switching from Vegas 7 to SE

[tmon]

Paul,

I look at this thread as a "REAL WORLD" challenge to NewTek's newest offspring (not yet born to the retail market)....excellent thread, though no one has provided comprehensive answers yet. Maybe if everyone chimes in, we can all chip away and discover an answer. I have zilcho experience with HD editing, and have little to contribute, however....

Earlier, you state:

OK, here's what I have:
3.4 Ghz dual core processor
4 GB DDR2 memory
8 port SATA Raid controler
7 500 GB internal HDs
NVidia Quadro Video Card
ASUS P5LD2-delux motherboard

You have an 8-port SATA RAID controller and (7) 500GB internal HD's. Are those 7 drives RAID-striped and controlled by the SATA RAID controller? What RAID-level do you have them striped with? I'm just asking because that would also affect your playback experience with any NLE that you might be using....e.g. Standard Def video needs about 22-23MB/s sustained read per stream of video, 720p or 1080i or 1080p much more...maybe you know this already...this is a piece of the equation that all SpeedEdit users will have to address, particularly with regards to HD editing.........

See what a big help I am?

 

[rbartlett]

Mirage and VT-Edit has a good history of working with individual frames in the form of stills held as sequences. So as far as codecs are concerned, this maybe moot until the final print/render is made.

Vegas can be co-erced to generate stills from the earlier work. So again, this is OK.

So whether the stills format (with companion WAV) or the AV format is 8bit YUV or RGB still stands. In a near perfect world we'd be HD resolution and HDR or floating-point for the animators pixels.

So I take it that Vegas has been used or dabbled with because of the fact that it is better at dealing with a bed of audio and sync with that of the video than Mirage?

I'd expect that VT[5] and SE would both slot in nicely here. Any work already edited in Vegas could either be frameserved into the NewTek product (via debugmodes frameserver set into YUV mode presumably), rendered out as stills or uncompressed/barely compressed. With the same PC used throughout one could also consider an AVI workflow using:

1. huffYUV - lossless (ignoring pixel representation changes)
2. SonyYUV - low loss
3. NT25 - low loss

Stills isn't that useful if you've spent anytime sync'ing the work up in Vegas as all these NLEs have different thoughts on what 12,24,25,29.97,30,50,59.97,60 is all about when bringing the stills back in again.

Another consideration for the workflow will be in how the 12fps work is frame rate adapted into the final work. Mirage, Vegas and NewTek all have code in their solutions to deal with this. Whoever is doing the film transfer might also have an opinion/solution to air on this subject.

I wouldn't get too hung up on industry standard techniques for transferring works between facilities. They are usually meeting the lowest common denominator at best.

So given that the sound track tells the story and the hard labor is getting the imagery to compliment and enhance this. The practical side to all this is that one should probably only use the tools that make this activity as painless as possible. So you know what needs to be done next, what is left to do overall and to be sure that it'll play through when you want it to (given the hardware investment).

Now I'd have thought you'd avoid worrying about 1080p or 720p considerations until the final print is ready to run-out. This might also encourage you to work at 2K as Mirage and Vegas support this (Mirage goes beyond). However the speed of the system may moderate these good intentions.

I'm actually quite pleased for Paul that folks are not coming back with hard and fast answers. aka Their way.

The system seems adequate for HD, but for low compression HD or film work perhaps it is wise to have the best available that can be had for mortal prices. For this a quad-core single-chip Intel Core2 1066FSB-4MB-cache or Xeon 1333FSB solution might be worth some amount of consideration.

With NLEs there is always the "best-for" and "favorite" argument to consider. That usually fits into the hierarchy of needs even before the file formats are firmed up.

Paul's "POST PRODUCTION" needs are not too different to that of the modern LW animator.
A similar question on workflow for HD might be placed into that forum too I suppose? (one probably shouldn't encourage cross-forum-posting)

 

[paulfierlinger]

Hmm..it just occurred to me if I would highlight all the QT clips in my Vegas timeline, including the overlapping ones, and saved them to the clipboard and then opened SE; could I simply paste the clips into a SE timeline? Is this technical naiveté speaking on my part or is it not that absurd that this would work? After all, there are no proprietary files involved here -- just plain ol' QT files.

