Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

I've recently been comparing the performance of Ulead's HDV codec / plug-in,
now offered for free, with their VideoStudio 9 editing program to 2 other
programs I have been previously using. I am simply amazed at how fast the
Ulead software edits and renders HDV compared to Vegas 6 and Apple's Final
Cut Pro Studio HD.

From all accounts, as well as from my own experience, the rendering speed of
both FCP HD (on a high end dual processor G5) and Vegas 6 (on relatively
fast single processor 3.4 GB P4 HT) is glacially slow, typically 10 times
slower than real time. Using Cineform or Apple proxy codecs, these products
take forever to render.

Much to my utter amazement, Ulead's $79 program blows them totally out of
the water in speed, by a speed up of maybe 5X. This is no small
improvement............and saves many HOURS of rendering time for a typical
project.

To my relatively untrained eye, the resulting quality form Ulead looks
essentially the same as I see from Vegas or FCP. I have not done a lot of
testing yet, but my early findings here are just amazing.

Has anybody else done a comparison, or have any opinions about relative
performance.

Since the Apple and Vegas products cost many times as much as VideoStudio9,
and yet render at 1/5th the speed, I guess I consider this all to be "too
good to be true".......

Any other opinions?

Thanks,

Smarty

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:23:27 -0400, in 'rec.video.desktop',
in article <HDV - Too good to be true? (FCPHD versus Vegas 6 versus
Ulead VS9)>,
"Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:

>I've recently been comparing the performance of Ulead's HDV codec / plug-in,
>now offered for free, with their VideoStudio 9 editing program to 2 other
>programs I have been previously using. I am simply amazed at how fast the
>Ulead software edits and renders HDV compared to Vegas 6 and Apple's Final
>Cut Pro Studio HD.
>
>From all accounts, as well as from my own experience, the rendering speed of
>both FCP HD (on a high end dual processor G5) and Vegas 6 (on relatively
>fast single processor 3.4 GB P4 HT) is glacially slow, typically 10 times
>slower than real time. Using Cineform or Apple proxy codecs, these products
>take forever to render.
>
>Much to my utter amazement, Ulead's $79 program blows them totally out of
>the water in speed, by a speed up of maybe 5X. This is no small
>improvement............and saves many HOURS of rendering time for a typical
>project.
>
>To my relatively untrained eye, the resulting quality form Ulead looks
>essentially the same as I see from Vegas or FCP. I have not done a lot of
>testing yet, but my early findings here are just amazing.
>
>Has anybody else done a comparison, or have any opinions about relative
>performance.
>
>Since the Apple and Vegas products cost many times as much as VideoStudio9,
>and yet render at 1/5th the speed, I guess I consider this all to be "too
>good to be true".......
>
>Any other opinions?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Smarty


What I think you're experiencing is simply the result of three
particular things:

1. Ulead Systems Video Studio 9 was specifically written to take
advantage of HyperThreaded Intel Pentium 4 processor chips. You
mentioned that the system you're using has a 3.4 GHz (you wrote "GB"
but I assume that you meant "GHz" ) P4 HT chip.

2. Although the VideoStudio HDV plug-in, which is a free download for
existing VideoStudio 9 users, treats the HDV MPEG-2 Transport Stream
as an MPEG-2 Program Stream for editing purposes, this process is
completely lossless and is, essentially, native HDV editing. No
intermediate codec is involved, hence no needless transcoding from one
lossy codec to another lossy codec, even one which claims to be
visually lossless. Nor is the program converting "long-GOP" MPEG-2 to
"I-frame-only" MPEG-2 for editing purposes, which itself can be a
time-consuming process.

3. Ulead is proud of their "SmartRender" technology wherein only GOPs
which were changed/altered in some way during the editing process are
re-encoded. This helps, in a big way, to a) maintain the full visual
quality of the original footage and b) speed-up the rendering process.
Of course, SmartRender provides no advantage if you're color
correcting the entire contents of the timeline, for example.

A quick question if I may...

