For a software project, I had to recently update my old Windows XP machine to a newer machine running Windows 7.
I decided to also look at the free demo version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 editing software.
Update: The following review is not quite correct. My original test footage was inadequate to test this out. Here’s the scoop: Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 will work with true 24P video. You can set a timeline to 23.976 and import video clips that are true 23.976. However, video recorded in the 2:3 24p “pulldown” mode which involves mapping 24p images into a 60i interleaved stream, will not work unless you use a separate program like Voltaic HD or CineForm’s NeoScene to remove the pulldown prior to editing.
I still really like Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 – in fact I have ordered a copy – but it does not do pulldown removal. But once I had everything in some form of 24p – including a combination of HDV, SD and AVCHD transcoded to remove the pulldown – I was able to edit the entire mix just fine in Vegas.
For a test, I gave it what I thought would be a difficult challenge – I combined 24PF video from an Canon HG10 in AVCHD format, with 24PF from a Canon HV30 in HDV format, with a 24P DV video stream. For those not familiar with those terms, 24PF is a 24 frames per second video stream embedded into a conventional 60i (interleaved) set of frames. To edit a 24PF video requires removing extra frames used to fit the 24 full frames into a 60 half frame (60i) video stream used by conventional video recording.
Incredibly – it worked!
I set the Project Properties to 23.97 IVTC (inverse telecine) option. I then imported the media – in the case of the AVCHD video clips, these were already on the system hard disk. The HDV was imported from tape using the Sony Vegas video capture function. The 24P DV video was actually shot as 60i on a Panasonic DV camera, imported and converted to 24p using DVFilm Maker.
And it just worked! I didn’t have to do any futzing around – it just worked.
I output the result to an MP4 file at 1440×1080 and the results are excellent.
Since the DV video was shot outdoors at an evening concert, the colors were muted. I used some Vegas filters to slightly increase the contrast and saturation, and added a bit of sharpening. This was then scaled up to the AVCHD/HDV frame size, producing an excellent result.
I’m still using the demo/trial version but I think Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 is a keeper. I’m pleased so far.
Each year, Spokane, Wa holds an annual Lilac Festival and Armed Forces Day Parade. This is the largest evening Armed Forces Day Parade in the country, and one of the larger parades of any type on the west coast.
This year, 211 units participated in the parade, with 46 high school marching bands from throughout the state (and some from out of state). The parade typically has around 50 + or – bands. If you like marching bands, this is a neat parade!
Over the years, I have followed the West Valley High School Eagle Marching Band since my own kids previously went through that band program. While I no longer have any of my own kids in the band, I still run their web sites and some IT functions behind the scenes, and do some media work for them, all as a volunteer.
Video taping a marching band in a night time parade is difficult. If you stand on the curb and shoot video, the band goes by once and its all over with in 20 seconds.
The only solution is to march with the band. But that adds a lot of challenges, even more so at night. I cannot use auto exposure in the camera since the camera tries to add 36 db of gain to make the night time look like daylight and covering everything in awful noisy graininess. Similarly, audio levels can not use the ALC to adjust audio level automatically – that makes the entire band and crowd noise come across as loud mess.
The opening scene of the following video is shot near the TV coverage area. I set the gain to 0 db and shot at 1/60th of a second in 30p mode, Tv exposure mode, on the Canon XH A1. Once the band passes the TV lighting, I manually switch to 12 db gain and the XH A1 has sufficient aperture to automatically set the f-stop the rest of the parade.
Why not use 1/30th of a second rather than 1/60th, considering shooting at night? Two reasons. One, 1/30th of a second produces some blurring, but does enable using +6 db gain instead of +12 db gain. But the second reason is that motion stabilizing software (see below) does not work well with blurred images. Sharp images work much better and that requires at least the 1/60th of a second shutter speed (based on some experiments I did).
I also use both a short shot gun and the on camera mic during the parade. For the long shot at the beginning, I used the shot gun mic to cut down the crowd noise. But once I start moving with the band, I switch to the internal stereo mic to get better coverage (less directivity) of the sound pattern of the entire band.
At about 1 minute 35 seconds into the video, you’ll see my fake “Steadicam” in action. You’ll see this type of shot throughout the entire video.
How do I do this?
1. I use a monopod and attach a 3 pound weight to the bottom of the monopod. This creates a simple dynamic stabilizer. Imagine holding a stick with a weight at the bottom. As you move the stick around, gravity naturally pulls the weight back towards the center. The amount of weight and the length of the monopod influence the dampening effect. I use only a 3 pound weight because I have to carry the camera gear for several miles (the parade itself is 3 miles long, plus I usually walk 2 or 3 additional miles before and after the event).
2. Learn how to walk smoothly. Watch marching band performers – they “roll step” as they walk. This means rolling your feet in a smooth motion rather than stepping, greatly reducing your vertical motion. Surprisingly, you can learn to walk backwards for an even smoother effect which has to do with how your body mechanics works out. Add a slight crouch and slightly bent knees and with practice, this technique combined with the weighted monopod can product surprisingly smooth walking shots.
3. In post, use motion stabilizing software. There are several applications available today that do a good job of analyzing images for motion and then shift your images around to create the appearance of stability. Since they has the effect of adding black edges to your video after shifting, most also slightly enlarge your original video to eliminate the black edges. For this video, I just used the built in motion stabilizing feature in Apple’s iMovie 8. It took about 3 hours to analyze the HD video I had shot.
