On the HDR-SR1 drive, video files are stores as .MTS files, up to 2 GB in size. Filenames are automatically incremented as the camera records, so the 2 GB filesize limit is never crossed.

I’ve found SONY Vegas is picky about importing MTS files when filenames are auto-incremented. Usually they import, but sometimes they have not.

SONY Picture Utility addresses this, by combining the auto-incremented-filename MTS files into bigger-than-2GB .M2TS file(s). And, you have the convenience of having a single video clip, for any single video shot, instead of 2GB fragments.

Many of us have lost, or misplaced our software DVDs which came with our cameras. And unfortunately SONY does not offer this program for download.

If you somehow manage to come across a copy of SONY Picture Utility, I’d grab it just in case you ever have an .MTS file SONY Vegas can’t read.

This represents a slight alternation in the chronology of events, as originally each candidate was introduced by Wil Tigley, then each candidate was allowed to describe their platform, then each candidate closed by addressing 3 questions.

I’ve combined Wil Tigley’s introduction with each candidate’s description of their platform. That way the viewer isn’t trying to remember what a candidate’s bio is by the time they’re finally speaking.

If this is a concern, the raw footage is always available on the Internet Archive.

However, we were beaten in all categories by Dink Pajama Party’s “Normal”, which everyone agrees kicked much ass. (Fun fact: Parts of it were shot in Calgary’s Hackerspace.)

If you get a chance to participate in a Film Race in your city, it is a heck of a fun way to spend 24 hours… plus the nap which follows.

Now, onto the anger.

SONY Vegas isn’t the worst purchase I’ve ever made… it has served me for years, and is pretty good at importing the broad range of video formats I throw at it. It has low overhead, and (big plus) can have multiple instances run at once.

And today’s SONY Vegas, run on my quad-core machine with 7 GB of RAM and 64-bit Windows 7, may occasionally crash, but it tends to recover work nicely and can get the editing job done.

But… the one thing Vegas never perfected: Exporting projects to various rendered formats.

“Gord,” you say, “Maybe you should point this out to SONY, and not be posting it on your blog like a whiny little bitch.”

Yeah, I’ve tried that. I’ve offered to ship a frigging hard drive full of video projects to SONY so they could run unit tests against the various projects to determine why renders fail. I’ve pointed out in the forums that projects can fail to render due to nothing more than project length.

I don’t think they care.

So when the Calgary Film Racing 2010 program guide includes an ad for SONY Vegas, and Calgary Film Racing asked for video projects to be submitted in QuickTime DV format, I was wondering…

Has anyone ever tried exporting a SONY Vegas project to QuickTime DV?

I’ll tell you what happens when I do it. Year after year. On different machines, different Windows operating systems.

The progress bar moves towards 100%, but never reaches 100%. Estimated time to render keeps increasing. Forever.

When you’re trying to meet a Film Racing deadline, that will kill you. SONY Vegas, the product advertised in the Film Racing program guide, will ruin your chances of making the 24 hour deadline.

Due to a bug that’s been there… certainly for the past 3 years I’ve been using Vegas. It is still there, in version 9.0e (64-bit).

That was the deadline-critical project I didn’t quite render this week with SONY Vegas. The less important one was a 90 minute comedy feature.

The feature will not render out using the SONY Vegas MainConcept MPEG-4 variable bit rate encoder. It crashes with an “unknown error”. It can be rendered with a SONY MPEG-4 constant bit rate encoder… which is just great if optimizing for high quality isn’t your thing.

That’s two export fails. In one week. Not one-time crashes. These are consistent, repeatable failures.

Vegas has really improved since I migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit… 32-bit was unusable for long, complex projects. No out-of-memory errors. Just frequent crashes when editing. Persistent crashes when rendering. I used have to render complex projects in tiny fragments, and piece them together in another simpler Vegas project. It isn’t that bad any more.

But the saddest thing about SONY Vegas is that I have no reason to think their QuickTime DV or MainConcept MPEG-4 rendering bugs will ever be addressed. They’ve been there for years. And SONY has no means of replicating these issues, so how can they be expected to fix them?

His July 7th reception at Art Central was my first opportunity to do so. I was too busy taping to get an answer to the questions: “Are you concerned about splitting the (social) progressive vote? Can you pursue Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as mayor for civic elections?” Maybe next time I see him we’ll get to discuss it.

For more information on the Nenshi mayoral campaign, visit the official website.