In your VideoStudio tests, are you editing 720p HDV footage or 1080i
HDV footage? I assume the latter, but wanted to be certain. Also, can
I assume that your comparisons to Sony Vegas and Apple Final Cut Pro
all involve the same type (720p versus 1080i) of HDV footage?

--
Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
[Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Thanks for your reply Frank. I have visited your website often and consider
it a superb and truly authoritative / comprehensive place to get HDV
information. Yes, I did mean HT (not GB), but am surprised that
hyperthreading gains much (since the processing doesn't inherently seem
likely to benefit by parallelism) and also since Cineform / Vegas should
have presumably exploited the same HT benefits if they do exist.

Your number 2 point is especially interesting to me. I was unaware that no
proxy or intermediate was being used in the Ulead codec, and this would
indeed account for faster renders, particularly for material which is
unaltered in the edit. The amazing performance, however, seems to take place
even heavily edited material where the long GOP structure ***MUST BE***
broken such as titling and transitions and blasts right through it. The
edited frames are, no doubt, "lumpy" (to borrow the phrase somebody else
coined to describe MPEG streams which have their P and B frames altered). I
guess it is conceivable that Ulead has chosen to do I frame only edits,
effectively taking out hunks as long as one half second, at the edit points,
but they must redo the GOPs for the smooth and continuous effects they
achieve with transitions and smoothly scrolling titles. In addition, since
they do not apparently use a codec which creates a proxy or intermediate,
you would think their editing and previewing would go very very slowly. To
the contrary, their timeline seems way way faster to me than Vegas 6. It
just seems contra-intuitive that they can avoid the conversion to a proxy /
intermediate, achieve fast timeline / scrubbing / preview effects, AND
render so damn fast without trading speeds off the way the others do.

Certainly they must be making some extremely good design decisions in the
algorithms and even better choices in their code / programming since the
performance is so sweet. On an absolute basis, I will readily admit that
Ulead's product is very limited in functionality compared to the other two
products (FCP and Vegas) and does not warrant the high prices of the other
two, but it sure does make a nice, simple, competent, and ***FAST*** HDV
solution. Their Media Studio professional product is probably fast also, or
so I would imagine.

To answer your question, all of my work is with HDV from a Sony FX-1 at
1080i. And thus my comparisons are all using the same footage.


Did I mention that you can arbitrarily mix HDV and normal 720 by 480 MPEG2
as will as high res stills in the same Video Studio 9 time line and Ulead
blasts right through them? Try doing that it FCP............it doesn't know
how to handle it at all as far as I can tell. I have been using Video Studio
since it came out as well as most of Ulead's other consumer programs, and
this version is in a whole different league IMHO. The early versions were
buggy beyond belief, and Ulead's support was awful. Both have changed
dramatically.

I would really like to see if anybody else has played with HDV on VS9 to see
if I am maybe drinking the wrong KoolAid or smokin' something here.....

