Sony Vegas Pro 11 update

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 12:48 AM

Jeff, I've been rendering to HIGH all along. Start with a file on the time line. Choose render as, select the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug in, choose Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 25 Mbps video stream. Choose customize template. Change frame rate to 59.940. Change field order to None (progressive scan). Accept all the other defaults. Render. Fails to render in build 425. Roll back to build 371. Renders successfully every time.

Jeff Harper · November 2nd, 2011, 01:13 AM

Tom, my apologies. I did not read your post correctly, and I was wrong.

I "saw" 720 60p when you are trying to render 1080 60p. Sorry. You are absolutely right, I cannot render to 1080 60p either, tried it every which way. Real bummer. I will likely be wanting to render using the same settings, down the road, so I'm concerned, but I cannot deal with it right now. My projects for the next month or so are all 720 60p, so I'm ok for now, but your situation stinks now.

I'll probably have to uninstall, since I disable system restore. I did at least keep a copy of the original version.

I hope this gets resolved!

Phil Lee · November 2nd, 2011, 01:19 AM

Hi

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tom Roper

Jeff, I've been rendering to HIGH all along. Start with a file on the time line. Choose render as, select the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug in, choose Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 25 Mbps video stream. Choose customize template. Change frame rate to 59.940. Change field order to None (progressive scan). Accept all the other defaults. Render. Fails to render in build 425. Roll back to build 371. Renders successfully every time.

I don't think the MainConcept MPEG2 encoder supports 1080 at 60p, this is true of the SDK used on the MainConcept reference program which uses the same DLLs as Sony Vegas, and I never got it working in Vegas ever.

Much better to use H264 for 60p anyway.

Would not surprise me if the template was wrong before and was actually defaulting 60i and so working?

Regards

Phil

Jeff Harper · November 2nd, 2011, 01:31 AM

Phil, you might be onto something. Unless I'm misreading, or unless the information below is wrong, Bluray does not seem to support 1080 60p. Is this correct?

Blu-ray Disc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Video
High-definition video may be stored on BD-ROMs with up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at up to 59.94 fields per second, if interlaced. Alternatively, progressive scan can go up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at 24 frames per second, or up to 1280x720 at up to 59.94 frames per second"

Would this also mean 1080 50p is not supported? If Tom was rendering it out before, as you say maybe the glitch was in the previous version?

I clearly am out of my depth here, but this is interesting.

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 09:04 AM

I think you should try it. Roll back to build 371 and you'll see that it outputs a file *.m2t. It was working in V10 as well. Worked in 8.0(c). You can read the file header it's progressive encoded. The template was not wrong, there is no standard template at all, you have to do a custom but the rendering codec did support it if you modified the parameters in the template.

If you can't get it to play, you have to remember with mpeg-2 there needs to be an audio track included. By default, the encoder parameters specify separate elementary streams for a/v, so you have to change this in order to get a playable file.

I also expected someone with not much experience in it would be the first to say use H264. Try your hand at 17-28 mbps 1920x1080/60p and see how all your player(s) handle it. Mpeg-2 at 35 mbps CBR is an easy injest for everything from WDTV to PS3.

I would not be surprised if SCS has dropped support for mpeg-2 1920x1080/60p, but the Sony/Main Concept plug-in for AVC (h.264) is very low end. And moreover, SCS emphasized all the fixes applied to encoder plug-ins and fails to mention that 1920x1080/60p mpeg-2 encoding has just now been disabled?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil Lee

Hi

I don't think the MainConcept MPEG2 encoder supports 1080 at 60p, this is true of the SDK used on the MainConcept reference program which uses the same DLLs as Sony Vegas, and I never got it working in Vegas ever.

Much better to use H264 for 60p anyway.

Would not surprise me if the template was wrong before and was actually defaulting 60i and so working?

Regards

Phil

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 09:13 AM

Jeff, you are correct that 1920x1080/60p is not a supported format but we're not talking Blu-ray here unless you just want to drop an mpeg-2 or h.264 AVC file onto a Blu-ray media for a non-authored, Data Disk.

Any recent Blu-ray player should be capable of playing a variety of media file types, picture, sound, video from a disk or other connected input, flash drive, HDD etc., not just authored BD content.

Jeff Harper · November 2nd, 2011, 10:03 AM

Tom, I disable system restore, so I can't roll back, unfortunately. Re: an authored Bluray disc is what I assumed you were trying to create, my mistake. This changes things in a way for me, as I have been wanting 1080 60p. I shoot weddings and my work ends up as Bluray or SD DVD, so the advantages of 60p would be minimal, right?

