That is an interesting difference - the 32bit version has a "deeper" look to it, very exciting. The white t-shirt really shows more latitude, the color on the parachute seems deeper as well. I'm very curious to check this out with some heavily tweaked footage :)

Does anyone know how this compares to the high end color correction tools? Thanks a bunch for posting DSE!

here is the original HDV file, watermarked only. Rendered from V8. Once the demo is available for download, you should be able to see the exact same results yourself.
BTW, you're gonna love the no-recompress rendering of long GOP in V8. :-)
Trust me...you can punch the he** out of HDV with in 32bit mode.

I am really excited about the smart render feature. I think it is going to make a world of difference in my post time. Thanks for sharing Spot. I am curious if you know why Sony chose to release this information early? Have a good labor day weekend!

j razz

Douglas, that looks great!

Have you had a chance to try that with any SD footage yet?
I'm hoping that it could help with a lot of low light footage I'm shooting on my current project.

Terry

Yes, SD looks equally nice, pending the original footage of course. This is an upgrade in which I will probably pull the past few projects I've edited for broadcast and throw them into Vegas 8 just for the 32 bit conversion and then re-archive. In some footage it's not as noticeable, but in footage where color is an issue along with latitude, (shouldn't that be everything ;) ) - it's amazing to see the change. It's like getting a new eyeglass prescription.

-cheno

Okay, I'm confused.

Took the two mpg clips to the timeline, one over the other, and did an A/B comparison. The 32 bit clip showed much wider luminance range and the chroma was a bit punchier.

I then threw in a Cookie Cutter overlay (to get rid of the top 20% of each clip and eliminate the effects of different text) and also Color Corrector on the 32-bit clip.

I adjusted the color corrector as follows: Saturation: 0.916, Gain: 0.856, Offset: 15.

Now when I do the A/B I can't see any difference and, more importantly, the Histogram and Vectorscope can't either.

In fact, I'm a little concerned that there is ANY difference in the two clips, which implies to me that something fundamentally wrong was happening before. What I WOULD expect is that a finer granularity offered by 32-bit processing would eliminate any banding present with 8-bit processing. Since I can't see any banding in the 8-bit image, then what's the point?

BTW seeing the chute fabric stirs a yearning inside me to jump again. I did exactly one jump back in '82 over Lake Elsinore in SoCal. Very exciting.

riredale, was that done in Vegas 8?

Terry

Thanks Cheno,

I can't wait to get my hand on a copy of V8.

I hope its all the juice its always been ;')

Terry

Unless you're using V8, I wouldn't expect to see any difference whatsoever. The V8 file is being truncated to the old V7 8-bit processing.

Well there's the rub of course, firstly you're processing the image in the old 8bit pipeline but more to the point what the output image is recorded to has the same limitations as what the original image had.
To truly see the difference and to be able to fiddle with the image in all its glory you'd need a screengrab to something like dpx or 16bit tiff before compression and then open that in PS or AE.
Also keep in mind that any modern display device that us mere mortals can afford is pushing it uphill to do justice to even a 8bit image let alone anything beyond that, in fact most are limited to around 6bits.

The only time the limitation on output becomes an issue is if you're truly doing a film out or sending the footage off for grading. If you're grading for release on DVD then what you see is as good if not better than what you might get anyway.

Bob.

Bob, if an improvement can't be seen, is it still an improvement?

I'm way out of my area of expertise here (frankly, I'm not sure I have any areas of expertise) but are you saying that my spiffy new 24" 8-bit LCD monitor won't be able to see any difference? Can anyone see any difference?

Again, it seems to me that 8-bit is plenty for representing gradations from black to white; the only reason people want or need to go to finer granularity is because some pixel processes can inherently coarsen the gradations, making them visible. I certainly didn't see any difference on the two mpg clips Spot posted, but then I did view them on Vegas7's preview window.

Still, when I tried to view them with my Zoom player on the PC, I only noticed the obvious luminance range and the stronger color saturation--no bands.

In any event, V8 sounds like a really nice upgrade and I'll jump on board for various reasons, but for now it sounds like the "smart rendering" feature will be the one I will enjoy the most!

Here's a split-screen of both files, side by side. There is a difference.

riredale,
I don't understand what you mean. The 32bit float looks way better. No effects applied other than turning on 32 bit.

Harold

I think what riredale is saying, is that he's able to duplicate the look using saturation and curves I'd imagine and is this the same? If we can match the look, can we theoretically say that 32 bit looks only as good as tweaked 8 bit. The answer is NO, again, I'm not a mathematician, but I've seen this with my very eyes on the footage Spot uploaded today. I was there, right in front of the same monitor as he was. You may be able to duplicate to an extent that 32 bit image using f/x however that's not the math that's going one, sure we're seeing nicer latitude and eye-popping colors but that's on the outside, what 32 bit is doing is allowing more color information out of the video, meaning that if you push the colors, truly saturate the hell out of them, you're not going to see any blooming or spill, it's clean as can be. Blown out, yes. Clean, you betcha.

I don't understand the technology behind it and don't even hope to. I'd rather edit and know that anything I now do to this video, still within some parameters, will hold much better than before without kicking the crap out of the HDV footage.