Smarty




"Frank" <frank@nojunkmail.humanvalues.net> wrote in message
news:a95oi1dg51lse0qn4435798up5hh37qblh@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:23:27 -0400, in 'rec.video.desktop',
> in article <HDV - Too good to be true? (FCPHD versus Vegas 6 versus
> Ulead VS9)>,
> "Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:
>
>>I've recently been comparing the performance of Ulead's HDV codec /
>>plug-in,
>>now offered for free, with their VideoStudio 9 editing program to 2 other
>>programs I have been previously using. I am simply amazed at how fast the
>>Ulead software edits and renders HDV compared to Vegas 6 and Apple's Final
>>Cut Pro Studio HD.
>>
>>From all accounts, as well as from my own experience, the rendering speed
>>of
>>both FCP HD (on a high end dual processor G5) and Vegas 6 (on relatively
>>fast single processor 3.4 GB P4 HT) is glacially slow, typically 10 times
>>slower than real time. Using Cineform or Apple proxy codecs, these
>>products
>>take forever to render.
>>
>>Much to my utter amazement, Ulead's $79 program blows them totally out of
>>the water in speed, by a speed up of maybe 5X. This is no small
>>improvement............and saves many HOURS of rendering time for a
>>typical
>>project.
>>
>>To my relatively untrained eye, the resulting quality form Ulead looks
>>essentially the same as I see from Vegas or FCP. I have not done a lot of
>>testing yet, but my early findings here are just amazing.
>>
>>Has anybody else done a comparison, or have any opinions about relative
>>performance.
>>
>>Since the Apple and Vegas products cost many times as much as
>>VideoStudio9,
>>and yet render at 1/5th the speed, I guess I consider this all to be "too
>>good to be true".......
>>
>>Any other opinions?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Smarty
>
>
> What I think you're experiencing is simply the result of three
> particular things:
>
> 1. Ulead Systems Video Studio 9 was specifically written to take
> advantage of HyperThreaded Intel Pentium 4 processor chips. You
> mentioned that the system you're using has a 3.4 GHz (you wrote "GB"
> but I assume that you meant "GHz" ) P4 HT chip.
>
> 2. Although the VideoStudio HDV plug-in, which is a free download for
> existing VideoStudio 9 users, treats the HDV MPEG-2 Transport Stream
> as an MPEG-2 Program Stream for editing purposes, this process is
> completely lossless and is, essentially, native HDV editing. No
> intermediate codec is involved, hence no needless transcoding from one
> lossy codec to another lossy codec, even one which claims to be
> visually lossless. Nor is the program converting "long-GOP" MPEG-2 to
> "I-frame-only" MPEG-2 for editing purposes, which itself can be a
> time-consuming process.
>
> 3. Ulead is proud of their "SmartRender" technology wherein only GOPs
> which were changed/altered in some way during the editing process are
> re-encoded. This helps, in a big way, to a) maintain the full visual
> quality of the original footage and b) speed-up the rendering process.
> Of course, SmartRender provides no advantage if you're color
> correcting the entire contents of the timeline, for example.
>
> A quick question if I may...
>
> In your VideoStudio tests, are you editing 720p HDV footage or 1080i
> HDV footage? I assume the latter, but wanted to be certain. Also, can
> I assume that your comparisons to Sony Vegas and Apple Final Cut Pro
> all involve the same type (720p versus 1080i) of HDV footage?
>
> --
> Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
> [Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
> Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

"Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote in message
news:iPCdnYzYrp_soLHeRVn-gA@adelphia.com...
> Thanks for your reply Frank. I have visited your website often and
> consider it a superb and truly authoritative / comprehensive place to get
> HDV information. Yes, I did mean HT (not GB), but am surprised that
> hyperthreading gains much (since the processing doesn't inherently seem
> likely to benefit by parallelism) and also since Cineform / Vegas should
> have presumably exploited the same HT benefits if they do exist.
>
> Your number 2 point is especially interesting to me. I was unaware that no
> proxy or intermediate was being used in the Ulead codec, and this would
> indeed account for faster renders, particularly for material which is
> unaltered in the edit. The amazing performance, however, seems to take
> place even heavily edited material where the long GOP structure ***MUST
> BE*** broken such as titling and transitions and blasts right through it.
> The edited frames are, no doubt, "lumpy" (to borrow the phrase somebody
> else coined to describe MPEG streams which have their P and B frames
> altered). I guess it is conceivable that Ulead has chosen to do I frame
> only edits, effectively taking out hunks as long as one half second, at
> the edit points, but they must redo the GOPs for the smooth and continuous
> effects they achieve with transitions and smoothly scrolling titles. In
> addition, since they do not apparently use a codec which creates a proxy
> or intermediate, you would think their editing and previewing would go
> very very slowly. To the contrary, their timeline seems way way faster to
> me than Vegas 6. It just seems contra-intuitive that they can avoid the
> conversion to a proxy / intermediate, achieve fast timeline / scrubbing /
> preview effects, AND render so damn fast without trading speeds off the
> way the others do.
>
> Certainly they must be making some extremely good design decisions in the
> algorithms and even better choices in their code / programming since the
> performance is so sweet. On an absolute basis, I will readily admit that
> Ulead's product is very limited in functionality compared to the other two
> products (FCP and Vegas) and does not warrant the high prices of the other
> two, but it sure does make a nice, simple, competent, and ***FAST*** HDV
> solution. Their Media Studio professional product is probably fast also,
> or so I would imagine.
>
> To answer your question, all of my work is with HDV from a Sony FX-1 at
> 1080i. And thus my comparisons are all using the same footage.
>
>
> Did I mention that you can arbitrarily mix HDV and normal 720 by 480 MPEG2
> as will as high res stills in the same Video Studio 9 time line and Ulead
> blasts right through them? Try doing that it FCP............it doesn't
> know how to handle it at all as far as I can tell. I have been using Video
> Studio since it came out as well as most of Ulead's other consumer
> programs, and this version is in a whole different league IMHO. The early
> versions were buggy beyond belief, and Ulead's support was awful. Both
> have changed dramatically.
>
> I would really like to see if anybody else has played with HDV on VS9 to
> see if I am maybe drinking the wrong KoolAid or smokin' something
> here.....
>
> Smarty
>
>