For your purposes I hope you get this figured out. For mine, I see that yes it's unfortunate no 60p for Bluray, but it ends my obsession with having it in 1080, it's pointless. Unless I'm missing something.

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 11:32 AM

There are only a few reasons to use 1920x1080/60p.

1.) Your source video is already in that format, i.e. 1080/60p camcorder. This is the main and most important reason.
2.) You have some 60i interlaced footage that you want to deinterlace with Yadif algorithm and play as 60p without artifacts.
3.) You have some 30p footage that you want to play. You could convert this to 60i but you'll add interlace artifacts.

30p isn't widely supported in displays, so it is often converted to 60p or 60i. The former is preferable from the standpoint of quality. The latter is preferable for compatibility with more displays and players but adds interlace artifacts in the conversion to it. All of the above formats can be rendered to 60i but you'll have interlace artifacts, flicker, line twitter.

Vegas does a poor job deinterlacing because it only uses interpolation or blending of fields. Hand Brake is better at deinterlacing because it uses yadif, which is much cleaner about combining 59.960 fields into 29.970 frames. Vegas also does a relatively poor job re-interlacing content that originated as natively progressive.That's why you don't want to let Vegas create dirty 60i when your recording started with clean 60p or 30p footage.

Can we get back now to the problem at hand, that V11.0 64 bit Build 425 breaks the ability to render 1920x1080/60p using the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug-in?

Jeff Harper · November 2nd, 2011, 12:16 PM

I think you have your solution, unfortunately. I would suggest using the original version, or contact Sony support to see what they know, if anything. I can't imagine a workaround, other than using another codec. If it's not working, and it certainly appears to not work, than you might be stuck until the next update. They will need to know about the issue, not sure how they gather and make their list. I imagine support personnel submit/report these thing via a database to be reviewed by the software engineers. They certainly have paid attention in the first week, that's for sure.

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 12:44 PM

I agree Jeff, about everything except not sure all those bug fixes listed were in just in going from Build 371 to 425. Maybe they were but seems like some of those could have been fixes dating back to the migration from 10.0.

And I'm fine with rolling back to Buld 371. The problem would be whether or not I would ever pay for another upgrade if I thought they were abandoning support for the rendering plug-ins that I need, specifically Main Concept MPEG-2 1920x1080/60p. Would have to revisit that.

And thank you for trying to do the render! It's a big help to know the problem was not unique to my installation.

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 01:09 PM

One other item, a person on the Sony Vegas forum reminded me that other aspects of the Main Concept MPEG-2 plugin have been broken and not fixed going back before V11, notably the attempt to render a high bit rate file over 35 mbps can also return the unexpected error argument. I have seen that one as well. He stated and I agree with him, Main Concept has work to do on the encoder problem and Sony has work to do get the parsed error reported as to what it is, rather than just calling it unknown.

He also noted that Sony has obviously had to re-license the plugins from Main Concept since they now have added support for OpenCL GPU rendering etc. If we don't hear from Ed on this one, then I would infer that it's not a bug as much as it is an unannounced drop in support for the particular aspect of the plug-in. I would hate to see Vegas go down the path of Adobe by trying to force us to conform to a finite collection of limited rendering templates, with no customizations possible. The program is called Vegas "Pro" and we should expect to be able to customize pro features.

You can have the greatest editor in the world, but if you have to render your edited footage into sub standard output, it would seem that's what we have taking place, unfortunately.

Jeff Harper · November 2nd, 2011, 01:09 PM

No problem, I tried it every way I could think, just wouldn't work.

Jeff Harper · November 2nd, 2011, 01:21 PM

Tom, from a professional point of view, at least for producing Bluray, it seems the ability to render 1080 60p would be disposable. Don't get me wrong, it would be a great option to have, for sure. But as a professional, what use do I have for it? Not much, if I can't deliver it as shot. If it's supported on the web, that would definitely be a practical use for it. But I don't know if it is.

There may be some advantages to shooting in 60p for down-conversion purposes, don't know, but at least in my case, I'm happy to have learned about the Bluray standard now than to continue pining for a 1080 60p camera, which I thought of as the holy grail.

You obviously have a need for being able to render to 1080 60p, and it stinks that you can't, for sure. But thanks to you I have one less thing to worry about regarding cam purchases.

On the other hand, 60p has got to become more widely accepted standard, as it is amazing to view. So I guess we'll see how things play out.

Phil Lee · November 2nd, 2011, 02:05 PM

Hi

Quote:

30p isn't widely supported in displays, so it is often converted to 60p or 60i. The former is preferable from the standpoint of quality. The latter is preferable for compatibility with more displays and players but adds interlace artifacts in the conversion to it. All of the above formats can be rendered to 60i but you'll have interlace artifacts, flicker, line twitter.