Is there anyone here who has both Vegas 7 and SE willing to try this out for me? Of course I could wait untill next week to try this out myself when SE appears at my door.

 

[lwaddict]

Oh man, if life were only that easy.

I say, try it on the Toaster and see what happens...somebody!

But I'm thinkin' this won't work.
Here's why...
Vegas isn't using the clips directly the way VT and SE do/will...
it creates some sort of temp file for the clips as you pull them into the timeline. Most of which stick around even after you've deleted something from the timeline...
so I'm not sure if what you'd be cutting and pasting is actually what you'd think it is.

But still...
somebody do it!
I'm not near my Toaster or I'd do it.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Oh man, if life were only that easy.

Yeah, you're right. I didn't think of that. The clips are just place holders and won't even appear on a clipboard. Oh well, I'm still looking forward to working with SE based on all I've heard about it.

 

[Seattle-HotShot]

Yeah, that would sure save some problems and time now wouldn't it?

I had a similar thought a couple of days ago. When I'm using my VT, sometimes I'll open 2 or 3 TEd windows, and copy / paste clips between them. One example is when I'm doing my first rough cut, if I see a good blooper I'll just drop it into a new project, etc. Now I wonder if there will be a way to open SE twice or to open 2 projects at the same time?

Otherwise its back to my Premiere 6 work flow, save a project 2 or 3 times, then make different edits in each version. Urg!

I had a dream one night, I was able to open AE and Premiere INSIDE the VT Desktop. Man was that sweet! I was all dragging clips from one to the other, no rendering, they were on the switcher... then I woke up... bummer

 

[SBowie]

Hi Steve, so you don't have any encouragement either about an easy, painless transfer, ey? Well then for that I'll be on your doorstep via telephone day and night until I learn everything and get my edits done all over again. I tell you, I should be an expert after that on comparing the ease and speed of the two NLEs. No interviews before I'm done (to be on the safe side).

Back again (though I'd much rather be in San Antonio today.)

Re: AAF - although at one time this looked like it might be "The Answer", the last time I checked it had turned into yet another one of those disappointing things where everybody had their own subtle flavour and it was nothing like the satisfying inter-program transfer mechanism promised once you stray outside the ranks of one developer's products. I remember a chat I had with a programmer who had done the AAF implementation for one of the major supporters - it was not encouraging.

Whether you are coming out of Mirage as either 720 or 1080 (I'm a 720 fan, myself.) A lossless variant of either Quicktime or AVI should serve nicely.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Whether you are coming out of Mirage as either 720 or 1080 (I'm a 720 fan, myself.) A lossless variant of either Quicktime or AVI should serve nicely.

How can one tell what's a lossless variant of QT? Is the Animation codec, which I've been using, lossless?

 

[Seattle-HotShot]

From what I've heard, the Animation codec is lossless, and I believe it also preserves the Alpha. See if we can get Harlan to comment on this?

 

[paulfierlinger]

From what I've heard, the Animation codec is lossless, and I believe it also preserves the Alpha. See if we can get Harlan to comment on this?

I can confirm that it preserves an Alpha channel since I use this all the time in Vegas. I like to use the Simple Text Tool in Mirage to create titles and import these as Targas to place over image clips in Vegas.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Real-time up & down conversion

Does "Real-time up & down conversion" mean that I can import into SE all my clips as 1080p QTs, but if at a certain point of complexity of my edits these clips won't play in real-time anymore I will be able to simply convert them down to any size that will become real-time playback again?

If this is the case, what happens here? Will I have to wait for the clips to be rendered downward or does this happen virtually and will thus be reflected only as a virtual downsizing in the preview window, leaving the original clips untouched and the down conversion happens at the speed of an OK click?