Humm... you have peaked my interest, I'll have to take a look at
this Ulead product. I have the means to display and store HDV,
but have no source, as of yet. I'm not yet convinced the HD
material available from such as DirecTv is worth what they are
asking for it.

Luck;
Ken

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Ken,
There are some HDV clips of reasonably small size which can be downloaded if
you would like to experiment. The VS9 software is really very competent,
particularly handling MPEG2s of both standard and high def formats. It's
worth a try, and especially worth buying if you have any HDV creation plans
in mind.

Smarty


"Ken Maltby" <kmaltby@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:NvednWYumL36_rHeRVn-uQ@giganews.com...
>
> "Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote in message
> news:iPCdnYzYrp_soLHeRVn-gA@adelphia.com...
>> Thanks for your reply Frank. I have visited your website often and
>> consider it a superb and truly authoritative / comprehensive place to get
>> HDV information. Yes, I did mean HT (not GB), but am surprised that
>> hyperthreading gains much (since the processing doesn't inherently seem
>> likely to benefit by parallelism) and also since Cineform / Vegas should
>> have presumably exploited the same HT benefits if they do exist.
>>
>> Your number 2 point is especially interesting to me. I was unaware that
>> no proxy or intermediate was being used in the Ulead codec, and this
>> would indeed account for faster renders, particularly for material which
>> is unaltered in the edit. The amazing performance, however, seems to take
>> place even heavily edited material where the long GOP structure ***MUST
>> BE*** broken such as titling and transitions and blasts right through it.
>> The edited frames are, no doubt, "lumpy" (to borrow the phrase somebody
>> else coined to describe MPEG streams which have their P and B frames
>> altered). I guess it is conceivable that Ulead has chosen to do I frame
>> only edits, effectively taking out hunks as long as one half second, at
>> the edit points, but they must redo the GOPs for the smooth and
>> continuous effects they achieve with transitions and smoothly scrolling
>> titles. In addition, since they do not apparently use a codec which
>> creates a proxy or intermediate, you would think their editing and
>> previewing would go very very slowly. To the contrary, their timeline
>> seems way way faster to me than Vegas 6. It just seems contra-intuitive
>> that they can avoid the conversion to a proxy / intermediate, achieve
>> fast timeline / scrubbing / preview effects, AND render so damn fast
>> without trading speeds off the way the others do.
>>
>> Certainly they must be making some extremely good design decisions in the
>> algorithms and even better choices in their code / programming since the
>> performance is so sweet. On an absolute basis, I will readily admit that
>> Ulead's product is very limited in functionality compared to the other
>> two products (FCP and Vegas) and does not warrant the high prices of the
>> other two, but it sure does make a nice, simple, competent, and
>> ***FAST*** HDV solution. Their Media Studio professional product is
>> probably fast also, or so I would imagine.
>>
>> To answer your question, all of my work is with HDV from a Sony FX-1 at
>> 1080i. And thus my comparisons are all using the same footage.
>>
>>
>> Did I mention that you can arbitrarily mix HDV and normal 720 by 480
>> MPEG2 as will as high res stills in the same Video Studio 9 time line and
>> Ulead blasts right through them? Try doing that it FCP............it
>> doesn't know how to handle it at all as far as I can tell. I have been
>> using Video Studio since it came out as well as most of Ulead's other
>> consumer programs, and this version is in a whole different league IMHO.
>> The early versions were buggy beyond belief, and Ulead's support was
>> awful. Both have changed dramatically.
>>
>> I would really like to see if anybody else has played with HDV on VS9 to
>> see if I am maybe drinking the wrong KoolAid or smokin' something
>> here.....
>>
>> Smarty
>>
>>
>
> Humm... you have peaked my interest, I'll have to take a look at
> this Ulead product. I have the means to display and store HDV,
> but have no source, as of yet. I'm not yet convinced the HD
> material available from such as DirecTv is worth what they are
> asking for it.
>
> Luck;
> Ken
>
>
>

