Why persist with 32bit?
Why keep banging your head against a wall trying to get a defective product to do a job it was never intended to do anyway.
Speak to a few locals, pretty certain you can score free or mates rates on systems that work. Drop me an email if you need some names to talk to. You might need to rejig your project a bit to a more traditional workflow however given the time and money you've spent to date that'd seem a trivial task.

Bob.

if you took it to Sony & they rendered it in 32-bit no problem would you make a public apology that they were right & you were wrong? Just wondering. :)

farss wrote:
Why persist with 32bit?

Not to hijack this thread, but what is the advantage in using 32 bit over 8 bit?

And if they can't what would you have SCS do?
Just wondering :)

Paying for Darren's losses which could be quite considerable by now sounds reasonable to me.

Bob.

In theory: smoother gradients after renders with color correction. In practice: no advantage whatsoever.

Yeah, there are some people here who can see the emperor's new clothes, but I'm not one of them.

Rumour has it that the next release of Vegas will support OpenEXR. Then 32 bit and linear light will make sense.

Bob.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The difference can be very substantial, you just have to know WHEN it makes a big difference.

You are insulting just about the entire profession of broadcast TV professionals, and the standards people who found it necessary to spec 10 bits for A/D conversion of broadcast video.

You cannot find one single post facility anywhere in the world that works only in 8-bit.

But what do they know? If only they had listened to those more knowledgeable, they could have saved a lot of money and rendering time...

I don't doubt that 10 bit color is better than 8 bit color. What I doubt is that math that starts with an 8 bit number, is calculated with 32 bit precision, then has all the bits past 8 lopped off without so much as a dither, whether that is any better than just sticking with 8 bits all along.

Oh, it can be quite a bit better. However, 8 bit -> 32 bit -> 8 bit isn't likely to be as good as 10 bit -> 10 bit -> 10 bit.

Woops ... looks like I opened another can of worms.

Fact is ... Sony Vegas Pro 8 is advertised as doing XYZ ... including rendering a project in 32 bit ... it doesn't do that on my machine ... or even on another quad with a different mobo and raid setup ... taking the project straight into the quad off a 2TB external.

Fact is ... 32bit rendering (the tiny little bits that I am able to render before Vegas crashes ... when it runs out of MEMORY!!) ... look EXCELLENT ON THE BIG SCREEN IN HD AT THE LOCAL CINEMA WHERE I MAKE COMMERCIALS ETC!!!

I can RENDER COMMERCIALS ... because they're only little projects ... my feature has been cut up into 10 minute sections ... and I still can't render it ... same camera, same m2t's, same everything just a whole lot MORE of it.

When you look at 8bit compared to 32bit on your Vectorscope and Waveform monitor in Vegas ... switch between the two and have a look at some HD m2t's ... there is a very subtle but impressive grading difference between the two. I want the 32bit that Sony says Vegas can do! Simple!

Thanks for your offer Bob to render my project ... I'll contact you about that ... BUT I disagree with you that Vegas 'was never intended to do the 32 bit thing' ... that's why I'll keep bashing my head for as long as it takes for SONY TO FIX THE SOFTWARE.

Cheers guys,

And congratulations if Vegas works for you!

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

I¡¯ve got a small experience:
I finished a short text design and render it to pal wide mpeg2. vegas ¨C in the a version ¨C crashed. Because I rendered several times in wmv to watch the result I know my project has no mistakes, thus I render it in dv-avi. To my surprise, vegas crashed, too.
I thought it may be an issue of the dynamic preview RAM. I increase it from 256 to 768 to 1024 and reduced from there to 512, 128, 32. No success. With huge angry I set it to ZERO. And Vegas worked, both in dv-avi and mpeg2.
And finally I found that if I put the motion blur more than 8 frame length vegas crashes, in that project. It was in 32bit modus. Now using the b version I never repeat or repro this ¡°bug¡±, it leads me thinking:
no software is perfect, if I can¡¯t or the software engineers can¡¯t figure out whats wrong, then can I avoid this point/these points during my work?
The problem is, engineers can make excellent NLEs but perhaps never cut a film and you who will realize your dream, probably, could never understand that NLE technique.
Forget the technical support and forget your annoying. Try to figure out or avoid it, by yourself. The 3rd way is, jump to another NLE.
But I doubt.

>Fact is ... 32bit rendering (the tiny little bits that I am able to render before Vegas crashes ... when it runs out of MEMORY!!) ... look EXCELLENT ON THE BIG SCREEN IN HD AT THE LOCAL CINEMA WHERE I MAKE COMMERCIALS ETC!!!

Are you rendering m2t or Cineform .avi at 32bits? Vegas changes the color space when you render m2t at 32bits which increases the intensity of the color quite noticabley. At first glance, it looks better because it is more intense, but it is a mistake. If that turns out to be what you are liking, you would be better off starting with the Sony color correction filter using the "studio RGB to computer RGB" preset (which is essentially the same thing only in 8 bits.) and adjust to your liking from there.

This fooled me untll I read http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/v8color.htmthis[/link] excellent page at Genn Chan's excellent glennchan.info site and I realized what was going on.

The real difference between 8 bit processing and 32 bit processing truncated to 8 bits is very subtle (if you can see it at all).

What I doubt is that math that starts with an 8 bit number, is calculated with 32 bit precision, then has all the bits past 8 lopped off without so much as a dither, whether that is any better than just sticking with 8 bits all along.

Adobe has spent the last two years on tour, showing exactly that in PP. 8-bit footage, posted in 32-bit, rendered to 8-bit.

