New Canon video cameras

[dchip]

Either way, eager upgraders will be there. I forgot which upgrade it was (perhaps 4 to 5) that basically added nothing but fluff, but everybody, including me still had to have it. If they release a 9, it should be geared towards these camera's that are coming along the pipeline now. The HFS1 is not a professional camera, but looking t the optics, sophisticated optical stabilizer, shooting modes, etc., it sure will be attractive to a lot of pro's. I am not a pro, by the way. I think I will just enjoy working with lifelike video and making jaw-dropping productions of stuff I like to shoot for fun. As I said before, this format might get me back into trying to make some money with the camera, but I don't know yet.

[Hulk]

I started with Vegas Audio 2.0. Then upgraded to 3.0 but never used the video part of it as I was using MSPro. Then I upgraded to 4.0 and around the same time started doing some third party work for Sony so I learned Vegas and was pretty amazed by the smooth workflow. I still love you you can drop in effects and stuff while the timeline is play and how customizable the interface is.

Then I was on the V5 beta. Skipped 6, got a free upgrade to 7. Not working so much with Sony lately and had to buy 8.

Sony (and other software manufacturers) should ask users if they can track which functions they are using and report back to Sony. Now what they are doing of course just what functions. For example, what preview mode, how much previewing, what effects are being used, track motion, cropping, etc... Then they can see which features should be further developed and optimized and which can be left to die.

It seems as though there is still a sizeable disconnect between the programmers and the users. And when people post their next version "wish lists" I think they put up what would be cool and not really examine their workflow and what could speed them up and enhance creativity.

[Hulk]

I know you might be building a system soon. Check out this memory deal I came across. $30 after rebate for PC8500, 4GB. Crazy!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227298&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL032409&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL032409-_-DesktopMemory-_-LC4B-_-20227298

[dchip]

It seems as though there is still a sizeable disconnect between the programmers and the users. And when people post their next version "wish lists" I think they put up what would be cool and not really examine their workflow and what could speed them up and enhance creativity.

It does seem that the programmers are told to enhance features that look good in marketing bullet point lists. That is a consumer-oriented process. When Vegas added "Pro" to its name it should have become bullish on enhancing and openly advertising what it can do to save Pro's time and money. I guess one of the problems comes in advertising the addition of stuff that has been in competing NLE's for years and is finally being added to Vegas.

I'll be frank, I think some staunch Vegas users and testers have not put the kind of pressure on the SF, and now Sony programmers that they should have. There has been a lot of coddling, but not in the direction it should have flowed. It's good that that has changed in the more recent versions of Vegas.

I know you might be building a system soon. Check out this memory deal I came across. $30 after rebate for PC8500, 4GB. Crazy!

Thanks. Awesome deal. Might help me break the Kingston habit. Have you used this kind before?

A quick question, if you don't mind. I understand that SATA (which I have none of) is the modern hard drive transfer standard, but, does the word PATA that I see in motherboard spec sheets refer to support for the regular old drives like I have? Man, there so many unfamiliar words and acronyms that I almost need a computer glossary to work with.

[Hulk]

You'll have to check the mobo to see if it supports PATA. I don't trust words and usually need to see a photo, which you can at NewEgg or the manufacturer's site, and actually see the IDE connector.

But if I were you I'd make a clean break from PATA and go SATA and don't look back. Easier to set up, faster interface, and cleaner cable-wise in the case, which as you know if better for airflow/cooling.

When I moved to SATA I plugged in the old drive one last time to move the data to the new drives. Pulled the drive, reformatted, filled it with data again (TV capture until full), then reformatted and they went onto e-bay. Like I said I don't like to keep stuff around that is totally outdated. Drives are so darn cheap now that you can get a TB for $100 if you look around. That's really quite amazing. Even with video editing you've reallly gotta try to fill a TB. That's over 70 hours of video at 25Mbps.

As for pushing the Sony programmers I know what you mean. But I thnk sometimes a module has to be totally rewritten to get something coded correctly and that will take a lot of time an resources so they put a band aid on the issue to be dealt with later and spend the time/money on some fluff.

If I were Sony I would go nuts on optimizing preview. Code specifically for SSE4 and make sure all available cores are floored on preview. That could be the whole damn V9 upgrade and I'd buy it if there were good speed gains. And as you know word would get around that Vegas kicks ass in the HD preview department. Of course that quad core AVCHD bug would have to be fixed as well.

The other thing we need to see more of is assembly language programming for some routines that require a lot of cycles. Perhaps one of the color correction plugs could go Assembly for the next update and they could pick them off one at a time?