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 11:59:45 -0400, in 'rec.video.desktop',
in article <Re: HDV - Too good to be true? (FCPHD versus Vegas 6
versus Ulead VS9)>,
"Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:

>Thanks for your reply Frank.

You're quite welcome.

>I have visited your website often and consider
>it a superb and truly authoritative / comprehensive place to get HDV
>information.

I'm pleased to know that it helps people.

>Yes, I did mean HT (not GB),

You meant GHz (giga Hertz, not giga bytes), I think.

>but am surprised that
>hyperthreading gains much (since the processing doesn't inherently seem
>likely to benefit by parallelism) and also since Cineform / Vegas should
>have presumably exploited the same HT benefits if they do exist.

Any given piece of software would have to be purposely designed and
written in a manner such that it could take advantage of multiple
execution units whether in the form of HyperThreading, dual cores,
multiple processors, etc. The trick to achieving parallelism is to
create multiple worker threads which can be executed in parallel but
without conflict in the form of logical out-of-order execution,
deadlock conditions, race conditions, etc. Some types of applications
tend to lend themselves to being written in a multi-threaded manner
more than others. Applications which can only be executed in a
top-to-bottom fashion can't really benefit from running on a system
capable of parallelism, although it some cases - using a dual
processor system as an example - one processor could be assigned to
running the application and the other processor could be assigned to
executing only operating system functions such as memory management,
supervising I/O operations, timer operations, screen updates, etc.

I understand that Vegas itself contains code to take advantage of
parallelism, but I don't know if this is also true of the Cineform
codec.

>Your number 2 point is especially interesting to me. I was unaware that no
>proxy or intermediate was being used in the Ulead codec,

Yes, it's merely (losslessly) converting the Transport Stream into a
Program Stream. The raw data is unchanged, hence the lossless nature
of the conversion from a quality standpoint.

> and this would
>indeed account for faster renders, particularly for material which is
>unaltered in the edit.

That's the SmartRender feature in action, or lack of action, actually,
if you know what I mean.

>The amazing performance, however, seems to take place
>even heavily edited material where the long GOP structure ***MUST BE***
>broken such as titling and transitions and blasts right through it.

I don't know what to say. Maybe someone swapped the innards of your
single processor Pentium 4 system with a dual processor Xeon system
when you weren't looking. (Wouldn't *that* be nice?!)

>The
>edited frames are, no doubt, "lumpy" (to borrow the phrase somebody else
>coined to describe MPEG streams which have their P and B frames altered). I
>guess it is conceivable that Ulead has chosen to do I frame only edits,
>effectively taking out hunks as long as one half second, at the edit points,
>but they must redo the GOPs for the smooth and continuous effects they
>achieve with transitions and smoothly scrolling titles.

They may also be creating open GOPs. This I don't know, but it could
be checked by running the output file through an MPEG datastream
analysis program. In the early days of MPEG, I used to have one or two
such programs, but no longer. They were commonly used to validate MPEG
datastreams for compliance to the standard.

>In addition, since
>they do not apparently use a codec which creates a proxy or intermediate,
>you would think their editing and previewing would go very very slowly. To
>the contrary, their timeline seems way way faster to me than Vegas 6. It
>just seems contra-intuitive that they can avoid the conversion to a proxy /
>intermediate, achieve fast timeline / scrubbing / preview effects, AND
>render so damn fast without trading speeds off the way the others do.

