Vegas or Avid for this project....??

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plainman007

Well-known member
Hi guys,

Before starting off any wars here. I dont want this to sound like the typical question thats been asked again and again.

This is with ref to a project that im working on. Its going to be shot on a DVX102B Pal. Its a short film (80 mins approx). Its more like a docu feature. Its about a performing art. A dying art form. Presented in an entertaining feature film style. Now this will be finally output to dvd. And then screened from this dvd using our own DLP Eqpt and a professional speaker system for a niche audience that are associated to this dying art. Dolby 2.1. (maybe 5.1 sound with the rear channels muted so i can have stereo + LFE subwoofer)

This will be a commercial project so i cant muck it up. So will there be a difference in quality if i take this to an avid suite in my area. Or will the output from Vegas be the same quality as if i edit this in a high end Discreet Smoke suite ? In other words if there will be a quality hit by doing this in Vegas i wont risk it on this particular project. But as to the editing talent even if it goes to an Avid suite ill be the one to sit and tell the editor where to cut where to fade etc etc. So creativity there. I love Vegas and wud love to cut this project on my system itself. But ill lose my name if theres a quality hit. So please advise me accordingly. I just want to know if the final output dvd will be the same quality wether edited on Avid or Vegas. If there will be a difference which one will have better quality (see how much i love Vegas!). Also keep in mind that i will be adding a lot of special effect scenes like multi layered composites etc. Will Avid produce a better output result inspite of severe bezier masking and lots of multilayered video compositing ?
 
As far as technical quality goes, it will be practically the same. The DVD encoder you use will make the most difference to the technical quality you get. This however is not as important as how the footage is shot and how you process it in post (which comes down to talent really).

There are very minor differences in how the program processes material, although they will not matter much (and will be hard to spot). Avid isn't necessarily better here (i.e. from Media composer and below, you must work with DNxHD compression for HD resolution; Vegas can work in 4:2:2 uncompressed).

It will (more or less) come down to talent. For certain graphics work, you may want to do certain composites in a program like After Effects if you feel that it cannot be done in Vegas.
 
Glen > With ref to your last line.....yes i admit in fact im very confident about the editing style etc if thats what your refering to. In fact ive worked in our neighborhood AVID studio. And everytime we are there its me whos doing the edit literally. Only that he is using the controls. Sometimes even for a particular style i will have to even tell him how to animate it etc. I lack knowledge about sound such as applying fx processes, flange, wave hammer, dry out, wet out, etc. But neither have i seen him use anything on our earlier sessions. In fact the dvds they cut for us till date has an audio overload that makes people duck. Its almost to the point of clipping. Anyway since all the edit creativity has to stem from me. Im darn sure ill do a better job of it if i had it in my own hands. Problem is i can work only in Vegas. After i studied 3ds max officially i needed a Video Edit Software. Let me tell you i tried many softwares and nothing worked as well as Vegas. I mean on my budget and level of computer hardware. So the edit talent is going to hinge on me. Secondly, most of the Bezier masking etc that i need for the effects im going to do will not require AfterEffects. In fact im delving so much into Vegas that i feel i can do anything within it. I sometimes sit up and dream up an effect and in the next one hour or lesser i get a concept clearly how to achieve that within Vegas. Im no expert but ive been helped by people like you David Jimerson and many members on this site that ive been able to problem solve easily. My only qualm is after the movie is out, I dont want someone saying "ouch you have worked on so many layers etc ??? Oh gosh thats why the film looks grainy, you shudve done this on an Avid or Smoke blah blah blah". And by final quality i mean in terms of clarity and color (not the effects etc).

An objective example question would be.....if i bezier mask in Vegas will the edges give artifacts etc whereas the same kind of mask with similar settings etc on the same footage in an Avid system be better in final output quality ?
 
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I'm not sure Avid can even DO bezier masks.

But Glen's right -- Vegas is good at those things, but if you're worried about the best possible compositing VFX, you'll want to go to something like After Effects which is built specifically for it.
 
