guess this is soon to come in a subsequent Update. They probably didn't have enough time to get it working for the initial release.


The biggest part of the upgrade for me was to have realtime timeline playback. As it stands, it appears that I will need to upgrade my hardware in order to achieve that. That will help with both PD10 and Vegas 11. I have begun the process of doing that today.

Wolfgang- I don't plan on getting that card now. Change of plans as I located a new CPU basic system this afternoon that will be a good starting point for a new upgradable box. It uses an LG1366 socket x58 board from ASUS. It has plenty of room to grow. I saved about 30% buying this demo package compared to me building from parts. Many thanks to djamesb for his answers to my questions which made me feel more at ease going with this.

Vegas 11: looks like the Quadro 5000 is supported (shown in settings as active: no change in performance when turned off), however CPU utilization is higher and it runs slower than 10e). In 11, anaglyph doesn't render properly (shows a single image; muted colors). When dragging a clip with an in/out point into the timeline, does not appear to be a way to drop it in without messing up the prior clip (all items in all tracks jump to incorrect locations). MVC in 2D runs in real-time. Side-by-side 3D and anaglyph are just 2D blits/renders, so it does not appear to be a graphics driver issue. No crashes in these brief tests.

Anyone getting real-time stereo 3D performance?

I'm using 12 2.93GHz cores, Westmere Xeons (hyperthreading enabled- 24 cores), 24GB RAM, OWC Mercury SSD drives (very fast). Tried changing the number of threads to 1, 2, 4, 12- no difference (same with preview RAM 0-2000MB). Installed latest NVIDIA drivers- no change. All the UI element render in real-time- just the video runs very slow.

As a beta tester, did you report to Sony that 11 runs slower than 10e? (and that CUDA support runs slower than software?).

What a difference 24 hours makes!

I'm really excited to start editing like greased lightning now!

The new computer is working great with Vegas Pro 11. I just got my secondary monitor up and running on the new graphics card. Took a bit of work to figureout all the AMD language but finally figured out the right combination and up popped the 3D image on the Vizio. I loaded a bunch of clips for a 30 minute timeline and it played at full resolution for about 10 minutes. ( I just stopped the test because it was not slowing down) I set the main preview screen for Left only and the secondary monitor for 1080 x 1920 and it played out at 29.97, never missing a beat. There was no delay between clips either with butt cut edits. Sound was in 5.1. I then set several clips for 5 second dissolves to give the 2 simultaneous streams a test. It played the first one OK but a second dissolve caused the video to slow to 20-25 fps. I'll need to do some more testing to determine if this was the single hard drive needing to be upgraded to a Raid0 twin like in my other computer or if this is too slow a GPU.

Anyway the image on the Vizio was spectacular! I will do some gamma adjustment to tweak the color later as the only flaw I could see was a bit contrasty on color depth.

All in all the video quality was equal to what I get from burning to a BD-R and playback in a BD player. Can't complain about that!

Now for the complaint:

I checked the GPU availability on the Radeon HD6850 video card with Vegas and it says "no GPU available" Why is that? The card is supposed to be supported. I checked the system and it lists the GPU as functioning and I can actually modify the clock speed and adjust over clocking on the GPU.

I was able to get real-time playback working by starting a new project and using 5.1 24-bit audio, 1920x1080@60i, stereo side by side full, 32-bit float color, then dragging clips straight into the timeline. Simple crossfades run in real-time with Preview Half, sometimes Preview Full. Setting 'Dynamic RAM Preview' to zero helps remove stutter (this is a bug- they should be decoding frames in advance so that when transitions come up, the queue is drained so more cycles can be used to do the blend (the next clip should already be decoded and buffered). Changing the number of rendering threads to 1 did not slow down preview (perhaps controls final rendering). During preview, Vegas has 470-485(!) threads running, but CPU utilization is only 15% (design issue): all this horsepower not being used... Setting the RAM buffer higher makes the stutter worse- another indicator there's a design issue). Adding clips from the trimmer sometimes ran slower (bizarre behavior). Sometimes the preview windows would flash black frames (had to restart).

Starting a new project with Stereo 3D off, adding clips, then turning on stereo 3D on ran very slowly: 1-3fps (issue that I encountered in first tests). This should be entered as a bug.

Leaving the Quadro 5000 enabled (might have) ran slightly faster in this scenario (but nothing like GPU accel in PPro CS5.x or vReveal: real-time with no dropped frames and many effects enabled).

MVC output still limited to 25Mbps- fine for a consumer app however a pro app should support the full standard: ~38Mbps.

John, couple issues with your work flow-

1. Shutting 3D off to add clips is not a good way to do a 3D project because you will be setting up your timeline as a non-3D and when you put a 3D clip into that the clip will show up as left and right video clips one above the other. While this can be done, not following proper 3D edit protocol makes life awkward. Therefore, what I do to get good realtime playback is this:

2. I set my preview screen in Vegas to "preview mode- Full. Then I get playback on the 3D monitor in full 1080x1920 29.97 playing clips butt edited, no effects. As I add 3D video layers requiring multiple clips and video timelines that slows down. (Maybe an even faster video card would help this but for now, the single MVC timeline plays in realtime with my cheap slower video card. The preview window in the Vegas desktop is automatically sized and is best set to Left eye only but it's quality mode is the same at "Preview-Full" Bottom line- not following protocol for editing shouldn't be considered a bug when it doesn't work, rather just someone not following recommended procedure. Simply put- when starting a new project, you FIRST set the timeline parameters to stereo: off or on to some preview mode, then you add your clips.