Back in the early '90's I was in a partnership (a band actually) and we had a pretty serious studio so we'd record local bands as well as our own stuff. We used a program called SAW (Software Audio Workshop) programmed by Bob Lentini in Assembly. In short it was amazing. This multitrack recording program, with good sounding plugs fit on ONE FLOPPY DISC! Yes that's right it was about 2MB. And NO INSTALL! It simply ran from the exe file. And while other programs of the day like SoundForge were slow as dog you know what SAW could preview compression and EQ in realtime on a Pentium 90. I don't know if SAW is around anymore but man that was a great piece of software.

I wish some start up company would build up a video editing program in Assemblyl. Start off slow, just the basic features cuts and dissolves with great preview and rendering performance. Then slowly, carefully in each release add more features. Because let's face it for most "pros" you don't do much more than straight cuts and maybe a dissovle here and there. Just have a look at any TV show or movie and you can see that's the case. Of course there are tons of people that would argue this with me but it's just my opinion. Do it once, do it right.

[dchip]

If I were Sony I would go nuts on optimizing preview. Code specifically for SSE4 and make sure all available cores are floored on preview. That could be the whole damn V9 upgrade and I'd buy it if there were good speed gains. And as you know word would get around that Vegas kicks ass in the HD preview department. Of course that quad core AVCHD bug would have to be fixed as well.

That's what gets you pumped up is when the preview works and looks great the way you intend your final output to look. On screen, external preview, etc. Of course that would require emphasis on very effective prerendering and that should almost be able to happen in the background with these megamonster CPU's today. That kind of thing is where I think a guy like Satish, who created that frameserver and some other goodies, could give Sony a world of insight into Vegas. There was another kid who used to come to the Sony site last year, or before, who also seems to be pure genious on programming stuff. Can't recall his handle but he got beat down pretty good for his frankess about Vegas.

I wish some start up company would build up a video editing program in Assemblyl. Start off slow, just the basic features cuts and dissolves with great preview and rendering performance. Then slowly, carefully in each release add more features. Because let's face it for most "pros" you don't do much more than straight cuts and maybe a dissovle here and there. Just have a look at any TV show or movie and you can see that's the case. Of course there are tons of people that would argue this with me but it's just my opinion. Do it once, do it right.

I agree. My first venture into editing was with Matrox Marvel and Avid Cinema and I thought I would make the most dazzling stuff possible. Right away I started using cuts and basic fades, ignoring all the dazzling stuff. Next, I moved to a Canopus capture card and what I think was called Edit DV. Again, a package with lots of dazzling effects in it. I have to admit, I did use a few of their cubes and rotating effects, which were very clean and beautifully written. Unfortunately their codec just didn't measure up. When I first saw the Sonic Foundry output, I was a goner. Never looked back since.

I agree, an editing package designed the way you described would be great. It's not hard to imagine how creative one could get if it had to come from between the ears rather than hoping some dazzling tools was going to do it for you. I happened to look at some stuff I did on Avid Cinema years ago and while the camera work looked very elementary, the editing showed that I was already thinking about what people would actually watch for more than 20 seconds.

** correction ** my Canopus package was called EZDV. Edit DV came much later and was more sophisticated.

[dchip]

You'll have to check the mobo to see if it supports PATA. I don't trust words and usually need to see a photo, which you can at NewEgg or the manufacturer's site, and actually see the IDE connector.

I'm just glad to know PATA is referring to my curren type drives. All I will want to get the data off of them. They are NTFS, all, so they should be good to go for letting any controller work with them. If the new motherboard has enough plugs, I might just keep the biggest of them off to the side for backup but buy all new SATA drives to work off of. All my current drives are old Maxtors, but have been pretty good for 5+ years now.

The thing you said about the cabling is key, too. Right now I have those big wide cables twisted all over the place in the case. I have a Promise 133 controller with two drives on it and that means cables all over top of key stuff on the mobo. Definitely cutting down on airflow. The coolermaster case I have now has a big funnel thing on the side panel. Because of those cables, there was barely room to put it down close to the CPU like it's designed for.

Thanks for the slick method of truly erasing a drive. First time I've seen that. I bet it is foolproof against even the most sophisticated forensic techniques to get "deleted" information off of old drives. I will definitely be trying that in the future. Lacking such foolproof methods is why I have never sold or given away a hard drive.

[Hulk]

I figure it would be pretty tough to recover data from a drive that has been written to like that as you would have to somehow recover the data "beneath" the current data! That sounds like Star Trek tech to me. Plus all of my important data on my drives is WinRar encrypted. WinRar encryption (compression) is tough. You will find no cracks online for $10 like you do for MSWord and Excel. It would take a serious distrubuted computing attack to attack WinRar with a robust password from what I have read.

And if you're really worried about the drive data just delete the big capture file and do it again. Then the original data would be two "layers down" on the drive!