30p in 60i does not introduce any quality degradation or interlace artefacts, and will still be progressive footage, it is called PsF. 30p is supported by all HD displays and to keep things simple it is carried as PsF (30p in 60i) or frame doubled to 60p as appropriate for device outputting. Blu-ray doesn't support 30p because it doesn't need to as 30p is carried over 60i perfectly without any issues and PsF has been used in broadcasting for decades to carry progressive footage over an interlaced system.

Quote:

Can we get back now to the problem at hand, that V11.0 64 bit Build 425 breaks the ability to render 1920x1080/60p using the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug-in?

I think the official specification for MPEG2 at it's 'High' level tops out at 1920x1080 at 60i, which explains why the MainConcept encoder doesn't support it. HD at 60p I don't think it was ever specified to be supported by MPEG2, I dare say some MPEG2 encoders do it anyway, but officially this is something MPEG2 doesn't support.

So how to get 1080/60p on Blu-ray? Officially you can't, the best supported official way is to create an AVCHD 2.0 disc, which should play back on any Blu-ray player supporting AVCHD 2.0, currently newer Sony players support this. AVCHD 2.0 specifies a maximum bit-rate of 28Mbits/sec, but I dare say most players will accept a higher bit-rate than that, upto around 40Mbits/sec, but I've not tested it. To get this stream you can just render using a Blu-ray template on H264 (Sony AVC probably the better option in Vegas) but switch it to 60p and a maximum bit-rate to 28Mbits/sec.

Regards

Phil

Tom Roper · November 2nd, 2011, 03:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil Lee

I think the official specification for MPEG2 at it's 'High' level tops out at 1920x1080 at 60i, which explains why the MainConcept encoder doesn't support it. HD at 60p I don't think it was ever specified to be supported by MPEG2, I dare say some MPEG2 encoders do it anyway, but officially this is something MPEG2 doesn't support.

MPEG-2 h.262 Main Profile High Level (MP@HL) supports up to 1920x1152, up to 60 frames per second, up to 80 mbps.

It had the support in Build 371 and lost the support in Build 425.

November 2nd, 2011, 12:48 AM	#31
Tom Roper Trustee Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Denver, Colorado Posts: 1,891	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update Jeff, I've been rendering to HIGH all along. Start with a file on the time line. Choose render as, select the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug in, choose Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 25 Mbps video stream. Choose customize template. Change frame rate to 59.940. Change field order to None (progressive scan). Accept all the other defaults. Render. Fails to render in build 425. Roll back to build 371. Renders successfully every time.

November 2nd, 2011, 01:13 AM	#32
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update Tom, my apologies. I did not read your post correctly, and I was wrong. I "saw" 720 60p when you are trying to render 1080 60p. Sorry. You are absolutely right, I cannot render to 1080 60p either, tried it every which way. Real bummer. I will likely be wanting to render using the same settings, down the road, so I'm concerned, but I cannot deal with it right now. My projects for the next month or so are all 720 60p, so I'm ok for now, but your situation stinks now. I'll probably have to uninstall, since I disable system restore. I did at least keep a copy of the original version. I hope this gets resolved! __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

November 2nd, 2011, 01:31 AM	#34
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update Phil, you might be onto something. Unless I'm misreading, or unless the information below is wrong, Bluray does not seem to support 1080 60p. Is this correct? Blu-ray Disc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Video High-definition video may be stored on BD-ROMs with up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at up to 59.94 fields per second, if interlaced. Alternatively, progressive scan can go up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at 24 frames per second, or up to 1280x720 at up to 59.94 frames per second" Would this also mean 1080 50p is not supported? If Tom was rendering it out before, as you say maybe the glitch was in the previous version? I clearly am out of my depth here, but this is interesting. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

November 2nd, 2011, 09:13 AM	#36
Tom Roper Trustee Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Denver, Colorado Posts: 1,891	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update Jeff, you are correct that 1920x1080/60p is not a supported format but we're not talking Blu-ray here unless you just want to drop an mpeg-2 or h.264 AVC file onto a Blu-ray media for a non-authored, Data Disk. Any recent Blu-ray player should be capable of playing a variety of media file types, picture, sound, video from a disk or other connected input, flash drive, HDD etc., not just authored BD content.