David > the bezier compositing im doing will mostly be split screen type. The kind we use for duplicating people in the same shot etc. I dont think this kind of simple beziering will require me to start learning aftereffects. I wont have the time to do that either. And i hate the aftereffects interface. I think adobe believes in making it look very complex so that it gets accepted as a professional package. How dumb but i really tired my eyes once or twice triying to work with AE.

My question is will the final clarity and color etc look better on an Avid or Smoke suite ?
 
Vegas will work in 4:2:2 if that's what the footage is.

PAL DV is 4:2:0, which is the same amount of color info as 4:1:1. It's a very low color resolution.

Working with DV, you aren't going to see a difference between the NLEs, as I said above.
 
Bezier masking in Vegas looks great. You just have to make sure that if you're applying effects, have the effects applied before the masking. In the eventFX window, click on those little triangles in the bottom left corner.
Otherwise than that annoying quirk of Vegas, the masking is good (and actually better than some other programs in some cases).

2- Vegas operates in 4:4:4 R'G'B' color space. It handles footage from other color spaces. If you want to get a slightly better conversion, apply the chroma blur filter. For 4:1:1, do 2.0 horizontally.

3- With the money you save by not going in a Avid or Smoke suite, you could spent more time on the graphics and such and make the end product look better.

You can for example spend time on color grading your footage:
http://glennchan.info/Proofs/dvinfo/EFP1-CC-comparison.mov
 
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Glenn, this is sort of a different topic. Obviously you work on Vegas and the file you have downloadable is a .mov file. It looks good. To create great looking .mov files, I had to use FCP. By far the best results from Vegas I've seen is when rendering out to wmvHD. What is your workflow to produce great looking .mov files from Vegas?
 
What I think Vegas can render out to QT right ? Or am i wrong ?

Glen >
1. I never knew that Vegas works in a 4:4:4 color space ! WOW thats as good as high end edit systems right ?

2. You have said the masking in Vegas is better than some other programs ? May i ask which ones your comparing to ?

3. I didnt understand the point "If you want to get a slightly better conversion, apply the chroma blur filter. For 4:1:1, do 2.0 horizontally" Are you refering to only the keying process workflow ? Or all footage can be improved ?

4. Talking about 4:4:4 color space workability, What are the other kind of footage formats which fall under the higher color spaces category that vegas can maybe take advantage of ?
 
Vegas will edit almost any footage, as long as you have the codec.

4:4:4 is as good as it gets in terms of color resolution (a vertical and horizontal color sample for every light sample), but you're limited by your footage. You can't make something out of nothing without taking some kind of hit. You can't take DV and uprez it to HD and expect it to look as good as HD, right? Same with color resolution. You can upgrade it, but it won't be as good as it would be if it were native.

The chroma blur filter will diminish some of the effect of 4:2:0 color space, i.e., blockiness between contrasting colors (like red and green). It will help make keys cleaner.

Zoom in on some raw footage of contrasting colors. You'll see the blockiness I refer to.
 
1. I never knew that Vegas works in a 4:4:4 color space ! WOW thats as good as high end edit systems right ?

Not really. All programs that render in R'G'B' have to render in 4:4:4 anyways.

2. You have said the masking in Vegas is better than some other programs ?
Final Cut Pro, Final Touch HD. In those programs, the falloff on the feathering is programmed differently. Using masks to make exposure adjustments will create the appearance of halos.

3. I didnt understand the point "If you want to get a slightly better conversion, apply the chroma blur filter. For 4:1:1, do 2.0 horizontally" Are you refering to only the keying process workflow ? Or all footage can be improved ?
All footage can be "improved" with this method. However, you probably won't see a difference unless you are keying.