As for the preview you are right about the satisfaction of seeing your edit right NOW in real time. Background render is a good idea but it should be defeatable in an options menu. Say your Quad core monster can preview AVCHD with simple cuts and edits in real time, on the fly, with no prerendering. For such a project you wouldn't need prerender on.

But on the other hand if you have a complex project with track motion, color correction, various FX, 3D transitions, etc, then prerender might be needed. But Vegas should be smart enough to prerender the sections that would have the lowest framerate without prerender. For example if the color correction sections would preview at 22fps but the transitions would preview at 4fps then Vegas' prerender should be smart enough to realize this and go after the transitions first so when you come back with that cup of coffee after a 10 minute break most of the project is rendering realtime and only a few spots are slowing down just a bit. Or other prerender options could be selected such as "prerender from cursor out" or something like that which would work forward and backward of the current cursor position. I'm sure other clever options could be selected for prerender. The first I mentioned could be called "lowest fps to highest fps" or something like that.

[dchip]

But on the other hand if you have a complex project with track motion, color correction, various FX, 3D transitions, etc, then prerender might be needed. But Vegas should be smart enough to prerender the sections that would have the lowest framerate without prerender. For example if the color correction sections would preview at 22fps but the transitions would preview at 4fps then Vegas' prerender should be smart enough to realize this and go after the transitions first so when you come back with that cup of coffee after a 10 minute break most of the project is rendering realtime and only a few spots are slowing down just a bit. Or other prerender options could be selected such as "prerender from cursor out" or something like that which would work forward and backward of the current cursor position. I'm sure other clever options could be selected for prerender. The first I mentioned could be called "lowest fps to highest fps" or something like that.

Now that is smart thinking. The program detects that you're away, because you haven't done anything in a bit, and automatically starts a CPU-hogging task like rendering a bunch of layered effects, etc. On top of that you could choose to turn all of that off or customize it for the way you like to work. Yep, Sony just needs to sit you down with a their programmers and have you ask them: "ya'll ready to write some really intuitive code?"

[Hulk]

I wish I had the guts to start a software company many years ago. I had a couple friends growing up and we used to do a lot of programming on our Atari 800 computers. They were brothers and smart. Really smart. They went to MIT and are now EE's. I went to Rutgers and I'm an ME so I'm not dumb but these guys were on another level. You know the type. One of them is working for nVidia now. They actually sold games to Broderbund when we were in high school. All programmed in Assembly. I wanted to call these guys and say let's start a software company. I tell you these guys could code Assembly faster than I could do Fortran.

Oh well.

[dchip]

Really smart.

When you said that, I remembered that kids name on the Sony forum who came out of nowhere with some brilliant insight into Vegas. It was Jonathan Neal, I'm pretty sure. I hope he still posts there. He's got that good combination of end-user mentality and talented programmer.

I wish I had the guts to start a software company many years ago. I had a couple friends growing up and we used to do a lot of programming on our Atari 800 computers. They were brothers and smart. Really smart. They went to MIT and are now EE's. I went to Rutgers and I'm an ME so I'm not dumb but these guys were on another level. You know the type. One of them is working for nVidia now. They actually sold games to Broderbund when we were in high school. All programmed in Assembly. I wanted to call these guys and say let's start a software company. I tell you these guys could code Assembly faster than I could do Fortran.

Oh well.

I know the type. They exist on another plane and don't even realize it. Thinking on levels that are far beyond most of the population is as normal to them as breathing. Whenever I watch some of the old Star Trek episodes and see them playing that multi-tiered Chess, I think of dudes like that.

Well, theres nothing wrong with still making a difference as an end user and tester. If only the corporate ear would really listen.

[dchip]

The Canon HF S10 is on the street. My price watch on it has begun.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/597438-REG/Canon_3568B001_VIXIA_HF_S10_Dual.html

[Hulk]

You sure you don't want to go with the S100?

[dchip]

You sure you don't want to go with the S100?

The thought of having that internal 32GB teed up and ready to go all the time yet still having the other flash recorder to stick a smaller card or even another 32GB into is nice, but I do think about the value of the HF S10 in other ways and wonder if it's really worth it.

It's got 32GB internal, but is there anything special about that 32GB. Hard to tell. I have seen all kinds of 32GB flash cards of this type ranging in price from around $100 to something called Class 6 memory that runs over $250 for 32GB. I wonder what's in the HF S10. It must be good quality to be capable of saving 24Mbps, but a 32GB card put into the HF S100 supposedly can do the same thing, BUT can it do so with just any decent quality 32GB card or would a more expensive card have to be purchased?

Still, the advantages of having that huge chunk of memory in the camera all the time is hard to deny.