This footage of Naheed Nenshi is released under a Creative Commons share-alike license, and is available for download and recycling from Internet Archive.

I’d edited his TEDxCalgary talk of course.

This got me thinking about the range of TEDx Talks given in Calgary. Some were extremely pertinent to civic issues, so here’s a brief summary for Calgarians.

Naheed Nenshi – Calgary 3.0

Journalist & mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi (with the help of dataminer Natalie O’Toole) reviews Calgary’s growth patterns, and proposes that we are approaching decision time: What kind of City does Calgary want to become? Los Angeles and Curitiba (Brazil) are offered as potential futures, depending on choices Calgarians make today.

Grant Neufeld – Communicating for Change

Community activist & computer programmer Grant Neufeld shares his learning experiences on how to effect change. Since this blog entry is specifically for matters pertaining to Calgary’s 2010 election I’m skipping ahead in his video (you can of course rewind) to his discussion of http://CalgaryDemocracy.ca, his tool to assist Calgarians with Calgary’s 2010 municipal election by consolidating candidate information.

“Isn’t that something local papers like Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun do?” you may ask. All I know is that during the last civic election, I waited until election day to do research before voting. It was hard to find detailed consolidated information online (to the point I was not satisfied with my own knowledge about the candidates as I voted). Maybe bigger news organizations will provide easier to find, more detailed information for 2010… But I would suggest bookmarking http://CalgaryDemocracy.ca just in case. It is exactly what I was looking for in 2007, and never found.

Jennifer Martin – Innovative Spaces

Fostering innovation in youth isn’t normally thought of as a civic issue (with education being managed provincially). But Jennifer Martin argues that innovation can be encouraged by providing civic spaces for experimentation (her example being Telus Word of Science).

What Telus World of Science does for kids and teenagers, Calgary Protospace provides for young & young-at-heart-but-in-reality-old adults: A space for experimentation and shared learning. These spaces aren’t something I’d specifically expect a mayoral candidate to support in their campaign, but I would expect candidates to share ideas on how they would “foster innovation” in Calgary.

Chris Turner – Great Leap Sideways

Climate change is not an issue I normally associate with municipal elections… carbon taxes, cap-&-trade and fuel economy standards for automobiles are legislated federally & provincially, not municipally. And while a typical Calgarian’s carbon footprint exceeds the Canadian average by 30%, our municipal government is actively pursuing energy efficiency in its operations.

“They’re on it.” In fact (around the world) municipalities are taking action on climate change more aggressively than any other level of government.

However the significant per-captia carbon footprint of Calgary citizens is something which can be addressed by properly managing urban development. Here, author and journalist Chris Turner shares efficiency success stories which Calgary is free to emulate. “It can’t be done” is trumped by “it’s been done”. Calgary’s next mayor won’t be taxing carbon, but he/she still has many opportunities to help Calgarians lower their CO2 footprint.

Again, I’m skipping ahead in Chris’s video (past the argument that climate change is a problem) to his examples of success in improving energy efficiency.

That’s all the TEDx wisdom I can impart regarding Calgary’s 2010 municipal election. Beyond that?

#yycvote is the hash tag for Calgary elections, and it can be easily applied as a twitter search filter.

On April 9th & 10th, Calgary Open Source Software advocates held a 2 day festival to discuss the challenges facing open source software, and promote its adoption.

Interested in OSS, I volunteered to create video archives of the event. Downloadable and Creative Commons licensed recyclable copies of the video coverage can be found on Internet Archive. (Anyone without full Flash support in their browser might need to access the lectures that way.)

But for YouTube hosted copies, I decided to experiment with YouTube Annotation Hyperlinks. They allow you to link from within one YouTube video to another. This allows me to show a brief summary of every event, and let the viewer click through if they would like to learn more.

For anyone denied YouTube Annotation Hyperlinks (currently not supported by iPhone or iPad), here’s an index of lectures. Clicking will open the appropriate YouTube video’s landing page, where you can either watch it, or find embed HTML if you’re looking to propagate your own lecture.

This is mostly because of my fascination with GPS enabled games, which raise the chance of physically bumping in to some stranger who you’ve just been battling with. That, and a resource system reminiscent of M.U.L.E. (yes, I’m old), must make for an interesting social laboratory on the programmer’s end.

For a more detailed summary of the demos, and future DemoCamp scheduling information, head to BarCampCalgary.com.

Who is responsible for these disasters? Who can be held accountable?!? I say, blame the Calgary Underground Film Festival! They made us make these movies!

