Nah, it's the upgrade. I'm still within my 12 months' subscription.

I just did a Macrium image backup. So, I can revert if there's a major problem.

Thank you.

@Craigster

Hi.

Some upgrades are available up to three years after the end of support.

You can also opt to buy a program within the upgrade period.

Not sure a backup will work once the new program is registered and activated due to the nature of the internet based verification process. I don't know that for sure but seems possible.Then again there should be two licences available for each version and one should still be available assuming that would still be on the server as unused.

In the long run I think it is possible to ask Magix to roll back to a previous version even if they refuse a refund. That should be well within their power to accommodate.

Ray.

@Craigster

Yes, as you have found out, upgrading VPX 13 to VPX 14 will automatically remove the earlier version, not always a "good idea"!

However, for me at least, and I believe for @browj2 also, VPX 14 has proved to be a very great improvement over its earlier brother. So, again speaking entirely personally, I have no regrets that 14 has removed 13!

HTH

Jeff
Forum Moderator

@Craigster, @emmrecs

Hi

. . . . However, for me at least, and I believe for @browj2 also, VPX 14 has proved to be a very great improvement over its earlier brother. . . . .

I also have seen improvements in the speed of loading and performance over VPX13, in particular preview playback is much smoother.

John EB
Forum Moderator

@Craigster

Hi,

If you use third party transitions, there is a new bug. The third party interface doesn't see one of the sides, usually the left side, making it hard to use.

I have noticed that sometimes the image on the screen sticks, meaning that moving along the timeline does not change in the Preview Monitor. Solution, select a different movie then go back. It may just be the material that I'm working with is a bit dodgy to start with.

On the plus side, the new controls in the Size/Position/Rotation are great.

Otherwise, I haven't found anything nasty.

John CB

That layout is such a waste of screen real estate. I know VPX has two monitor windows, but it looks like we're being forced into using two physical monitors (or having to scroll down to see the lower part of the active Effect area).

@AAProds

Hi,

The layout is the same as VPX13 and MEP2022 except for the addition of the left/right top/bottom adjustment boxes. Yes, you have to scroll down or make a bigger window, like many other effects. Remember that Rotation was combined with Size/Position requiring scrolling down to see all effects.

That is one reason that I use 2 monitors.

John CB

@AAProds

Hi Al.

In what way? I can make either monitor full screen for a short while by just double clicking on it and then a double click to return to fitting into the editor. I normally use the second screen for the timeline or audio mixer, not for an enlarged monitor view. I do agree working with a single screen is difficult but I find the same problem with MS. That effect area box can be enlarged as well both horizontally and vertically (Not sure about VPX 14). You can also set up different project views to switch between. I often do the latter with other programs as well.

Ray.

Can anyone speak to size of files that VPX 14 can handle? I am working on editing a 2-camera interview (about 45 minutes of usable footage, in 3 shots). I have double-tracks of 1080p MP4 recordings, specifically:

- Camera 1 (Fujifilm X-T4) shooting (accidentally) at 200mbps

- Camera 2 (Fujifilm X-S10) shooting at 100mbps

- line out ATEM Cam 1 redundant copy recording variable bitrate averaging 72mbps

- line out ATEM Cam 2 redundant copy recording variable bitrate averaging 55mbps

plus PCM/wav audio files (4 above for timing references, plus my Samplitude-mastered audio track)

So, maybe 300GB of footage total being accessed. From 64GB available RAM. Usually when I've checked Task Manager, about 50% of that (around 32GB) is being accessed.

So, simple editing has been a nightmare. At least 10 crashes. Averaging 10-30 minutes of work between each crash. I cannot connect the crashes to any particular function that I'm doing. (i.e. making a cut, moving the timeline, zooming, etc.). I'm not aware that it has crashed twice for the same thing.

Tomorrow I need to finish this project. Can Video Pro X simply not handle large 1080p files with large framerates? (How in the world then can it handle 4K, 6K, 8K???)

I'm thinking at the moment that I might simply delete the original camera files and work with the ATEM backup copies -- simply because they are smaller.

Do I need to take the time to create and then use Proxy files for a project with large files?