 

[kleima]

It means that if your project size is 1080 and you put an SD clip on the timeline, the SD clip is uprezed to 1080 in real time. It also means that if your project size is 480 or 720 and you put a 1080 clip on the timeline, the 1080 clip is downrezed in real time.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Hmm.. I just found out that Vegas does that too. And I've been downsizing everything in Mirage without having to do that... How does this affect the playback power? Is the NLE playing back the full size and just displaying a smaller rez or by displaying a smaller rez does the software need less CPU power to playback in real-time? Sorry if I am asking naive questions but being self-taught I obviously have some gaps in my understanding of how NLEs work and I appreciate these forums as a source of education.

 

[SBowie]

... How does this affect the playback power? Is the NLE playing back the full size and just displaying a smaller rez or by displaying a smaller rez does the software need less CPU power to playback in real-time?

It takes noticeably more system resources to playback a project comprised of 1080 clips than if they are 720. But you *can* work quite flexibly - you could go with either 1080 or 720 right through, and still output as SH, 720 or 1080 (or PAL for that matter.) Obviously 720p source files will soften a smidgen going up to 1080, but we've discussed that before.

 

[paulfierlinger]

It takes noticeably more system resources to playback a project comprised of 1080 clips than if they are 720.

Thanks Steve. This is what I need to know. I don't believe my system can pull it off at full size.

Obviously 720p source files will soften a smidgen going up to 1080, but we've discussed that before.

Yes, this is not so much my concern anymore. I thought I'd be saving myself some time if I wouldn't have to convert every scene when exported out of Mirage.

 

[kleima]

I don't believe Vegas plays it all back in realtime at full res. That is what the realtime means - if you press play after putting the clips on the timeline, then it all plays back in realtime at full project resolution! (Assuming your hardware can handle it.)

 

[paulfierlinger]

I don't believe Vegas plays it all back in realtime at full res. That is what the realtime means - if you press play after putting the clips on the timeline, then it all plays back in realtime at full project resolution! (Assuming your hardware can handle it.)

What I meant is that if I forgot to downsize from 1080 to 720 when exporting from Mirage, Vegas 6 would show just a 720 segment of my 1080 image. Now, after Steve's remark, when I tried to do this in Vegas 7 (since I just got Vegas 7), I found I can export a project as 1080 and it will also automatically resize to 720 (if that is my Vegas project setting; this I believe is a new feature). I've been hoping that SE will play 1080 in real-time on my computer but I don't believe it will if Vegas 7 can't either.

 

[rbartlett]

The two rendering systems are quite different - SE is fresh and new and peels away from the legacy of an app that used to run nicely in Win98 until just recetnly. Vegas preview isn't directly comparable as it doesn't make as much is of your graphics card/ directx.

Not to take too much away from Vegas - I still use it an awful lot.

Now, as for choosing format and what to do with your drawn source. While you can listed to the virtues of SpeedHQ etc. The choice of an animator is different from a videographer heading out to film.

Paul, I'd encourage you to choose either a motion-sequence or still image workflow that suits your needs for both productivity and the retention of your original image quality all the way through to film.

That might be SpeedHQ, SonyYUV, PNG, TGA, uncompressed-AVI or MOV, an Animation MOV, RGB or YUV. You'll know more when you investigate what your transfer house uses for their media currency of choice.

I'd say that LW animators will be going through much of the same thought process.

Have you dabbled with a picture sequence as yet with SE? I'd say you might have a tighter control envelope for the 24p aspects with a picture source. However the main recommendation is for a 4:2:2 (YUV sub sampled) SpeedHQ codec right now.

Do keep your source files in the best format you can though. You and whoever looks after your work in the greater hereafter will certainly value that as will the world. Not trying to be morbid, more greedy really.

 

[Tom Wood]

I don't see any mention of Newtek's RTV format in all this, is it going away in SE?

I animate in LightWave and render out lossless image sequences to be composited in Mirage, then render out an RTV there for use in VT-Edit. I'll probably stick with that to complete the current project in 720p. I actually have to degrade the images in LW with some blur so I'm wondering if HD is all that important to me anyway.

TW

 

[billmi]

Probably not much discussion of rtv because it is not a new feature (relative to what is supported in VT Edit in VT[4]) but yes, Speed Edit reads and writes RTVs.