Sony Vegas Pro 9 720/60P Slow-Mo

A

alexsalmona

Member
Hi all. Ok here goes maybe I'm on crack and its just me but I think there may be an issue with what I'm shooting. So I went to Griffith Park and shot some streams in the park. Flowing water close up for the most part. I am using Sony Vegas Pro 9 to edit the footage. I have shot at 720/60P at 120th for clean slow mo as most have posted. I dropped the footage on a 720/24P Timeline and set the playback speed to 0.40 (also known as 40% speed). Resampling is disabled. Rendered and when I playback Vegas says I'm playing at the full 23.97 rate but the playback is choppy. I read some where that AVCHD doesn't do well with greenery and water. So is this my problem? Limitations with AVCHD is causing the choppyness? Any input would be good.
 
hmm... what codec are you exporting in? i've never reset the playback speed in your method i've always just done the measuring on the timeline and did the ol' ctrl-pull on the footage and it always worked for me that way. as far as i know i'm not sure many people here edit with sony vegas, i've asked a few vegas related questions in the past and haven't gotten many replies, most people are with mac
 
Alex...that's exactly my workflow, and i've had success, but Tony's question is valid...what are your render settings? That may hold the answer.
 
Hey guys thanks for the reply's. I am actually using the original files right from the camera using GPU Decoder from Divide Frame to play back the AVCHD in real time. Trying to avoid a generation loss until the last second of output. For render settings (which ends up rendering everything in the timeline because it is all speed controlled) I use Cineform as my render codec using the same settings as the original files so there is little translation as possible. The only thing I haven't tried is to use neoscene to convert everything to Cineform 60P first and then use those files to do all my speed bumps. Not sure it should make any difference though.
 
Ok good news. I just did a test of reprocessing all my footage through neoscene into cineform. The "replaced" each original clip with the cineform clip (gotta love Sony Vegas I've use Media Composer for YEARS and Vegas is so much more powerful and easier to use than MC every was specially from a technical stand point). Anyway the finished render was very smooth. Same settings for clips as before but using cineform originals. from now on that will be my workflow for slow mo. might even spring for cineform HD to do resizing and retiming in the preprocessing stage.
 
if you export as avchd (sony avc, using project settings) and you match your clips to the originals from the GH1, then render with project settings, there is no quality loss because it doesn't convert the codec, it will say "no compression required" in the preview window while it renders incredibly quickly, it takes me about 10 seconds to render a two minute video under the right settings. check out the 24p project/render settings i use here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/novanimages/

i also don't use neo scene or any other pulldown methods though, i don't mind skipping out on a step when 99% of people won't notice the difference.
 
well to answer the first question about generation loss... I believe cineform is actually a very good codec. it has a great balance of speed and system resource requirements and is visually indistinguishable from the original source. Once in Cineform Vegas an deal with the files really well.

To answer the second question I'm not sure the method you describe is lossless. I forgot to mention originally that I am using a color correction filter in each shot to even them out a bit (changing sun through out the shoot). So that means the Vegas would essentially be decompressing each from from the original AVCHD file processing and re compressing back to AVCHD. AVCHD Is pretty lossy as a destination I believe not to mention a processor hog!

I will try and post my test short on Vimeo when I get a second. I will admit that I still think the AVCHD codec does have issues with moving water. Its almost too much information.
 
alexsalmona said:
well to answer the first question about generation loss... I believe cineform is actually a very good codec. it has a great balance of speed and system resource requirements and is visually indistinguishable from the original source. Once in Cineform Vegas an deal with the files really well.
Click to expand...

I understand the benefits of Cineform, and yes, you are right about how well it works in Vegas. But that doesn't preclude the fact that as implemented in NeoScene, it is lossy. Not very lossy, but you do get generational loss, and it's at it's worst on the first generation.

alexsalmona said:
I will admit that I still think the AVCHD codec does have issues with moving water. Its almost too much information.
Click to expand...

The AVCHD codec can deal with moving water just fine. The AVCHD codec as implemented in the GH1 is pretty weak. That's well known, and has been discussed to death.
 
PerroneFord said:
I understand the benefits of Cineform, and yes, you are right about how well it works in Vegas. But that doesn't preclude the fact that as implemented in NeoScene, it is lossy. Not very lossy, but you do get generational loss, and it's at it's worst on the first generation.
Click to expand...

Just curious about what you mean by the way implemented by NeoScene. Is there a better way to convert to Cineform (or any other codec) than Neo Scene. I still really like Cineform (being wavelet vs DCT it degrades better at lower res) for editing. Unless you have a better sugestion?

PerroneFord said:
The AVCHD codec can deal with moving water just fine. The AVCHD codec as implemented in the GH1 is pretty weak. That's well known, and has been discussed to death.
Click to expand...

Agreed it is pretty weak. Although I hadn't seen much discussion about water specifically.
 
Cineform offers a lossless variant if I am not mistaken. But not at the Neoscene level. I use Jpeg2000, which is also a wavelet codec, for archival purposes.
 
water, trees, tall grass, fast pans following a flying bird for instance. here's a good example:

http://www.vimeo.com/5643842

should also mention this is the first thing i shot/edited with the GH1, though looking back at it the footage holds up for the most part. at 0:52 there is a shot of moving grass, looks terrible, i remember thinking "uh oh!" when i played it back on the computer for the first time, but it's all about knowing and avoiding the cameras limitations... i guess, that and praying for a big time firmware upgrade to hopefully correct some of this stuff, if it's at all possible.
 
PerroneFord said:
Cineform offers a lossless variant if I am not mistaken. But not at the Neoscene level. I use Jpeg2000, which is also a wavelet codec, for archival purposes.
Click to expand...

Nice. Its cool to see another person as much of a nutjob about codecs as me. Where did you find a nice Jpeg2000 is it built into Vegas (still getting use to Vegas after 9 years of Media Composer).
 
tonydvcoste said:
water, trees, tall grass, fast pans following a flying bird for instance. here's a good example:

http://www.vimeo.com/5643842

should also mention this is the first thing i shot/edited with the GH1, though looking back at it the footage holds up for the most part. at 0:52 there is a shot of moving grass, looks terrible, i remember thinking "uh oh!" when i played it back on the computer for the first time, but it's all about knowing and avoiding the cameras limitations... i guess, that and praying for a big time firmware upgrade to hopefully correct some of this stuff, if it's at all possible.
Click to expand...

Good so I'm not totally loosing my mind. I just finished cutting it together and color correcting and I will throw it on Vimeo this weekend. It would be very nice to see a bump in codec bit rate. maybe get it up to 24mbit like some of the camcorders do now but it may be a limitation of the processor in the camera.
 
alexsalmona said:
Nice. Its cool to see another person as much of a nutjob about codecs as me. Where did you find a nice Jpeg2000 is it built into Vegas (still getting use to Vegas after 9 years of Media Composer).
Click to expand...

Why on Earth did you leave MC for Vegas? Well, that's another story.

There is a jpeg2000 codec built into Vegas, but I bought Morgan Multimedia's jpeg2000 codec also because I wanted more control.
 
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