Even with motion stabilizing software, you will achieve the best results if you also use the tricks outlined in (1) and (2). You can see the effects of this fake “Steadicam” throughout the videos, but if you are in a hurry, you can see it in the first scene in Part 2, below.
Other tricks I use during the parade are to use the monopod for overhead shots, including walking shots. Sometimes I take a video clip standing in the midst of the band but did not do that this year. It would also be nice to take some low level shots from near ground level, but there is never enough time.
By the end of the parade, I am drenched in sweat and exhausted. In order to get many shots of both the front and back of the band, I have to shoot while the band marches by, then run back up to the front of the band.
This was shot using the Canon XH A1. I have shot daytime parades using an HV30, external BeachTek audio mixer, and a short shot gun XLR mic, plus wide angle lens (always go wide angle for these things). I use the XH A1 for the night parade because of its better light gathering capacity of the big lens and larger imagers. But it does weigh a bit more!
This afternoon I downloaded and tried out the Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.0b trial version. Vegas is unique in that it is able to edit AVCHD directly, without conversion.
But as I learned, you’ll probably need a dual core processor.
The process was slow on my 3.2 ghz single CPU PC with 1.5 GB of RAM and running Windows XP. Vegas quickly imported the clips from the camera, and arranging them on the time line was quick and easy. BUT – all videos stuttered when I tried to play them without using the “render to preview” step.
By the time I started doing rendering so I could watch in real time, the whole process had bogged down. Converting to other formats was not real fast on the 3.2 Ghz machine, either.
Seems to me that if your system really can not handle true AVCHD editing, then you are best off doing a conversion to another editable format.
On the Mac, I’m likely to stick with Voltaic HD 2.x for both transcoding and elimating the 24p pulldown frames. Voltaic HD is also available for Windows. I have not tried the Windows version yet, but the idea is the same – it should transcode from AVCHD in to (probably) an .AVI file that you can use in your favorite HD capable video editor. (Note – not all video editors can handle 24p – you’ve been warned.
Now that Voltaic HD 2.02 properly converts AVCHD to AIC and removes 24p pulldown frames – I will probably just use that. Sure, there is a transcoding step from AVCHD to the AIC format. But it is darned hard to see any meaningful loss except for a very slight softening of the colors. Since my destination is eventually to MPEG4 files that I play on my HDTV any image losses in the AIC transcoding are irrelevant.
More info on AVCHD and also 24p is available in other posts on this web site. In other posts, I describe how you can use iMovie and the free program JES Deinterlacer to process hv20/hv30 24p, or AVCHD with 24p video frames.
For now, I’m likely to use Voltaic. It is not real fast but it does produce the best results for when you want to be picky about images.
I just installed the latest version of HandBrake, the free video converter for Mac and it easily converted AVCHD directly to mpeg4 video files. Unfortunately, it does not know what to do with the 2:3 pulldown removal required for the 24p on my HG10. Still, if you’ve got 30p or 60i video in AVCHD and want to go direct to MPEG4, this would be a good solution.
Unfortunately, Quicktime doesn’t know what to do with the resulting mpeg4 file, but other programs, like VLC and MPEG Streamclip, played the mpeg4 file just fine. Go figure.
Update: I have been experimenting with Voltaic HD 2.0.2, which now correctly processes the 24p AVCHD files from my Canon HG10. I have successfully transcoded from AVCHD with 24p pulldown removal to AIC, Photo JPEG and uncompressed 4:2:2 and more.
Uncompressed 4:2:2, not surprisingly, gives the best result. But an 82 Mb 40 second input file becomes a 3.7 GB uncompressed file! The most noticeable change is enhanced saturated color in the 4:2:2 color scheme versus AIC and Photo JPEG – and some improvements in subtle color graduations that leave compression artificacts in AIC and Photo JPEG. But the huge file size makes this unusable.
It is very hard to tell much difference between AIC and Photo JPEG. They can pretty much be considered equivalent. The Photo JPEG codec definitely softened the colors while the AIC codec seemed to have a slight softening. The quality, otherwise, is basically identical – however, the Photo JPEG version is about 1/3d smaller than the AIC file.
I downloaded and used the free Avid DVxHD code. Transcoding to this codec produced results similar to uncompressed but with an 800 MB output file instead of 3.7 GB. Still, that is a ten times file expansion. I also used the AVID DV100 codec which produced a 446 MB file with better color than AIC but the compression issues seemed no better. The Avid Meridien codec produced slightly larger – but all AVID codecs had better color.
Conversion to HDV did not work, even though the original AVCHD is in 1440×1080. This appears to be a bug in Voltaic HD and this is supposedly a feature of Voltaic.
I also have an XDCAM 35 Mbps variable bit rate codec (1440×1080/24p) that I believe came with FCP version 5.x. Unfortunately, like HDV, this did not produce a proper output file. If it had, the file size would have been smaller than AIC and provided better compression and color than AIC.
The
At this point, for working with AVCHD/24p files that require pulldown removal, the highest quality will come from using Voltaic HD to transcode and do pulldown removal in one step (versus 2-transcode steps required in the iMovie–>AIC –> JES Deinterlace to inverse telecine –> AIC). As to which codec to use? I’ll probably stick to AIC.
The new feature can automatically generate on-screen captions, which is very useful and valuable to those who are hearing impaired. The system can even translate to other languages.
As the narrator in the linked video notes, “sometimes the automatic captions are pretty good” 🙂
Seriously – this is a fantastic new feature. Good job, YouTube!
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