Are you working with short clips, or doing long-form work? This
difference could have a major impact upon performance/responsiness.

>Certainly they must be making some extremely good design decisions in the
>algorithms and even better choices in their code / programming since the
>performance is so sweet.

It would certainly seem that way.

>On an absolute basis, I will readily admit that
>Ulead's product is very limited in functionality compared to the other two
>products (FCP and Vegas) and does not warrant the high prices of the other
>two, but it sure does make a nice, simple, competent, and ***FAST*** HDV
>solution.

Based upon your report, it would seem to provide good value for money,
or to put it another way, a high price/performance ratio, which I
think makes it a good fit for the low-end consumer market to which
it's designed to appeal, where most users are complete novices when it
comes to the technical aspects of video and video editing.

In the world of Windows HDV editing products, the only other low-cost
contender that I know of is Vegas Movie Studio+DVD Platinum Edition
for $129.95.

>Their Media Studio professional product is probably fast also, or
>so I would imagine.

Don't quote me on this, but I understand that MediaStudio Pro version
8 will contain some pleasant surprises.

>To answer your question, all of my work is with HDV from a Sony FX-1 at
>1080i. And thus my comparisons are all using the same footage.

Good, that's what I figured.

> Did I mention that you can arbitrarily mix HDV and normal 720 by 480 MPEG2
>as will as high res stills in the same Video Studio 9 time line and Ulead
>blasts right through them?

You didn't mention that, but I did know that.

>Try doing that it FCP............it doesn't know
>how to handle it at all as far as I can tell. I have been using Video Studio
>since it came out as well as most of Ulead's other consumer programs, and
>this version is in a whole different league IMHO. The early versions were
>buggy beyond belief, and Ulead's support was awful. Both have changed
>dramatically.

All good news.

>I would really like to see if anybody else has played with HDV on VS9 to see
>if I am maybe drinking the wrong KoolAid or smokin' something here.....

Must be the KoolAid. I know I just *loved* the stuff when I was a kid,
despite being constantly told that it would rot my teeth.

>Smarty

--
Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
[Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Thanks for your reply Frank.

I can imagine that there are indeed opportunities for parallel processing in
the rendering process, perhaps something as simple as one thread working B
and P frame generation while the other is doing audio processing of some
sort. My comment was really meant to question why Ulead gets an apparent
speed benefit of (maybe) 5X over others who also exploit multi-threaded
techniques like Vegas.

The SmartRender regions appear to be operating at (essentially) disk I/O
speed, which is to say that the renderer spits out finished output at a rate
which is way above real time. This "lack of action" is certainly key to the
overall speed, since the areas which do not need to be rerendered are output
extremely quickly. Such is not the case for Vegas or FCP. More impressive to
me is the speed the rerendered areas seem to be processed at. Even in the
transitions, titles, etc., the renderer moves very swiftly. I had to check
my settings and file output to be sure I wasn't rendering normal DV footage.
Sure enough the output file was of the proper resolution for HDV, has a
bitrate of about 25 MBits/sec, and looks fabulous.

My hunch is that the renderer is written with a combination of assembler,
very strategic use of the P4 SSE / SSE2 instruction set, an optimizing
compiler (if they did use C++ or some other higher order language
whatsoever), and hand optimized code for the tightest loops where the real
work is done. The best aspect of all of this is the very likely prospect
that HDV NLE software will support pretty robust workflow without the need
for hardware acceleration. Such was not my impression when working with the
other (Vegas and FCP) products, whose previews and rendering are far too
slow for efficient production.

I too was a KoolAid junkie, and would actually eat the powder before it even
went into the pitcher. My mom would therefore mix it up before I could get
my hands on the envelope........and she also discouraged us from drinking
the stuff. I'm sure some of the amalgam in my mouth owes it origin to all
this junk.

The price/performance of this UV9 product is really quite remarkable. I have
only done relatively short clips to make comparisons between the 3 products,
but I don't see why they shouldn't scale about linearly for longer jobs. I
will do more experimenting and see what I find, and I will certainly follow
other reports here and in other forums to see if my Dell has some magic
affinity for UV9.
I feel like the guy who (believes he) is getting 60 miles per gallon in his
Hummer H2................