Thank you for any advice.

Craig

@Craigster

Hi

File size has little to do with the performance as the video is not 'loaded' into the program all at once what you see on the screen is a 'reference' to the video which is loaded as required in real time.

Assuming your computer specs have not changed from one of your previous posts, I would suggest you put the in your Profile, Signature to make it easier to get them. there are a couple of issues that can cause the problems you are having with editing:

1. The two ATEM recordings being variable framerate - constant framerate is the standard for video, try converting these with a video converter, such as Handbrake, to Constant Frame Rate
   
   As these are 'redundant copy' recordings are they on the timeline for the editing? If so is this necessary?
    
2. 1080p at 200 and 100 Mb/s is going to put a load on the system - I would expect this resolution bitrate to be in the 16 - 24 Mb/s range unless they are All-Intra recordings.

Proxy files would help, as would turning on the Lightning symbol bottom right of the Program preview screen it is blue when on.

VPX handles 4K at 100 Mb/s easily depending on your systems specifications and settings in program.

HTH

John EB
Forum Moderator

@Craigster @johnebaker

Hi.

I agree with John about the variable frame rate files. If you don't need them, get rid of them.

For what editing purpose are they there? They will put a lot of additional calculating stress on the project in real time and I suspect is the main causes of your crashes.

The 100Mb/s files I have had no problem with in the past at 1080p. I've run up to 10 tracks.

It starts to become more problematic when I up resolution to 4K and above.

The higher up the resolution scale you go the slower any machine running it will be. For some the slowdown would hardly be noticeable while for others it will get painfully slow.

I have downloaded 8K files from the net to see how my machine handles it. It works without crashing but is far from a happy experience.

Each new version of MEP / MMS / or VPX that comes out is going to be tuned to make use of the latest component combinations. I expect, and so far have experienced, a hit on performance in one department or another with each subsequent release. Maybe one bit of the program responds better but another bit may be a lot worse. Some people will experience better performance while other will experience the opposite depending on both their computer specs and the way they set up and use their editors.

Ray.

John E and Ray --

Thank you both for speaking in. I will follow your tips! Heading back to start again now.

I will follow up here!

My mistake (I've corrected it above). My files are all Constant Frame Rate. The ATEM files are Variable Bitrate.

Meanwhile, I've deleted the largest files (removing the redundancy). And have turned on Lightning, and added my signature. Here we go.

@Craigster

Hi.

If those ATEM files are from Black Magic cameras I'm fairly sure they are not a supported file format for VPX.

I'm not 100% sure but that sounds like they need to be in Resolve to edit if that is what they are.

Ray.

I have a Win 10 machine with VPX 13 installed and I started a new project this morning and had a strange problem that I never had before. I put a piece of music, a WAV file, on the timeline and when I started to play it, the playback audio disappeared at 30 seconds and came back at 50 seconds, and then played to the end I tried other pieces and the same thing happened. I put it in the trim window and it played all through, no problem. It also plays fine if I go to the file and double click it. I also reinstalled VXP13, same problem. I have MEP16 on another Win 8 computer and it plays just fine. I don't even know where to start on this one.

Don

@Craigster

Hi.

If those ATEM files are from Black Magic cameras I'm fairly sure they are not a supported file format for VPX.

I'm not 100% sure but that sounds like they need to be in Resolve to edit if that is what they are.

Ray.

 

 

Nah. Fujifilm cameras. MP4 files.

@Craigster

My bad and a stupid question. You mentioned the cameras earlier.

I've just never heard reference to ATEM files before and there is little information on the internet about them.

Trying to look up information, If I'm correct (and I may well not be) it is an outputted signal that can be captured by an external device. If so what did you capture the signal to? Using what?

Ray.

Black Magic Design makes the various ATEM units. In this case, I'm using a sweet ATEM Mini ISO. The "iso" part stands for "isolated" channels that get recorded to an SSD. In other words, it will record to SSD each camera and the mixed audio source (plus camera audio that I use simply for audio alignment) to separate files. So, in this specific example, I'm sending 2 cameras and 3 audio channels to the ATEM for backup recording. The primary recordings are within the 2 cameras (for Video) and 3 microphones into a MixPre3 by SoundDesigns for audio -- in both cases to SD Cards. If the cameras shut down or if I forget to record the audio, the ATEM provides backup sources for both, so I don't need to re-record the session. (After making mistakes on projects, I've come to embrace redundancy). It's all running at 1080p as MP4 video and 24-bit .wav audio.