Is the difference visible to everyone? Enough that even viewed on a mobile phone screen(!), the difference would be shockingly large.

Not one person in the audience would disagree with that.

I'd love to see a demo of that. Just because I've been a "doubting Thomas" so far doesn't mean I won't convert after I see it for myself. I sure haven't seen it yet with my Vegas experiments. It sounds like I am probably spectacularly wrong though.

Hi Laurence,

Sorry for shouting before.

I can definitely tell the difference between 8 bits and 32 bits by looking at the two renders (only about a minute or less each before Vegas crashes) on the big screen at the cinema ... the cinema HD player is playing both files one after the other ... 8 bit looks good ... 32 bit looks better and I'm rendering to 720p m2t's ... why? I have no idea and I really don't want to know that much to tell you the truth ... I just want the one that looks better for my film master ... (hopefully to a Blu-Ray disc but I haven't even bothered trying to get that working yet ...)

Darren

Hi HappyFriar,

Glad you're happy!

No I wouldn't apologise because I've tried my renders on two different quads both running Pro 8b and it doesn't work ... my guru friend in Sydney can see that there is a serious problem with Vegas running out of memory when rendering m2t's ... especially long projects (ie: big projects) ... all I'm going to do if Sony got the render working (if I do have to go to the US which I will if I can't render in the next few months ...) is say 'thankyou very much' and then take the computer that they rendered it on and give them my quad.

Cheers,

Darren Powell
Sydney Australia

Darren, What is your source footage: Cineform .avi or mpeg2 .m2t?

Are you color correcting?

Which of the two compositing gama modes are you using?

Source is mpeg2 m2t's ...

Colour correction ... sometimes ... Sony Colour Corrector ... minimal ...

Using Video (2.222) ... have tried Linear but Video looks best to me.

Cheers,

Darren

Anyone working with m2t source footage who is using the 32bit color mode is definitely messing up the color space and unnaturally increasing the gamma. I know because I went through this too. The link I posted to the Glennchan.info site explains this pretty well. Here is the link again:

http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/v8color.htm

and here is the part that is relevant:
____________________________________________________

Levels differences between 8-bit and 32-bit
When you change between 8-bit and 32-bit, Vegas changes more than just the bit depth. Certain codecs like HDV and 10-bit SonyYUV will decode to different levels depending on this setting.
In 8-bit, these codecs will decode to studio RGB levels.
In 32-bit, these codecs will decode to computer RGB levels.
____________________________________________________

In other words, what you are seeing and liking isn't the difference between 8 and 32 bit corrections, it is the difference added by inadvertantly going from studio RGB to computer RGB levels. Initially it looks really good because it is so saturated and I believe that it compensates for Vegas's preview IMHNO is a little undersaturated anyway. It is not correct though and by the time you burn it to Bluray and watch it through a well adjusted Bluray / HDTV setup, it is going to look oversaturated.

I personally believe that the Adobe demo team mentioned by Bjorn Ahlen (Coursedesign) was probably making the same mistake but I could be wrong.

I am absolutely convinced that the Glennchan.info page is correct though. I did experiments myself that left me in no doubt. I took a clip, converted it to high quality Cineform with HDLink from NeoHDV. I looked at it with media player over an external HDTV set via the HDMI connection on my computer. I established that there was no visable difference between the original m2t clip and the converted Cineform avi. I put them both on a fresh Vegas timeline one over the other so I could mute one track to go back and forth between them. There was no color correction of filters whatsoever. I switched to 32bit color in the project preferences. The m2t clip became much more saturated looking (quite nice actually). Then I added a color correction filter to the Cineform avi and called up the Studio RGB to Computer RGB preset. The two weren't an exact match, but it was close enough to see that this was exactly the mistake that was happening and Glennchan was right. What I was seeing was just my m2t clips with the colors exaggerated by being shown in the incorrect colorspace.

Then I started looking at just the Cineform clip. I put it on the HDTV and switched back and forth between the 8 and 32 bit color settings looking for even the slightest difference. There was none. I started applying color correction and switched back and forth again. Sometimes I though I could see a difference, but most of the time I could not. If I looked away and clicked away on the 8bit / 32bit check box (so that I would lose track of how many bits of color I was looking at) I was wrong half the time.

Maybe my HDTV isn't good enough to see the difference (with the Cineform clips that display correctly), but I personally am satisfied that whatever minute difference there might be is not justified by the orders of magnitude longer render times and constant crashing when I try to use it (the 32bit color mode).

Plus, if you are working with native m2t clips and 32bit color mode, your color space is screwed up. You really have to be working with Cineform or some other codec that is treated correctly in order to use the 32bit mode.

It's drop dead easy to TEST!

Render out both and subtract using Vegas.
If the result is 50% grey there's no difference. Can't get much simpler than that.

If it turns out it makes no difference in Vegas and yet it does in Ppro then Adobe must have some mojo working that Vegas doesn't. Although I don't recall Ppro offering a 32bit option. 10bit YUV yes. Maybe you mean AE?

Bob.

Do this test with Cineform source clips though, otherwise you are just going to be looking at the difference between computer RGB and studio RGB color space in the two clips.

The clue to what Darren is seeing could well come from how HD projectors look on the big screens in cinemas. From my own experience they're seriously short in the lumen department and indeed the image can look desaturated and washed out. The artificial boost in saturation from going to 32bit would appear to correct this but not a good solution technically.
If you really want to see how it looks on a big screen plug your player into a DCI compliant 2K projector. Better do that while no one's looking though seeing as how the cinemas don't own them.

Bob.