Vegas Pro 11 released - Page 13

No, I didn't even get to adding any effects to the TD10 MVC clips. It was not able to play through a dissolve of two clips as originals.

Yes you understand correctly that the SSD SATA III PLUS the V8800 was the way to achieve my goal of real time playback of clips 23.976 FPS perfectly even with effects and dissolves. MY only way to test 23.976 fps is to use my TD10's in paired 2D mode. If I had clips from your Z10k in 24p I could run a test to see if it is the frame rate of the MVC that continues to be the bottleneck or just MVC calculations. (HINT)

I feel the next step to improve my system here is to replace my system drive with an SSD too. The reason is when I run the diagnostics utility to track bottlenecks, the one that shows up most often when a hesitation happens now, is the VegasPro v11 access during playback of the timeline. The second bottleneck reported was my AVG antivirus and I shut that down so that the only remaining bottleneck is Vegas Pro access on my C hard drive.

Before I added the V8800 I made the addition of the SSD as a basic data drive for 3D clips and all other media for my projects, including a folder for Vegas temps and veg files. This made my system perform from 8-12 FPS ( on MVC clips ) to 16-18 fps. Adding the V8800 improved that timeline to full 29.97 FPS but only for virgin clips from the TD10.

Wolfgang- Please note- my tests were not done in a scientific manner ( I do know the difference) I did my tests to achieve a goal of performance for the types of projects I plan to do. In other words, when I got success in a test I moved on in the direction that test led me. Because of this it is not valid to draw conclusions from any extrapolations of what I did. I made some observations too that indicate testing I did may not be consistent. A 3D clip that has lots of scene changes will not play as well as a clip with a lockdown shot. Since I believe the combination of hardware I now have is just borderline to achieve playback goal, any additional factors that tax the system can degrade the playback. In otherwords, I don't feel all this cost has put my system in a comfort zone of performance, rather it is just barely able to achieve satisfaction.

BTW- the other interesting observation was the Bottleneck utility showed my i7-950 @ 3.07 Ghz operating at 88% capacity for playback without the GPU and with GPU active the CPU was at 26%. Clearly the GPU was taking the load off my CPU. I think this says there is to be no advantage to upgrading the CPU until my file delivery bottleneck ( for Vegas Pro.exe) is improved. When I was at NAB, I asked an AMD engineer about what I need to do. He said the FirePro will give me what I need but I will find out that the hard drives will not feed the FirePro what it needs. So, I added the SSD for the media but I see now it needs to be added also for the system drive.

When I do add the SSD to the system for the C drive, I plan to use one that supports TRIM and no less than a SATAIII.

Thanks, but I had some issues with the location and format of those files. The files are in an executable that I do not wish to access as that requires yet another application from an unknown source that gives me a malware warning. I need to get you some space on my web server for you to upload files without all the 3rd party interference that I just do not trust. Let me look into it and I'll get back to you. I'm curious about the Z10K 24p files especially. I'm sure you have the same curiosity.

Thanks for posting the test results, Don. In another thread, someone mentions that PowerDVD runs a few services that pull in ads automatically. He's deactivated their ability to communicate through Windows Firewall. I'm looking into that, too, though I don't know if they're a problem when the PDVD isn't being used, or if the network cable is pulled. It's just one more potential issue I'm thinking about after reading your results.

Later today, I'm going to try Wolfgang's clips on my new 3930 system. IIRC, I had some success with them playing smoothly in Vegas 10e a few months ago. The 3930 PC uses all SSDs, but the system drive is SATAII. All the rest are SATAIII.

I'd prefer not to have to deal with the download process, either. Wolfgang, why don't you use Dropbox for files like that. It's much easier and more direct.

Wolfgang- I set you up with upload privileges to the folder you've had access to on my server. I assigned you 500 Mb of space for uploads. If we need more I'll assign more. I've got plenty of space. I will PM you with account info for you to log in with an ftp client. I saw there were still a bunch of files in that folder that are old so I will delete them.