CUFF runs the 48 hour movie making challenge every year. CUFF promises participants fame. CUFF promises fortune. CUFF promises cold beer. But in the end, it wasn’t fame or fortune I spilled down my shirt.

Countdown to Destruction

Our first CUFF 48-hour challenge saw us finalizing our script after a mere 18 hours of debate. But we had our largest team ever, allowing us to build “sets” and send people out for “food”.

You could say we stalled that first evening, trying to agree on an idea. We all headed for home, agreeing to each return the next morning finished scripts in hand. The next morning, Blaise showed up with a mostly completed script. The rest of us had only brought coffee. So we went with Blaise’s script.

To speed up editing, we tried hooking up a laptop to our primary machine’s firewire port as a means of sharing video data (this was back in the day when Windows still supported 1394 networking). Blaise was able to perform some editing on the laptop, but ultimately the connection was too slow to facilitate true parallel editing with my desktop.

Lesson?
Screenplay by committee does not work. Once an outline is agreed on, then it is possible to write scenes in parallel, but brainstorming should alternate with working-in-silence or else too much time is wasted debating.

Fantasy is Hard

Curtis (”Crom“) Larson was easily fooled into joining our team by lies about our 2008 performance. “No really, we were this close to winning in 2008, Crom!” <snicker/>

Crom said he’d show up to help out Sunday, if we still needed any help by then. It was with this small and cautious first offer of help that Crom would be sucked into the vortex.

At 7pm, as soon as we received our short story parameters (prop, genera, dialog) we raced to the office and began writing scripts in parallel. By 2 am, we reviewed what we had created, and the panic set in.

Little did we know Crom was also writing a script in parallel. He emailed us a copy (a PDF, because that’s how Final Draft users make fun of everyone else), and we knew that despite his inability to be videotaped until Sunday, he would play the lead role.

Saturday we shot every non-Crom scene we could, while Crom laid down guitar tracks (and Cameron Falkenhagen supplied synth). I took some naps over night while others took a whack at editing. On Sunday, we picked up the missing Crom footage on Flamingo Block rooftop.

Then, realizing we were almost out of time, I took the music tracks which had been so lovingly constructed, and jammed them onto the editing timeline like a drunken chef constructing a turducken by force.

The rest, as they say, is movie making history!

(We lost again.)

Lesson?
Background render your current, crappy edit to an uncompressed video file early on, while CPU cycles are plentiful. Come deadline, when SONY VEGAS decides it doesn’t want to export some specific piece of your video project you can focus on exporting that one troublesome section. Then all uncompressed parts can be quickly transcoded together if a deadline panic hits.

Fun House

After 2 consecutive years of failure, and the discovery of Cameron Falkenhagen and Crom’s bodies with “You have failed me for the last time” carved into their foreheads, it was getting hard to find new team mates.

Fortunately, Sarah “@ispeakcanadian” McKenzie hadn’t heard about the bodies! And Blaise Kolodychuk, Elaine Boyling & Colin Kershaw volunteered to create music at home and email tracks to us as MP3s.

Unfortunately, as the team worked in parallel on different scripts, we didn’t quite have an ending we were 100% satisfied with. We figured we’d jump off that bridge when we came to it, and the best thing to do was start shooting what we had.

Tubby Dog was gracious to let us shoot before (and after) opening on Saturday morning. Jeff at The Mustard Seed not only let us use their Coke vending machine, but glamorized cola theft. (Soda pop theft is a gateway crime, so I’m guessing this was a long-term strategy for job security.)

Things were racing along, until Sunday at noon when we agreed the current ending needed improvement. We shot 2 alternate endings simultaneously, and I quickly tacked one onto the end of Fun House. Then I spent 3 minutes stuffing in music that had taken Blaise, Elaine and Colin hours to create. (See a pattern here?)

And for the 3rd time, we made movie making history!

Lesson?
If sleeping on a problem doesn’t present a solution, then running around shooting video probably won’t be conducive to finding an answer either. We knew we had script issues, it was a perfectly parallelizable problem which we could have bounced off multiple writers simultaneously, but we waited until the last day to try address it. We should have taken the time up front to get someone else to solve our script problem, while we shot and edited the solid portion.

2011 CUFF 48-Hour Challenge

A word of warning to anyone thinking of competing in 2011.

There will be no awards left for you after we win them all.

There will be only cold beer and pizza. And even then, we will try acquire all the meat-lover slices for ourselves.