Smarty





"Frank" <frank@nojunkmail.humanvalues.net> wrote in message
news:1s3pi1l9s4rkct5agra1sei63i3ov1vhpd@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 11:59:45 -0400, in 'rec.video.desktop',
> in article <Re: HDV - Too good to be true? (FCPHD versus Vegas 6
> versus Ulead VS9)>,
> "Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:
>
>>Thanks for your reply Frank.
>
> You're quite welcome.
>
>>I have visited your website often and consider
>>it a superb and truly authoritative / comprehensive place to get HDV
>>information.
>
> I'm pleased to know that it helps people.
>
>>Yes, I did mean HT (not GB),
>
> You meant GHz (giga Hertz, not giga bytes), I think.
>
>>but am surprised that
>>hyperthreading gains much (since the processing doesn't inherently seem
>>likely to benefit by parallelism) and also since Cineform / Vegas should
>>have presumably exploited the same HT benefits if they do exist.
>
> Any given piece of software would have to be purposely designed and
> written in a manner such that it could take advantage of multiple
> execution units whether in the form of HyperThreading, dual cores,
> multiple processors, etc. The trick to achieving parallelism is to
> create multiple worker threads which can be executed in parallel but
> without conflict in the form of logical out-of-order execution,
> deadlock conditions, race conditions, etc. Some types of applications
> tend to lend themselves to being written in a multi-threaded manner
> more than others. Applications which can only be executed in a
> top-to-bottom fashion can't really benefit from running on a system
> capable of parallelism, although it some cases - using a dual
> processor system as an example - one processor could be assigned to
> running the application and the other processor could be assigned to
> executing only operating system functions such as memory management,
> supervising I/O operations, timer operations, screen updates, etc.
>
> I understand that Vegas itself contains code to take advantage of
> parallelism, but I don't know if this is also true of the Cineform
> codec.
>
>>Your number 2 point is especially interesting to me. I was unaware that no
>>proxy or intermediate was being used in the Ulead codec,
>
> Yes, it's merely (losslessly) converting the Transport Stream into a
> Program Stream. The raw data is unchanged, hence the lossless nature
> of the conversion from a quality standpoint.
>
>> and this would
>>indeed account for faster renders, particularly for material which is
>>unaltered in the edit.
>
> That's the SmartRender feature in action, or lack of action, actually,
> if you know what I mean.
>
>>The amazing performance, however, seems to take place
>>even heavily edited material where the long GOP structure ***MUST BE***
>>broken such as titling and transitions and blasts right through it.
>
> I don't know what to say. Maybe someone swapped the innards of your
> single processor Pentium 4 system with a dual processor Xeon system
> when you weren't looking. (Wouldn't *that* be nice?!)
>
>>The
>>edited frames are, no doubt, "lumpy" (to borrow the phrase somebody else
>>coined to describe MPEG streams which have their P and B frames altered).
>>I
>>guess it is conceivable that Ulead has chosen to do I frame only edits,
>>effectively taking out hunks as long as one half second, at the edit
>>points,
>>but they must redo the GOPs for the smooth and continuous effects they
>>achieve with transitions and smoothly scrolling titles.
>
> They may also be creating open GOPs. This I don't know, but it could
> be checked by running the output file through an MPEG datastream
> analysis program. In the early days of MPEG, I used to have one or two
> such programs, but no longer. They were commonly used to validate MPEG
> datastreams for compliance to the standard.
>
>>In addition, since
>>they do not apparently use a codec which creates a proxy or intermediate,
>>you would think their editing and previewing would go very very slowly. To
>>the contrary, their timeline seems way way faster to me than Vegas 6. It
>>just seems contra-intuitive that they can avoid the conversion to a proxy
>>/
>>intermediate, achieve fast timeline / scrubbing / preview effects, AND
>>render so damn fast without trading speeds off the way the others do.
>
> Are you working with short clips, or doing long-form work? This
> difference could have a major impact upon performance/responsiness.
>
>>Certainly they must be making some extremely good design decisions in the
>>algorithms and even better choices in their code / programming since the
>>performance is so sweet.
>
> It would certainly seem that way.
>
>>On an absolute basis, I will readily admit that
>>Ulead's product is very limited in functionality compared to the other two
>>products (FCP and Vegas) and does not warrant the high prices of the other
>>two, but it sure does make a nice, simple, competent, and ***FAST*** HDV
>>solution.
>
> Based upon your report, it would seem to provide good value for money,
> or to put it another way, a high price/performance ratio, which I
> think makes it a good fit for the low-end consumer market to which
> it's designed to appeal, where most users are complete novices when it
> comes to the technical aspects of video and video editing.
>
> In the world of Windows HDV editing products, the only other low-cost
> contender that I know of is Vegas Movie Studio+DVD Platinum Edition
> for $129.95.
>
>>Their Media Studio professional product is probably fast also, or
>>so I would imagine.
>
> Don't quote me on this, but I understand that MediaStudio Pro version
> 8 will contain some pleasant surprises.
>
>>To answer your question, all of my work is with HDV from a Sony FX-1 at
>>1080i. And thus my comparisons are all using the same footage.
>
> Good, that's what I figured.
>
>> Did I mention that you can arbitrarily mix HDV and normal 720 by 480
>> MPEG2
>>as will as high res stills in the same Video Studio 9 time line and Ulead
>>blasts right through them?
>
> You didn't mention that, but I did know that.
>
>>Try doing that it FCP............it doesn't know
>>how to handle it at all as far as I can tell. I have been using Video
>>Studio
>>since it came out as well as most of Ulead's other consumer programs, and
>>this version is in a whole different league IMHO. The early versions were
>>buggy beyond belief, and Ulead's support was awful. Both have changed
>>dramatically.
>
> All good news.
>
>>I would really like to see if anybody else has played with HDV on VS9 to
>>see
>>if I am maybe drinking the wrong KoolAid or smokin' something here.....
>
> Must be the KoolAid. I know I just *loved* the stuff when I was a kid,
> despite being constantly told that it would rot my teeth.
>
>>Smarty
>
> --
> Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
> [Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
> Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Smarty wrote:

