Vegas Pro 8 Suite to be unveiled at IBC 2007

[Konrad Haskins]

The last two rev cycles and maybe more there has been a regular upgrade price and then the "secret" url upgrade price. The secret URL which is a much better upgrade price is emailed to registered users and posted on every Vegas forum known to man. Sony takes good care of registered users and I'm confident they will do so again.

Konrad

[Renton Maclachlan]

On another post I asked about Excalibar - and then looked at its multicam features. With Vegas coming out with multicam editing, where does that leave Excalibar? Get V8 rather than have V7 + Excalibar?

[Buddy Frazer]

Renton,
If they do multi-cam like Adobe Premiere does multi-cam, it will be cuts only. Excalibur allows a transition (such as a dissolve) between shots.
Buddy

[Jon McGuffin]

Originally Posted by Konrad Haskins

The last two rev cycles and maybe more there has been a regular upgrade price and then the "secret" url upgrade price. The secret URL which is a much better upgrade price is emailed to registered users and posted on every Vegas forum known to man. Sony takes good care of registered users and I'm confident they will do so again.

Konrad

Good!

I sure hope you are right! :)

Jon

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by John F Miller

I'm curious as to where this comes from - the Vista bit, I mean. The ability to tie a thread to a particular processor has existed ever since the first 32-bit Windows (NT 3.5) via the SetThreadAffinityMask() function. However, doing so can be problematic if you have multiple applications running that each decide to tie a thread to the same processor. Often, it is better to allow the OS to manage the assignment of thread affinity. Of course, giving the user the option to enable or disable the feature and/or specify a given processor would be best.

Correct, you can manually do this, but the OS doesn't know about it unless you tell it. So it thrashes like crazy when it shouldn't. This means that vista (again, only available in Ultimate Premium Super Duper Version) will lock a single thread to a core by default, making it much smarter from the start.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Theodore McNeil

Even if just the ProType Titler and the Multi-Camera part are true, we'll be ordering seven upgrades the week it comes out.

Vegas titles have always been barely adequate to put text up on the screen and that is about it. The options for a scrolling title are maddeningly stupid and few so if you want to do anything remotely fancy, you have to kludge it together with loads of keyframed layers and masks.

[Theodore McNeil]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

Vegas titles have always been barely adequate to put text up on the screen and that is about it. The options for a scrolling title are maddeningly stupid and few so if you want to do anything remotely fancy, you have to kludge it together with loads of keyframed layers and masks.

I agree. So any improvement is welcome.

[Jon McGuffin]

So of the new features....

Looks like the most signficicant are..

ProType Titler
Multicamera editing tools
Blu-Ray Disc burning direct from the timeline
No-recompress rendering for long GOP HDV (wonder what that really means)

This looks more like an incremental upgrade rather than a huge change which frankly is a good thing..

I'd like to know how performance is going to be affected. If they can get 10-15% better performance, particularly with .m2t HDV playback after color correction, transitions etc then I'm sold...

Jon

[Jerry Waters]

The word at NAB is that 64 bit Vegas will be a widespread beta BUT ONLY to people who upgrade to Vegas 8 - for whatever that is worth. They already had a working version of it then.

[Michael Mann]

Originally Posted by Robert Wheeler

I was also like a stablizing plugin. That would be very useful.

I second that.

[Glenn Chan]

10-bit 4:2:2, matches the human visual system better than 8-bit 4:4:4, that is why it is better performer.

Which is better comes down to what implementation you're talking about (many different ways of implementing 10-bit 4:2:2), your subjective taste, what test material you are using, and context (what are you monitoring on).

As far as 10-bit 4:2:2 deficiencies go...
A- Non-constant luminance. When you have fully saturated green on magenta (and most other combinations), there is a dark band in the transition area.
B- Chroma subsampling causing colors to go out of R'G'B' gamut. If you take valid R'G'B' values, the chroma subsampling can push them outside the displayable R'G'B' gamut. If you have alternating red and black lines, the black pixels will end up with chroma on them, resulting in positive red and negative green and blue light. And of course negative light isn't displayable, so you effectively have clipping.
You can see it in the test patterns at
http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/
C- The subsampling itself is prone to aliasing, imperfect frequency response, and/or ringing artifacts. If you run a color zone plate pattern through a codec you will see this. The worst offenders are the codecs that implement point sampling (e.g. DNxHD in its VFW implementation; haven't tried its other implementations).
D- You also get inappropriate mixing of resampling schemes. Most codec/NLE combinations result in this inappropriate mixing.

The attached images show a zone plate example. Box resampling was the chroma filtering + reconstruction method. Box resampling doesn't follow 601/709 standards (e.g. they call for co-sited chroma, whereas box resampling means interstitial chroma). But nonetheless it's what Vegas works well with.

As far as 8-bit R'G'B' deficiencies go...
You can see banding/contouring artifacts as long as:
A- The image has no noise in it and no dithering or dynamic rounding. (Smart implementations would implement dithering or dynamic rounding so that banding isn't an issue. Or your image source has noise in it, which happens in the majority of real world situations.)
B- The two different tones are very large / have a large visual angle.

In a very clever/interesting scheme, you can actually almost get away with 3-bit bit depth. So the picture of the baby at
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/ade...i_ACM_24-3.pdf
15.4MB PDF file; it's page 7
HDR companding and bit depth is related; you can ignore the HDR stuff the article is about.

[Glenn Chan]

Negative light - nonesense. The full luma range is able to you, yes the extremes value are super-black and super-white they perfectly usable and highly valuable. Some lowend solutions just crop them off, yet these values are increased dynamic range of YUV over CG-RGB. Nearly all video cameras use these values. Now Vegas uses video systems RGB, so the 0-64 luma values map to 0-16 in RGB, so it is not even negative in the Vegas presentation. Vegas uses a wider gamut RGB so it can store the naturally wider gamut of YUV. So 10-bit YUV does have 4 times the luma levels as 8-bit 4:4:4 video systems RGB.

I guess I am coming from a different context. If you send 10-bit Y'CbCr to a broadcast monitor, values 0-64 dont contain visually discernible information. They all result in black.

You're coming from an equally valid perspective in that you can map these values around in post.

[Alastair Brown]

Wow...you guys go in deep!

I'm just happy to hear the words Blu-Ray Authoring.

[Colin Ard]

After breezing through the post, I did not see anyone link to the SonyStyle site. I may be wrong, but it looks like they're selling Vegas 8 + DVD Production Suite for $599 but it's on backorder.

Here's the link:
Vegas 8

DSE is even selling training for it.

[Seth Bloombaum]

Forum sponsor videoguys.com is selling Vegas 7+DVDA for $400 after rebate, and announced free upgrade to V8.

http://www.videoguys.com/specials.html