I use Dynamic RAM allocation of about 4Gb of my 12 Gb available to test segments of the timeline. But this has always played at full frame rate even well before my addition of the V8800 graphics card. The way I see it, the Dynamic Ram preview just takes the drive out of the equation and it eliminates the need to calculate the video on the fly but does a prerender and saves that rendered temp file to the RAM disk. The amount of ram reserved for the shift B render controls the length of the timeline that will play. The Open CL graphics card I used before with full frame rate in Ram Preview was the msi brand R6850, an AMD card. IMO, I don't consider the use of the RAM Disk prerender a valid solution, rather it is an alternative to see your editing when your system can't play from the timeline. stopping and having to wait is like editing with Final Cut, slow and annoying!

I see no difference in performance regardless of how much ram I reserve for the ram disk prerender. Here's how it works. If I want to review a section of the timeline I select that segment. I go into the video preview preferences and allocate 4Gb. Then I exit out and hit shiftB and the timeline selection may snap shorter to render the maximum time my reserved memory will allow and it begins to render. When done, I can play that at full frame rate and no disk is in play. If I shorten the allocation to 3Gb then hit shift B the selection will snap to a shorter period approximately 3/4 the length. I've allocated as much as 10Gb for the ram disk but the only thing the longer or shorter amounts result in is the length of time I can preview. Also, the more time I prerender the longer that rendering takes. There is never a change in the fps of the based on the amount of ram allocated. There is never a bump in the fps when a dissolve or PIP or CG comes up either as all that is already prerendered for playback. This preview prerender is lost as soon as I change the allocation or do a shift b again.

I'm not sure how cuda is affected by the allocation of system memory but the open cl on the amd graphics card is unaffected. Dynamic Ram or a Vegas Pro ram disk is only activated with shift B. Then it will prerender the selection on your timeline up to the allocation size of the ram disk you specified. If you specify too much, it can greatly hamper total system performance since windows will then page to the C drive any operations that would normally happen in ram. A good rule of thumb is to set the dynamic ram to a size no bigger than 3/4 of your available ram which is specified to the right of the setting as " available ram" This is how it was explained in my class on Vegas Pro.
FWIW, I normally keep my Dynamic Ram set to 0 until I want to use it and then I estimate how much to allocate based on the length I wish to prerender. Then I do the shift B and review the timeline selection playing it over and over until I am satisfied I see what I like or don't like. Thehn make changes, but once a change is made, I must shift B to be able to see those changes in prerender on the dynamic ram disk.

While I have pretty much been always able to preview an edit in real time with dynamic ram shift B procedure using my older R6850 graphics card open CL activated, my real goal is to not have to use the time consuming prerender. My goal is to be able to just play the timeline and have the graphics card do the work and play anywhere, anytime at full resolution and full frame rate. By my tests and editing work I have done in the last couple days, I have achieved that for the paired clips in 1080 24p x 1920 even for dissolves. It's not quite there yet for TD10 clips in dissolve.

I reserved a web space folder on my server for you to upload a couple of your 1080 24p x 1920 clips as recorded with the Z10k ( MTS or m2ts ) so I could compare with the twin camera clips of the same resolution. You haven't gotten back to me as whether you are having trouble uploading. Did you get your user ID and PW I PM'd you? I was eager to see if there is a difference. I will be leaving again in the morning for another shooting project so at this point there is no rush until next week.

According to the engineers at Sony the dynamic ram has no function until you use the shift B to access it. Confirm, I see no difference in just basic playback regardless of where I set the number of MB reserved. That adjusts the size of the ram disk. Something else must be going on in your system that is affecting the playback speed.

When I say prerender in these posts, I was referring to what happens when you do a shift B for a selection of the timeline. Actually all this is in the help files.

Got to run. If I get time I'll check back in tonight. Out for shooting all day and into the evening.

"And we know that there is an issue with the allocation of dynamic ram preview - if you allocate a significant number, Vegas Pro 11 tends to become less stable on some machines."