There is simply more information in the 32 bit processing and it's literally beautiful. I'm anxious for someone who does a lot of grading, like Patryk Rebisz, to chime in once Vegas 8 is officially out.

-cheno

Vegas has always done excellent DV import into the 8bit RGB pipeline. You had to almost be trying to break the engine by sending it artificial/CG images to see any contouring. The cleverness was probably a combination of look-up-tables and some maths that ended up in truncated gamma corrected internal representations. Then Vegas was also quoted at having a 16bit internal pipeline with 8bit I/O, possibly with oversampling when working in 3D compositing mode.

Well, HDV is still YUV oriented and the Vegas pipe is almost certainly constrained to RGB but the additional fractions of levels (after the decimal point) makes color space conversion far more accurate. It may well be more accurate than your WMP or VLC is at displaying raw MPEG-2 using it's reader, the directx abstraction layer and your graphics card drivers (which are likely to have both RGB and YUV modes again limited by 8bits).

DSE has rendered from an 8bit (poss. 10bit DC co-efficient) source into an 8bit (poss. 10bit DC co-efficient) target. The piece in the middle had more latitude. So that the intrinsic need to do the color space conversion was likely to have far better results than using an 8bit integer library (whether aided by the fancy non-Pro8 version of Vegas' mapping technique or not).

If your display is a 6bit dithered LCD then it may look more contrasty, darker or with gradients. However it shouldn't as if the player/viewer you use or your graphics card driver has the right capabilities then it should be more represented of what came out of the camcorders DSP after the imager (and before the compression to MPEG-2). To rectify a lesser windows display system, render to your camcorder and play it back from there or use an HD-SDI playout device on Vegas. In both cases a reference monitor, or at least one with S-IPS technology (on an LCD) and view again.

DSE's project also points out the the passthrough mode of Vegas probably wouldn't be used in this case, despite the untouched HDV MPEG-2 to an HDV MPEG-2 render would use recompression. Although the watermark guarantees that this is the case, I suspect the fact that the footage enters the pipeline and through it at the rendering phase is what makes this a certainty.

The important thing to note here is that the client doesn't need 32bit FP playout equipment and Blu-Ray and HD-DVD etc doesn't need an addendum because this extra latitude is an internal phenomenon because we are image processing. Headroom, this time in dynamic range rather than strength/dB 'levels' is advantageous.

If you need realtime playout to an HDV camcorder in a scrubbable environment then NewTek's SpeedEDIT has pseudo-HDV preview capabilities to decks and camcorders from it's timeline. They call this RT HDV preview, you wouldn't record it as such. That may help you see the difference without having to wind or rewind a single inch of tape (or run Vegas PTT with device control swapped between off and on as you progress your piece).

The old rule that if you can't see it, then it isn't there is of course true too. It would be a shame if 32bit-FP for the Vegas upgraders was somehow about as useful to the client base as throwing strawberries to swine. ;)

It should be better and the real part of being better will be when you are grading your footage where you intend to bend your pixels against a curve or if you are making certain areas bloom, diffuse, glow or blur. Once you start bending and cutting your source material, the tolerance to layered effects having rounding issues should be very much more favorable with VegasPro8 in this mode. We'll have to see, the proof is in the pudding's tasting. It is a very good recipe though.

DSE, thanks for posting this.
Am i correct in assuming that Sony have given you some leeway with letting afew kittens out of the pouch (as oposed to cats out of the bag)? LOL
The information you are providing so far in a number of posts has been very helpful with clarifying some elements people are already raising concern with.

Either way, its appreciated
cheers

DGates - THANKS for posting the WMV! It looks all very exciting indeed!!

Grazie

Seems like this is a bit analogous to Photoshop's ability to work in 16-bit.

When you do various color manipulations (curves. levels, etc.) in the 8-bit world, you can see the histogram goes from being a smooth curve into a bunch of spikes with gaps between them. The more operations you do, the worse it gets. In the final output this translates to more noise and grain.

If I start by converting the image to 16 bit and do the same color manipulations the curve stays smooth. When I do the final operation and then switch back to 8-bit, it looks better than the final output of the previous 8-bit only image.

This all happens because those various color manipulations are doing a lot of interpolating. In the 16-bit domain there are a lot more values for the algorithms to work with during the intermediate operations, thus the final result can have less noise in it.

Obviously the whole thing works best if the source image is a camera RAW image (i.e. higher than 8-bit), but for intermediate operations there can still be benefits from having a higher bit depth.

I would think the same principles can be working to our advantage with Vegas.

Spot, what can you tell us about the title generator?

It has more keyframing tools than anything you've ever seen inside of Vegas. Powerful, and while it can be very simple (easier than old title tool) it is also exceptionally complex.
I've got a short vid I was gonna post, still debating.
Either way, you'll love the way you can save presets/actions inside the new title tool. It's an amazing timesaver. We just finished a 3 hour DVD9, and it has nearly 600 text events. In the past, this was what took the greatest amount of time. With the new title tool, it easily cut that time aspect by 75%.
The tracking paths for text are sweet. It can be fully automated (or not).
Get Course to send me somemore of his great coffee and molasses...I'll post the vids :-)

do these paths behave like DVDA4?
If thats any indication (ie V8 text tools a hybrid of text tools in DVDA4) it might give us a basic idea..

look at us, like kids with a new toy.. lol