FCP slo-mo VS Vegas slo-mo
 

RE: Spot's post on the Sony forums- he did a test in B&H today where he took the same ArtBeats clip in both Vegas 5 and Final Cut Pro and slowed them both down to 20% speed...to test the interpolating quality. Apparently Vegas beat out FCP hands down. This intrigued me- I decided to do some tests of my own though I don't know how official they really are.

I took a clip I captured via Vegas (DV avi format) sent it to a friend who uses Final Cut Pro and asked him to slow it down 20% and return it to me. I did the same. Once I got his clip back (in quicktime format...settings equivalent to DVavi) I dropped them both on the timeline. Now I don't know if the interpolating quality is something that has to be judged on an external monitor- or if sending a Vegas Catpured DVavi to a Mac and having it converted to quicktime to be compatable in a Final Cut Pro interface will nullify any volidity of the experiment. Non the less here's what we came up with.....

http://www.msprotege.com/members/Laz...FCPvsVegas.mpg

funny coz some of my slow mos come out super smooth while other come out horrible and jittery

im tryin to work out why and even supersamplig is terrible..

any ideas??
im runnin gthe footage between 50 and 75% speed and its stutters so bad its driving me nuts

Change the monitor preview quality from "Preview" to either "Good" or "Best".

that doesnt do much, its the final render which is what i am refering to... sometimes its good other times its absolutely terrible

Have you tried rendering it at "best"?

Re: FCP slo-mo VS Vegas slo-mo
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : ... Non the less here's what we came up with..... -->>>
So Vegas does beat FCP.

Dennis Vogel

It does in that limited example. But you'll find that the quality of the slow motion has a lot to do with choice of speeds and the type of footage used. Most serious FCP users use different plugins for motion effects, rather than the default FCP effect.

Jeff,
I'm not gonna argue the point, a: because I also use FCP and b: because I know plugs are available for most things...but....there are also tools to improve most of the stock offerings in Vegas. Comparing Apples to apples, using the same original pjpeg footage from Artbeats, Vegas did much better frame interpolation. And that's the only way to do a fair test.
For purposes of my comparison, I did one better than Glen, I rendered to QT in Vegas as well, so the comparisons were exact.

I'm not trying to push the FCP vs Vegas thing, it's more that I'm pretty tired of the hype surrounding FCP that is in many extremes, just plain BS...It's a very good tool. But, it's missing a lot of great things because Apple is relying on third parties to build what they didn't do correctly in the first place.

It's a very good tool. But, it's missing a lot of great things because Apple is relying on third parties to build what they didn't do correctly in the first place.


which is why i stopped using it when Vegas 2 came out ;)

Photoshop must be a terrible program, I use 10 to 15 different plugins daily. I guess I'll need to find new photo editing software.

no far from it mate.. i understand the sarcasm LOL.. but for me the fact that i come from an audio background.. Vegas makes a Huge difference wit the way i visualise and create an edit.. also the way i work is alot more efficient, but everyone is different..

THese are tools, and im jsut greatful that theyre always improving..

I jsut wish vegas had afew more plugins!!

Ah, so maybe the greatness of a program can help be determined by the number of individuals and companies willing to invest the time and effort to write plugins. If this is true, than maybe Photoshop isn't so bad after all.

ROFLMAO youre evil dude! LOL

Those Mac people are a firey bunch. :)

I wonder how many companies (several) that Adobe has put out of biz because they realize the necessity of workflow that many plugs provide, and so they eventually add those features to their arsenal of tools.
While plugs may or may not determine the value of a tool, and were that the case, Vegas would be at the bottom of the heap, you'd think that for something as absolutely basic as slo-mo, no one would EVER have to write a plug. Might as well write a plug for something silly like...fade in/fade out.
A WHOLE lot fewer plugs for Photoshop these days compared to 4 years ago. Wonder why?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't plug-ins make use of an applications' native features/architecture to achieve their functionality? If so, the 'parent' program is capable of achieving what the plug-in can...... the only difference being the long and involved task of discovering how!!
The desire by the majority of computer users to avoid 'blowing time' on tracing such long and torturous paths to a single result; that may or may not be of benefit, is what the plug-in developers have expoited.
From my viewpoint it's a mighty fine thing that plug-in developers have developed their software to make my creative life a little easier, but it's a relief when you get an app that does everything you want of it without having to hunt down plug-ins/codecs etc. just to get a bit more than basic functionality!!!! For this reason alone, (and especially as a HD10 user!!!) Vegas is a standout app.....

hmm..

moving back to the focus of teh thread.. heheheh

one thing i have noticed is that footage shot in 50i, which is then slowed (i got it down to 15%) then rendered to Progressive 25p is much smoother and alot more fluid and jerk free than it is when rendering back to 50i

Interlace broken
 

Speaking of that footage, it looks like much of the difference in image quality is due to the fact that the Vegas footage is still interlaced and the FCP footage has been deinterlaced, giving it a 'smoother' look...

Is this just a question of the settings that are being used for the final render?

From a programmers' and plug-in writers' point of view:

"We all stand on the shoulders of giants."

If I write a plugin, as I do regularly for FCP, I use it's fxscript API, and that can be as simple as putting together a programmed version of a simple layering or bluring recipe, or it can be as complex as programming a new effect from scratch with only the most basic tools at my disposal. Now what those basic tools are, is down to the programmers at FCP, but if I invent something totally unique using them, like my chroma reconstruction filter, then that's serious programming and mental effort on my part.

If I write a plugin for, say, After Effects, and I have to code every bit of image manipulation from scratch in C, I'm still using the C language and all it's constructs and underlying operating system code that makes my plugin work. I still wrote or invented my algorithm, but I've had to do more work.

However, either way, we're all building on the work of others.

So when something like Shake or AE gives you a plugin architecture that allows you write your own low level code in C, it can open doors to much more complex effects, however, exactly the same could theoretically be done in FCP with it's higher level API, albeit too slow to be usable.

Shake (which I'm just learning, so don't take my word as the total truth) has 3 levels of "plugin" type customisation:

macros, which turns a node structure you've set up into a single node, a sort of recipe if you like,

scripting, which uses the macro type structure, but you can go in and add expressions and even some C code to make things even funkier

SDK, which supposodly lets you at everything including writing your own stuff from scratch with C. This will be great for very complex, innovotive stuff.

Also, the "difficulty" level scales, so even non-techy users can do some programming, and real geeks can get right into it.

Graeme