I think I understand why that is true. Allocation of large amounts of ram for dynamic preview will cap the upside of ram for parts of a timeline that makes demand on it. When that happens, the windows system will revert to paging operations to the system disk. If the system disk has marginal capacity the system becomes unstable and could halt. A response will be "Vegas is not responding". I'm sure you have seen that before. Last summer I did some experiments that could consistently trigger a non responsive system based on limited ram and limited system disk capacity. I did this because so many were reporting instability with Vegas when using marginal system hardware. I tend to design my computers with a bit of engineering overkill by some standards so instability on that limitation is rare for me. When I would cap my 12 gigs of ram to only 2.5 available, I too would see frequent non responsive Vegas on playback and rendering. When I reduced available c drive free capacity to less than 150 gb I would get frequent instability.

I will update to the new build next week and see what surprises are there.

It's been a long day of family vacation style shooting. Two kids (age in their 30's) and two grand kids (ages 6 months and 3 yrs) wore us out. My wife asked me at 5pm if I got any good video. I said from a production perspective, no. She said no, I mean from a family perspective. I said I carried three cameras, left one in the car, and shot only with one all day, none of it is worth editing. So I suppose we can save it as raw footage. The kids were eager to return to the park this evening but the grand kids were cranky and grandpa, me, was spent. I fell asleep at 6 pm and just woke up. besides, I already shot and edited these performances so I didn't need any production quality shooting.

Glad your 3 camera shoot went well. Somedays I miss the excitement of broadcast TV field production with my 4 camera production van, then again, I'm glad to be away from the client demands and impossible schedules and rushing to do at the last minute. For the family, it's about them and the "pictures" are just extra. So, with that said, today was a big success. The 3 year old was in so much joy being his first time at Disney. Tomorrow will be bigger crowds and the heat will be a steamy 95 degrees F so I will take just the TD10 on a belt case and shoot mostly 3D stills with the 3D1.

Hey, Don. I laughed today when my mom told me what a great photographer I am. I told her your story from last year - where everyone was impressed with the great shots you took at a family get together, but you didn't bother to tell them that you took 50 more that you had to throw away. I have a lot of great shots, but zillions more that are unusable for one reason or another. Thank God we're not using film, where every such "mistake" costs money. And thank God for not having to worry about deadlines.

I'm back to using Vegas as my everyday editor again. The trial of Edius 3D ended yesterday and Edius 6.5 (with 3D) won't be out until "the second half of 2012." Yikes! I've loaded all these editors onto my new system over the last couple of weeks, and I'm back to my old workflow. The Edius trial is over. I'm still having problems with the Cineform/Premier workflow, which was always flaky with my JVC converted files. But the Cineform/Vegas 11 workflow works just fine, although it's more time consuming because of having to use the large intermediate files.

One issue I'm having is that the Vegas preview is not accurate in terms of color and contrast. Clips in the preview window look washed out, as if the system is using the wrong HDMI setting. It makes color/contrast correction all but impossible. Any thoughts on why that might be? Everything else in the system looks fine.

Joe-
I agree about the color quality on the Vegas preview window, at least it is so on my computer monitor but then I don't have that monitor calibrated so never gave it much thought. However, on my secondary monitor, the vizio, I do have calibrated and the color is quite accurate. Did you get the z10k yet? I don't recall.

Wolfgang,

That seems to have fixed the problem. I had a signal mismatch, but I didn't know where to change it. Mine was the other way around, though. That is, I wasn't set up for RGB on the monitor, but I was in Vegas.

Don,

I haven't received the Panasonic Z10000 yet. I should get it in the next couple of weeks. It's a long story, which I'll share later.

Meanwhile, I've gotten some incredible footage over the last 3 weeks or so. Although the JVC has its weaknesses, detail and contrast are not among them. I just hope I'm not disappointed in the Panasonic's level of detail. I'm virtually certain it's going to handle color better, especially red, and if it can approach the JVC in terms of detail resolution, I'm going to be very happy.

Being a 3 chip design the edge definition of the colors ( chroma ) should be much sharper leading to even better detail. The JVC's claim to fame, IMO, is it's color matrix and that you will probably be required to experiment with in the Panasonic. The good news is that you can as it has some user defined presets for just that purpose.