> Thanks for your reply Frank.

Etc.

Fascinating discussion. I put a blurb about the apparent attractiveness
of the Ulead program in a thread in rvp, called "Video Studio 9 Goes
HD." This is what I was looking for, from someone in the know. Thanks.

Gary Eickmeier

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Gary,

I hope my observations are comparable to others who are trying out this new
software. I am still scratching my head wondering if my experiences are
typical.

I am eagerly looking forward to magazine reviews and other independent
commentary before I consider this conclusion to be legitimate. I subscribe
to everything I can find on HDV editing, and have not yet seen any other
reports to compare. I sure hope that somebody generates a published and
standardized test to directly compare render times, preview capabilities (do
effects and transitions require a delay to view and if so how long it
takes), etc.

Smarty


"Gary Eickmeier" <geickmei@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:LreXe.68760$4i6.31245@tornado.tampabay.rr.com...
>
>
> Smarty wrote:
>
>> Thanks for your reply Frank.
>
> Etc.
>
> Fascinating discussion. I put a blurb about the apparent attractiveness of
> the Ulead program in a thread in rvp, called "Video Studio 9 Goes HD."
> This is what I was looking for, from someone in the know. Thanks.
>
> Gary Eickmeier

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Smarty wrote:

> Gary,
>
> I hope my observations are comparable to others who are trying out this new
> software. I am still scratching my head wondering if my experiences are
> typical.
>
> I am eagerly looking forward to magazine reviews and other independent
> commentary before I consider this conclusion to be legitimate. I subscribe
> to everything I can find on HDV editing, and have not yet seen any other
> reports to compare. I sure hope that somebody generates a published and
> standardized test to directly compare render times, preview capabilities (do
> effects and transitions require a delay to view and if so how long it
> takes), etc.

What is most interesting is I thought they HAD to transcode the video
into I frames in order to edit. If what you say is true, perhaps Ulead
is just smarter than all the rest. I love it!

Gary Eickmeier