While it may seem that using "Best- Full" or "Best auto" would produce the best quality, I do not see any difference on the 3D monitor between Preview- Full and Best -full. In fact the setting Best auto looks far worse than Preview- Full. Even the numbers show this as a much lower resolution.

IMO- it's not the resolution or the color depth or the frame rate by itself that matters. What matters to me is the synergistic combination of the three parameters balanced for overall quality. Using Preview Full with my Vegas window set to Left only results in the best overall quality at realtime speed.

In a perfect world with the fastest hardware it may be nice to run the preview screens at full quality Best full but if that doesn't result in a better visual, then the cost of the super hardware to achieve realtime playback isn't worth it. If I upgrade to a new faster video card now, it will be so I can use Preview Full mode to see several timelines in real time speed, not to switch to Best- Full which doesn't seem to get a better image.

fyi guys, like I said I don't know jack about editing, but what I do know is that these programs need power. I got the 3d full screen (Video Preview on External Monitor)/active shutter to play. It does stutter for about 10 seconds then catches up, but while doing so ran my 980X running at 4.00ghz - 50% processing power, and continued to use about 45%.

There is a fair amount of fiddling around moving the primary screen and secondary screen around and Alt/Shft/4 on/off, but it does work pretty nice.

Tomorrow I'll load a program to see what my gpu is doing, and maybe learn how to edit some day...

Dan- what I seeing now with the latest driver installed is that I now have the GPU for rendering. The video preview from timeline playback is what we have had trouble with in video editing of the MVC clips for 3D. The settings I found stated above now play the timeline of single butt edited clips ( that's editing lingo for clips put on the timeline in a contiguous manner with no overlap.) without any stuttering at full 29.97 frame rate at full 1080 x 1920 resolution. I agree it requires a lot of power but there is a threshold and once you reach that, adding more power doesn't do much more in the platback quality until you add to the editing. Meaning now adding the need to play back two or more streams of 3D video simultaneously due to dissolves, picture in picture and titles and other graphics. Now increasing the frame throughput as well as the CPU power is required. On my new system, I think I have just made the threshold but your 980x and additional ram plus fatter video GPU power will put you well into the multiple timeline playback capability. I'll get there but taking it one step at a time.

PS- editing is not about this hardware or the software. It is about story telling. If you can tell a good story, you already know how to edit. You just need to learn how to get the software to cooperate.

Tested a single PIP in 3D. After setting it up, ran about 1fps. Tested RAM preview & thread settings- no change. Saved the test, restarted the app, then it ran in real-time (though the PIP element was very low resolution). Using Preview Half. CPU utilization was 28% (12x2.93GHz Xeon), GPU (Quadro 5000) 41%. Sometimes GPU utilization is ~7% (same clip segment with PIP) and frame rate drops way down (to ~1-3fps). Looks like a thread/GPU synchronization issue (stall condition).

[EDIT: turning off the GPU did not affect performance (used about the same amount of CPU: 28%). Same behavior- sometime real-time, sometimes stalled]

John- I may be wrong on this but I believe there is no way in Vegas to turn off the GPU for preview display. The selector to check GPU or CPU is for rendering only. That you can select. Maybe your Quadro display has a switch to shut down the GPU and use the card in legacy VGA mode but why would one do that? Just guessing as none of my video cards offer that choice. If you were turning on and off the Vegas GPU selection and verifying with preview only, that is probably the reason why you didn't see any difference.

Don- you can enable/disable GPU processing under Preferences/Video/GPU Acceleration of Video Processing. I checked for GPU activity using GPU Meter (Win7 desktop widget/gadget): see percentages in prior post.

Just to followup, for whatever reason, using the 2nd monitor in 3d quit so I tried installing the beta 285.38. At least now I get a black screen that says "esc to exit" and some green nvidia verbiage at the lower right. Posting in Nvidia forum and will talk to Sony tech over the next couple days. Part of cutting edge.

I ran a test of that switch ( using the new HD6850 video card ), John, and saw no difference in preview speed of timeline playback. I tested several settings. Then, I shut the GPU setting to off and the playback was the same. ( Reminder- I do get full 29.97 fps playing single video timeline butt edited clips.) Note- Yes I did restart Vegas as warned between settings and tests.

By contrast, my older computer using the nvidia 8800GT, did not offer an adjustment and the only option is "OFF"

Back to the new computer with HD6850 video card: I also did a render test of a 10 second clip and the render speed to 1080x1920 24P iso file took 30 seconds to complete with the GPU switched to OFF.
Here's the strange part- The render speed with it switched on was 55 seconds.
In other words, the GPU switched on slows down the render speed of a single clip to iso file. Maybe if the process is more complex such as clips with transitions and color correction, slomo etc the GPU would be faster but I'll need to run that test first. For now, it seems that just having the proper video card gets me what I was after, which was realtime playback of 3D regardless of the Vegas switch. My basic render time ratios were 10:1 for 3D rendering of a timeline and now with the new computer it seems to be 3:1 or 3 times faster. If I select GPU on then it slows down to 5:1.

Note- My tests are with a AMD video card and yours are with nvidia technology. That may be why the difference in test results.

I don't understand your statement I put in Bold. Did you mean you can disable only GPU cuda cores in the nvidia card but not the video card's processor?
In the AMD card, I believe there is a setting to shut down the card's GPU but this puts you in basic VGA mode with complete change in resolution as well. It's what operates the monitor before the graphics drivers are loaded.


I understand and knew about the render settings.