switching from Vegas 7 to SE

[paulfierlinger]

So since it is an avi, your film house might be able to use it, but since it is a proprietary flavor they might not. So have them test it.

That seems like something I could do, starting locally. Thanks.

 

[ScorpioProd]

Well, but note that just like any QT codec or AVI codec, in order to play SpeedHQ, one needs to have that codec on one's system.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Well, but note that just like any QT codec or AVI codec, in order to play SpeedHQ, one needs to have that codec on one's system.

I see; of course. I was caught in a moment of poor attention.

 

[paulfierlinger]

All these threads on the SpeedHQ codec and I still don't have a clear mind about what I should do for the best result. If I were to edit everything as a SpeedHQ 720p and when done converted that to an "uncompressed" AVI, such as a Main Concept MPEG-2, how do you think the result of that would compare to just sticking to QT-Animation 720p in SpeedEDIT all the way to the completion house? Can anyone make an educated guess?

 

[ScorpioProd]

Well, I would caution that if you need uncompressed as your final output, your maximum quality would be to keep it uncompressed for your entire path.

For things like CGI, everything tends to be "crisper" and more saturated than the more organic "normal" video, so CGI would benefit from uncompressed more than normal video would. CGI simply won't compress as well as normal video.

SpeedHQ is a great codec, but it's important to understand it's not necessarily best for everything.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Well, I would caution that if you need uncompressed as your final output, your maximum quality would be to keep it uncompressed for your entire path.

OK, I'm going to hold onto this plan, therefore I will render every clip out of Mirage twice, once as a 720p (or even smaller in the 16:9 format) just anything to edit the film with in SE, and the second render should be 1080p, uncompressed for a switch when the entire film is ready for transfer. So one last question please; what will be my best choice for rendering out of Mirage the uncompressed files? Mirage right now gives me a choice of:
Uncompressed UVYY, YUY2, BGR24, BGR32, and NewTek inc. Version 0.0, whatever that is. But after installing SE into that same machine will I get more choices and if that is the case, which one do you recommend most for my particular case (transfer to 35 mm film).

 

[Lightwolf]

So one last question please; what will be my best choice for rendering out of Mirage the uncompressed files? Mirage right now gives me a choice of:
Uncompressed UVYY, YUY2, BGR24, BGR32, and NewTek inc. Version 0.0, whatever that is. But after installing SE into that same machine will I get more choices and if that is the case, which one do you recommend most for my particular case (transfer to 35 mm film).

Chiming in now...

If your final output will be 32bit, pick BGR24 (which is 8bit for red, green and blue, no alpha - unlike BGR32). However, it will also result in large files 3 bytes per pixel per frame.
At 1920x1080 that is roughly 2 million pixels, 3 bytes each -> roughly 6MB per frame. At 24fps that will be a throughput of 144MB/s to play back, add another 25-50% for safety.
At 720p it will be less than half of that (just short of a million pixels).

Most YUV codecs use less storage (2 bytes instead of 3 per pixel), but they also share one chroma value between two adjacent pixels. (so, you get the full luminance resolution, but only half the colour/chroma resolution). For video this is fine, since historically video uses a similar scheme. For printing to film this isn't sufficient (then again, I'm a quality freak) though, and in the case of CG I'd go the full RGB route mentioned above.

Cheers,
Mike

 

[paulfierlinger]

blessed are the sheep, for they shall inherit the grass

Thanks for chiming in. Based on what you say I made these tests with a 1080p clip consisting of 280 frames to be played a 24 fps.
Using BGR.24 1080p the size is 1.64 GB (your math seems to be correct).
using BGR.24 720p the size is 749 MB
using QT.mov-Animation Best quality for 1080p the size is 357 MB
using QT.mov-Animation Best Quality for 720p the size comes to 181 MB

The only one of these clips in Vegas that can play at 24 fps real time is the QT 720p but the BGR.24 720 comes close; about 20 fps.