November 2nd, 2011, 10:03 AM	#37
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update Tom, I disable system restore, so I can't roll back, unfortunately. Re: an authored Bluray disc is what I assumed you were trying to create, my mistake. This changes things in a way for me, as I have been wanting 1080 60p. I shoot weddings and my work ends up as Bluray or SD DVD, so the advantages of 60p would be minimal, right? For your purposes I hope you get this figured out. For mine, I see that yes it's unfortunate no 60p for Bluray, but it ends my obsession with having it in 1080, it's pointless. Unless I'm missing something. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

November 2nd, 2011, 11:32 AM	#38
Tom Roper Trustee Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Denver, Colorado Posts: 1,891	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update There are only a few reasons to use 1920x1080/60p. 1.) Your source video is already in that format, i.e. 1080/60p camcorder. This is the main and most important reason. 2.) You have some 60i interlaced footage that you want to deinterlace with Yadif algorithm and play as 60p without artifacts. 3.) You have some 30p footage that you want to play. You could convert this to 60i but you'll add interlace artifacts. 30p isn't widely supported in displays, so it is often converted to 60p or 60i. The former is preferable from the standpoint of quality. The latter is preferable for compatibility with more displays and players but adds interlace artifacts in the conversion to it. All of the above formats can be rendered to 60i but you'll have interlace artifacts, flicker, line twitter. Vegas does a poor job deinterlacing because it only uses interpolation or blending of fields. Hand Brake is better at deinterlacing because it uses yadif, which is much cleaner about combining 59.960 fields into 29.970 frames. Vegas also does a relatively poor job re-interlacing content that originated as natively progressive.That's why you don't want to let Vegas create dirty 60i when your recording started with clean 60p or 30p footage. Can we get back now to the problem at hand, that V11.0 64 bit Build 425 breaks the ability to render 1920x1080/60p using the Main Concept MPEG-2 plug-in?

November 2nd, 2011, 12:16 PM	#39
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update I think you have your solution, unfortunately. I would suggest using the original version, or contact Sony support to see what they know, if anything. I can't imagine a workaround, other than using another codec. If it's not working, and it certainly appears to not work, than you might be stuck until the next update. They will need to know about the issue, not sure how they gather and make their list. I imagine support personnel submit/report these thing via a database to be reviewed by the software engineers. They certainly have paid attention in the first week, that's for sure. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

November 2nd, 2011, 12:44 PM	#40
Tom Roper Trustee Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Denver, Colorado Posts: 1,891	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update I agree Jeff, about everything except not sure all those bug fixes listed were in just in going from Build 371 to 425. Maybe they were but seems like some of those could have been fixes dating back to the migration from 10.0. And I'm fine with rolling back to Buld 371. The problem would be whether or not I would ever pay for another upgrade if I thought they were abandoning support for the rendering plug-ins that I need, specifically Main Concept MPEG-2 1920x1080/60p. Would have to revisit that. And thank you for trying to do the render! It's a big help to know the problem was not unique to my installation.

November 2nd, 2011, 01:09 PM	#41
Tom Roper Trustee Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Denver, Colorado Posts: 1,891	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update One other item, a person on the Sony Vegas forum reminded me that other aspects of the Main Concept MPEG-2 plugin have been broken and not fixed going back before V11, notably the attempt to render a high bit rate file over 35 mbps can also return the unexpected error argument. I have seen that one as well. He stated and I agree with him, Main Concept has work to do on the encoder problem and Sony has work to do get the parsed error reported as to what it is, rather than just calling it unknown. He also noted that Sony has obviously had to re-license the plugins from Main Concept since they now have added support for OpenCL GPU rendering etc. If we don't hear from Ed on this one, then I would infer that it's not a bug as much as it is an unannounced drop in support for the particular aspect of the plug-in. I would hate to see Vegas go down the path of Adobe by trying to force us to conform to a finite collection of limited rendering templates, with no customizations possible. The program is called Vegas "Pro" and we should expect to be able to customize pro features. You can have the greatest editor in the world, but if you have to render your edited footage into sub standard output, it would seem that's what we have taking place, unfortunately.

November 2nd, 2011, 01:09 PM	#42
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update No problem, I tried it every way I could think, just wouldn't work. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

November 2nd, 2011, 01:21 PM	#43
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Sony Vegas Pro 11 update Tom, from a professional point of view, at least for producing Bluray, it seems the ability to render 1080 60p would be disposable. Don't get me wrong, it would be a great option to have, for sure. But as a professional, what use do I have for it? Not much, if I can't deliver it as shot. If it's supported on the web, that would definitely be a practical use for it. But I don't know if it is. There may be some advantages to shooting in 60p for down-conversion purposes, don't know, but at least in my case, I'm happy to have learned about the Bluray standard now than to continue pining for a 1080 60p camera, which I thought of as the holy grail. You obviously have a need for being able to render to 1080 60p, and it stinks that you can't, for sure. But thanks to you I have one less thing to worry about regarding cam purchases. On the other hand, 60p has got to become more widely accepted standard, as it is amazing to view. So I guess we'll see how things play out. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."