Why not spend the weekend at home with your family? Perhaps you own a dog. They need lots of attention, don’t they?

Hey is that your car over there getting towed?

Rick Castiglione – Storytelling

John Manzo – Third Wave Coffeehouses

Chris Turner – Great Leap Sideways

Decidedly Jazz Danceworks – Wise Apple

Jennifer Martin – Innovative Spaces

Garnette Sutherland – Imaging, Robotics and Surgery

Eden Full – Changemaking & Solar Panels

Lorrie Matheson – Creative Process

Ben Cameron – Live Performing Arts in the 21st Century

Ruben Nelson – What Calgary Must Become

Dan Lui of BNetTV.com provided me access to additional coverage (footage swap!), and access to BNetTV’s mixing board audio. And thanks to Sarah Blue for letting me capture the event.

…as you can see, the promotional video introduces the Hottie Hookups team using “Guy Ritchie on a budget” style title cards. In theory, a Sony Vegas workflow for such dynamic titles isn’t terribly difficult… grab a frame from video, manually trace around the Hottie Hookup developer’s image so they’re masked out. GIMP or Paint.NET can both mask and stylize, so Photoshop is not required.

A single masked out image can then have multiple effects applied, each slightly different looking effect saved as a separate file. Rapidly alternating between different versions of these masked images, at slightly different positions (be sure to use “hold” keyframes, or the images will slide instead of jump), an editor can use Sony Vegas to manually create extremely dynamic title cards.

Unfortunately, the story does not end there… at least while VEGAS PRO 9.0c 64-bit is SONY’s latest release. Because Sony Vegas 9.0c does not like my masked images.

This is an inconsistent issue, and I’m finding it does not matter what format the image is in. What does matter, is the complexity of the timeline at that instant (how many layers, how many masked images), and the pan & scan movement being applied to the video element.

While Hottie Hookups title cards features jerky motion, such an error is best illuistrated by a slow pan and zoom. When previewing the video in Vegas, I see the image flicker and disappear, instead of expanding and filling the screen. This may be some sort of caching error, since I found I needed at least 5 images in any single project before one image would flicker and disappear. Occasionally, I could return to a “trouble” spot on the timeline, only to see the video suddenly preview correctly.

This inconsistency also applies to rendering the final video. Not being able to edit the video in a WYSIWYG manner is bad, but lucking out when editing (so that the image remains visible) does not guarantee your final render will contain the image.

Fortunately, there is a work-around. Unfortunately, it is extremely tedious and makes Sony Vegas a giant time-suck for complex title sequences.

1. Create a new (temporary) Sony Vegas project. Set project resolution either as big as your masked image, or as big as possible.
2. Import your masked image into Sony Vegas.
3. Export your image as a short uncompressed video clip (AVI version 2 with alpha channel enabled).
4. Instead of using images in your “real” Sony Vegas project, use your exported short video clips.

No, seriously. It does not matter if my images are JPG, or PNG. They don’t even have to be high resolution (I see this problem with images only 1280×720). And it doesn’t take much complexity for images to start disappearing.

Those dynamic title cards you see consist of layers of static video, and not images. Because Sony Vegas could correctly render a complex timeline filled with many alpha channeled video clips, but not alpha channeled images.

I realize not everyone uses Sony Vegas for animation, but to quote Gob, “Come on!”

Sony Vegas 9.0c came out in 2009-10 (October 2009). Since then, VideoLAN Media Creator has been announced.

Sony Vegas currently maintains the lead in supporting a wide variety of file formats (AVCHD is why I’m using Vegas today, and not Final Cut), but the only other significant advances I’ve seen Sony make since 6.0 are multicam editing and 64-bit support. How about basic UI issues, like freeing aspect ratio for more than one clip at a time? Or directly exporting old-school FLV?

In fact, I had a complex project on hold for 6 months until I happened to upgrade my Windows box to 64-bit, finally allowing the project to render successfully. In 32-bit land, no memory warning was given. Sony Vegas simply crashed while rendering.

So Sony Vegas 9.0c 64-bit solves one problem, while introducing another. Given VLC Media Player’s fantastic support for playback of various file formats, one has to wonder if Sony Vegas’s strongest feature, broad file format support, won’t be soon surpassed by a free and open source application.

VideoLAN Media Creator will support all 3 OSes (Linux, Mac, PC) just as VLC Media Player does. Give me stability and consistency, I’ll take that over multicam any day.

“$600?!? Come on!”