When I placed all four clips next to each other on the Vegas timeline and clicked back and forth between them, observed on a 24 inch plasma acer screen, I saw absolutely no difference in line quality or color. It was as if I kept clicking on the same clip.

But to backup any QT clip with a 1080p BGR.24 clip isn't anything I my HDs can't handle. An 80 minute film has roughly 115,200 frames. Multipled by 6 MB should come to about 700 GB. I can fit that on one or two external drives and carry them into a completion house. They seem to want films in 20 minute reels so I can even put 4 reels onto 2 drives. The soundtracks would be on a seperate drive.

Do I have this right now and leave you kind people alone?

 

[Tom Wood]

blessed are the sheep, for they shall inherit the grass

Completely off-topic (sorry Paul) but this is a trailer to a low-budget horror movie coming soon, made by Jonathan King who is a filmmaker who posts over at Wordplayer from time to time:

BLACK SHEEP

The violence of the lambs...

 

[Lightwolf]

Do I have this right now and leave you kind people alone?

You've got it allright.
I forgot, you are using QT Animation at 100%, which afaik is RGB as well (and lossless at 100% to boot). It should do well with more graphical imagery too, and seems a good choice.
The only downside is, as soon as you use keyframes, scrubbing can be slow (the longer the space between the keyframes, the longer it takes to scrub to a certain frame, since all frames from the last keyframe to the currently viewed frame need to be decompressed).

Cheers,
Mike

 

[paulfierlinger]

The only downside is, as soon as you use keyframes, scrubbing can be slow (the longer the space between the keyframes, the longer it takes to scrub to a certain frame, since all frames from the last keyframe to the currently viewed frame need to be decompressed).

Is this why some scenes with camera moves tend to slow down in Vegas? And when I convert the QT movies to AVI to make a WIP DVD for the producer, there is no slow down in any of the scenes. Since this is most likely the case this should explain why I will be better off using SpeedHQ for editing. I think I am done with this topic and ready to get working with SE soon. Once again I thank all who patiently helped me figure this out and I'll let you get back to the black sheep of New Zealand.

 

[paulfierlinger]

Converting files in SE

A new but related question: I realized that there might be no need for me to render each clip coming out of Mirage two separate ways. Wouldn't it be possible for me to render out just the uncompressed 1080p clip and then when loading it into SE, convert it to a smaller sized SpeedHQ without destroying the original clip? Or at least could I not make a copy of the original one and downsize the copy within SE?

 

[Lightwolf]

I assume you can just load the 1080p it into a 720p project and render that out to a SpeedHQ file.
Cheers,
Mike

 

[paulfierlinger]

Wonderful. Life is too simple.

 

[cholo]

You can render out without ever touching the timeline. Just right click on he add media window on the clip you want and select render/convert (I can't remember exactly what it says, just off the top of my head.) Alternatively, you can just use the quicktime 1080 files directly in your timeline even if it doesn't give you realtime playback by enabling the background render for all HD clips added, but you'll have to wait for rendering.

 

[paulfierlinger]

That sounds OK too, but don't you think that I should have all my clips stored uniformly as BGR.24 1080p ones and resize each in SE with SpeedHQ to a smaller 16:9 size for efficient editing rather than have a mismatch of QT-Animation and BGR.24 clips? The rerendering of about 100 clips out of Mirage is not going to take that much time because they will be uncompressed files, but the re-editing of five 6 minute segments will be the time consumer no matter how I look at it and I mainly see this as time spent on learning and practicing SE.

 

[radams]

That sounds OK too, but don't you think that I should have all my clips stored uniformly as BGR.24 1080p ones and resize each in SE with SpeedHQ to a smaller 16:9 size for efficient editing rather than have a mismatch of QT-Animation and BGR.24 clips? The rerendering of about 100 clips out of Mirage is not going to take that much time because they will be uncompressed files, but the re-editing of five 6 minute segments will be the time consumer no matter how I look at it and I mainly see this as time spent on learning and practicing SE.