So, I brought the original camera files plus ATEM duplicate camera files into the project.

Well, having removed the redundant files, my crashes have slowed a bit. Running maybe hourly now.

Just a moment ago, simply being online, VPX 14 just shut down. Another crash -- not even doing anything on the program!

So, one of the Event Log errors mentioned memory paging. I remembered I generally run with the paging file disabled (for most of 20 years -- seems Samplitude used to be known to run better that way), especially with 64 GB RAM. But, I re-booted and set it to Auto.

I can't say the crashing time has changed. Still every hour or so.

But now there is a show stopper. This is now showing up every time I press PLAY. And I have to hit OK or the X 10-20x to make it go away. And then moments later it returns.

I'm at a loss. Project almost completed. But...

So, I manually added paging to every internal drive (except my samples and externals), rather than just going with Auto. (So, the accumulated paging expanded from 9k to like 45k). So far no crashes. Was able to complete the project. We'll see...

One thing I'm noticing in X14: The audio waveforms are much less reliable visually. Particularly useless on several tracks where audio and video are sharing 1 track (i.e. soft audio showing up as massive blocks -- completely unrelated to actual audio waveforms). Much more accurate once separated to it's own audio track. But still inconsistencies with drawings. I hadn't noticed this being so problematic before (with X13). But also these were larger files (by bitrate) than I've ever used before.

Thanks, guys, for some tips and for bearing with me.

@Craigster @johnebaker

Hi.

I'm not on VPX 14 yet. Still happy with 12.

I have noticed over each release that the page filing system has become more problematic. So far though I have only had to do this for the C: drive. A lot of data seems to get preloaded onto the C: drive depending on the file type. 10 bit log files seems to keep disk activity going for much longer than 8 bit files. The same is true for 24 bit audio compared to 16 bit audio. How much free space is on your C: drive for these Constantly changing swap files?

Most of my videos are below fifteen minutes. I don't know the implications of running longer projects but it is my understanding is it is not as great as using files that use more data per second or use codecs with more complex encoding.

John EB and myself have recently been looking into the problem of stuttering video on playback (Without having to use proxy files) to try to find out differences between our systems as his machines don't suffer as much as my own machine does. I was convinced it was mainly the the difference between the additional power of his RTX 2060 over my 1650 Super graphics card. Now I'm not so sure.

One thing we have noticed is differences in disc access times and the amount of buffer cache a drive has.

My WD blacks are quite old and although 7,200 rpm as opposed to John's newer 5,400rpm drives, his drives have more than four times the amount of buffer cache. I think it may be as much as eight times the amount. There have also been huge leaps in the technology of the read heads with much faster and accurate access times. So I'm ordering a new internal HDD with a much larger buffer memory than any of my current drives to see if things improve. I should have an answer to that by Wednesday.

24 bit audio files would be overkill for an interview soundtrack. Conversations never get that loud. What could make a difference to quality would be the sampling rate if recorded higher. All you are doing with 24 bit is increasing the noise floor of the recording in the quiet sections, especially if you are not using the very best microphones. The same goes for using an automatic record level. Much better to manually set a record level to maximum and then pull it back by six db for some headroom and if you have the ability, set a soft limiter to -.01.

Whatever you record at, the finished file will never be exported using more quality than a 16 bit pcm audio track.

As for the difference in the appearance of the audio waveforms. Upload a small clip (Five seconds or so) to Google drive and I'll put it on my timeline and show it here for you to compare to what you are seeing if you wish.

Ray.

@Craigster

Hi

The improvement with setting the paging files for the drive manually and the error message would suggest there is an issue with the Windows installation and/or the Visual Studio C++ Redistributables eg mismatched DLL files.

Try running a system check on the Windows installation - see this tutorial and do steps 3 to 11.

For the Visual C++ see this support article

John EB