Its good to be home again. I reviewed my video on the Hotel rooms 46" LG monitor and every one watching was stunned by the quality I was getting with the TD10. My son-in-law has an older Canon with hard drive storage. Comparing, the TD10 was way better in color saturation. The difference is that the Canon doesn't have an x.v. color setting which the Sony does. If I turn off the X.V. Color, then the two are about equal.

I'm still having trouble with my Lilliput 7" monitor I use for remote control of the TD10. I could not get it to connect when in the crowds. I realized later that evening I had a setting wrong, again... I need to use it more often so the setup is embedded in my brain. This is the third time this system has failed me in the field. So, I ended up working the camera using the Hoodman and looking up at the TD10 5 ft over my head. By the end of the 20 minute performance my neck was so sore. The good news is the video is great! Didn't do much with the 3D1 this weekend. Maybe 20 minutes of 3D video and a dozen stills. Didn't use the NEX 5n at all.

The TD10 has about 4 hours of video to edit. I'm now trying to decide whether I should suffer through editing with the current setup of go ahead and buy a 250 Gb SSD SATA III for a system drive, with the hope to achieve the two TD 10 clips with dissolve in real time preview. Currently the only bottleneck remaining is the system drive that is a 3 Gb/sec 7200 RPM.

Now have 5 big projects to edit. 3 of them are TD10 MVC clips and two are mostly 24p clips which is no problem.

Thanks for the update on the Z10k, Joe.

Don you don't have problems with rendering 1 hour long project (TD10 mts files) to Sony MVC 1920x24p format?
My computer always freeze at different part of the project.
And i'm just come back from France with a lot of footage!
thx

I keep having to stop myself from running down to a local Best Buy to pick up an open box TD10 for $500. It's been there for months and I've seen it drop from $1,100 to $1,000 to $900 to $750 and now to $500. I really, really don't need it, but it's so cheap I'm thinking about picking it up just to play with this summer, so I can do some A/B comparisons with the JVC. Next year, I could donate it to a local high school media program run by a friend. They're getting into 3D video and need a good camera. If I ever do decide to buy it, though, it'll probably be gone.

relaxman- I don't have any of the instability problems many do in these forums. The longest project I have rendered was a Top Bottom full in 1080 24p x 1920. For direct burn in Vegas I have done a 100 minute project rendering. I don't recall either of my computers aborting a rendering. One of them is a Vista 64 bit and the other is a Win 7 Professional 64 bit.


Suggestions that have helped others-
Be sure you reduce your dynamic ram to zero before rendering.
Be sure you have lots of free hard drive space on your system drive for temp files to be generated.
Shut down your antivirus software and pull the plug on your internet cable. Make sure you have nothing else running in the background ( Use task manager to look for stuff running that you don't need for rendering)
Expand your timeline to see if there is a gap in places where it stops rendering. I don't think this should matter but in one case the problem was reported fixed when a clip of generated black was inserted to fill the void.






Joe- as long as it wasn't dropped on floor its probably a great deal. But you be careful, if you do buy it you may fall in love with the screen. For $500 I would buy it just to have a backup. There are none in that price point around here.

Interesting that you guys don't have rendering problems.
We also have on another new pc, fresh win7 and vegas11 latest install.
Just copy 1 hour TD10 MTS files to the timeline with 1 sec dissolve between each. So no gap, no third party fx, or anything.
If some gap cause the problem, then the rendering should stop always at the same part of the timeline. But it's not.
Ram preview was set to 100MB, i don't think this is problem, because i have 8GB and total mem usage was only 4GB.
We have a lot of space on C and temp drives.

"the longest project I have rendered was a Top Bottom full in 1080 24p x 1920."

Yes, but our problem is with MVC rendering. Nobody render to MVC? Wolfgang?


"Shut down your antivirus software"

Really this can produce this error?

One solution was in the past to separate all the footage to L/R with the Sony app, and import to Vegas pair to 3D, etc. But this is a lot of work now:
i have around 1000 files.. And don't want to recompress the right side.
But why, when Vegas11 can handle TD10 files natively?

thx