Hi Paul,

Yes and No....

Keeping things uniformed is a preferred method...but with SE you don't have to...thou I would still recommend it...

SE allows you to work with ANY resolutions..& ANY frame rate....add to that if the codec works with SE you can mix and match them...on the same timeline or as Cholo stated just right click and render out to any of the supported codecs or formats....

I would recommend keeping your original art uncompressed...either with AVI, QT or even with Still a uncompressed still format....then I would convert those to SpeedHQ and edit your offline with it...at any resolution you want....then take the offline...with the original uncompressed to your completion house....let them and the lab conform the originals & audio to your offline...then take that to the lab...Note: I strongly suggest that you do a couple of tests to make certain that your get the proper gamma and color rendition as well as line integity that you want....you may want the lab to make some additional adjustments or so to properly bring out those subtlies of your masterful work

Again, If there is anything I can assist with please let me know...

Your Friend,

 

[paulfierlinger]

I would recommend keeping your original art uncompressed...either with AVI, QT or even with Still a uncompressed still format....then I would convert those to SpeedHQ and edit your offline with it...

Are you saying I should convert each of my AVIs to SpeedHQ before I import them into SE or do this as I import them? What I understand of SE is that if I set the timeline up with a 720p template and import 1080p clips they will automatically run as 720's in SE with all the advantages of a reduced size.

I don't think it is necessary for me to have a completion house re-assemble my entire film, scene by scene, if I can supply them with the film in four 20 minute parts already edited as four 1080p, uncompressed AVIs.

Note: I strongly suggest that you do a couple of tests to make certain that you get the proper gamma and color rendition as well as line integrity that you want.

We have all the color control we need in Mirage when painting the scenes and further in SE. I imagine that for purposes of transfer to film there will be some checking involved but do not expect any color correcting. My experience has been that completion houses have a tendency to screw up our colors badly, for instance the currently running Comcast spots make Sandra faint everytime one of those come on again. Of course, our client just gave our DVD to a lab and told them here are the final spots and someone in that lab had fun dulling and washing out all our colors. There was absolutely no need for this to happen from a technical point of view.

How do I know that our colors are fine? because a previous spot we made for United Air was completed without any lab correction involved and the colors were perfect -- the lab just double checked them for legitimacy in my presence and they confirmed that we had everything right. Likewise, every film we have ever done for PBS had to go through very stringent quality control by a house in Virginia, called Pillar to Post. Those guys are professional nit-pickers. We have been repeatedly told by these people at Pillar to Post that we are one of the rare studios that get everything right and nothing has to be changed.

There are musicians who have perfect pitch and don't need any gadgets to tune a piano and there painters who have a perfect sense of color pitch and don't need instruments to have their colors corrected.

So I pretty much trust our own gadget I call most of the time Sandra.

 

[radams]

Hi Paul,

I also trust you and Sandra Paul...but what I don't trust is that there is a difference between your Monitor display and that which is shown on the Theater screen... There are many things that are different...including Gamma...

So That is why I suggested making certian the lab has their settings properly setup with the proper film stock to print your fabulous creation so that it is seen as you created it to be seen

As for working with uncompressed, BRG24, QT, vs SpeedHQ....I understand you don't need the completion house to re-edit your peice...okay... But I would STRONGLY suggest using an uncompressed RGB based format to do your film out with...thus "not" SpeedHQ.

Each frame needs to be pulled anyway to be printed...If you have those already as frames or Uncompressed clips...then the completion house is only reconforming using your master edit...syncing the audio etc...but there are so many ways to do this.

Just trying to help give you the best Realtime feedback and best film out options...

Cheers,

 

[paulfierlinger]

I understand Ray. Somewhere back a hundred posts and a day or so ago I had stated that I have decided to go the 1080 route. and thanks to you and all for helping me understand what I should do.