4. Talking about 4:4:4 color space workability, What are the other kind of footage formats which fall under the higher color spaces category that vegas can maybe take advantage of ?
Vegas works with HD-SDI, SDI, and data formats like still images. It can't render in bit depths higher than 8-bit (unlike some of the other NLEs). It doesn't accept dual link HD-SDI for 4:4:4 ingest as far as I know.It does handle HD-SDI 4:2:2 uncompressed. Whereas with Avid, you need a recent Symphony or higher I believe to work without DCT compression for HD resolution (meridien, DNxHD codecs). The lower-end Avids like Xpress Pro with Mojo do SD uncompressed.Final Cut does HD uncompressed. It can render in 10-bit Y'CbCr and 32-bit floating point. Those implementations are sometimes buggy.In any case, you probably won't notice the differences in output between the systems. There are actually minor differences in how these NLEs process the signal... i.e. in the codec (chroma resampling, or lack thereof), the bit depth used, the color space used, bugs, algorithm for dissolves, etc.But when people cannot notice the difference, I would not worry about it!
 
What is your workflow to produce great looking .mov files from Vegas?

I can't remember the exact details for what I did for that particular clip. However:
1- Having the paid/commercial/professional version of the Sorenson3 codec makes a big difference versus the free codec.
2- Use 2-pass variable bitrate encoding if possible. It may be that out of Vegas you can only do 1-pass.
3- H264 is even better quality than sorenson3 (pro), although not quite as widespread.
 
Glen > When we say 4:4:4. The first element is Luma ? 2nd Chroma, and third ? Can you tell me the right order plz ? And am i right that the first one carries a B&W image the second is Hue and the third is Saturation ?
 
The notation refers to different chroma subsampling schemes (and there are many).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

4:4:4 is no chroma subsampling.
4:2:2 is horizontal chroma resolution cut in half.
4:1:1 is horizontal chroma resolution cut in quarter.
4:2:0 is complicated. The simple (not quite correct) answer is that both horizontal
and vertical chroma resolution are cut in half.

2- When video is converted from R'G'B' into Y'CbCr, the Y component stores luma and the Cb and Cr components store chroma.

Y' roughly represents the "black and white" part of an image.
Cb and Cr roughly represent the "color" part of an image. Cb and Cr are not hue and saturation (respectively). They are color difference components.

Cb is based off B' - Y'. The luma channel (Y') is subtracted from the blue channel from the RGB image (B'). That gives you B' - Y'. You then add an number to it (offset) and multiply that number (scale factor) so that the numbers are in the right range. The right range is 16-240 (which is sort of a un-intuitive number when you look at the other numbers).

Similarly, Cr is based off of R' - Y'.

Because Cb and Cr are based off of finding the difference between two numbers/channels, they are also called color difference components.

The math can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr
(An aside: Hmm, that article is kind of dense and assumes that you know what they're talking about.)
 
I dont even know too much about what we are talking here so i wont dare click that link ? LOL.

But i have a small doubt a dvd's native resolution is 720x480 ? is that the same for pal too ?
 
An NTSC DVD's native resolution is 720x480, just like NTSC DV.

A PAL DVD's native resolution is 720 x 576, just like PAL DV.
 
David > I never knew a pal dvd would allow for more horizontal lines.

I want my final movie to come in a cinemascope style or anamorphic 2.35 or whatever that is. Its narrower than 16:9 so what should my project settings be ? Ive currently set them to 1024x466. Then ive test rendered to mpeg2 while unchecking the "Stretch video size do not letterbox" under the render save panel. It looks ok but till date ive never got to burn a dvd out of DVD Arch because it burns but the dvds dont play. I have an ol software called power director which has dvd burning. I load the same mpeg 2 into that and burn on the same burner and it comes out fine. Dunno what the problem is. I can see the burnt mark. But it doesnt play. Sometimes if im lucky the resulting dvd plays a lilttle and will then get stuck and lock up on any player. :(
 
Another doubt does this mean even a Pal widescreen dvd is 720x576 ???

If so then are th pixels a lil wider which is what the difference is betw the widescreen and normal file ?
 
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