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jvanhoose  
#1 Posted : Monday, July 19, 2010 5:37:03 PM(UTC)
jvanhoose

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So far, a really good and powerful tool - but a couple of things that I would love to see happen:

1. Color correction/white balance capabilities. These would be most useful. Certainly usable without them, but this would make my life SO much easier. While a lot of this can be done at the source (which is fine), but having a way to centralize some elements of this would be great. If you want to be my new special friend, then integrate some of this with control surface (I would love to be able to tweak things a bit during the production).

2. Some form of hardware "control surface" support (or, at least, midi triggering). I currently have some of the Mackie stuff, but whatever would be fine - just something to make it less "PC" and more "video-ey" (ok, the last is not a word - but you get the idea).

3. If we want to get super cool - then a real-time chroma-key tool would be super good. This is probably (of course) outside the scope of something like this, but having a way to do some overlays of this type would be fantastic.

4. I second the "multiple record" option (the ability to record each input - especially if you can encode timecode into them - would make it fantastic). I am fine with needing the right class of hardware (I could even see using multiple SAS drives - or even a flash-drive array), but having this would be good.

So far, REALLY good (and the price is in the right neighborhood) - but #1 and #2 would make make me throw away the hardware devices and go completely software based.
admin  
#2 Posted : Tuesday, July 20, 2010 5:21:08 AM(UTC)
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Thanks for your suggestions, in response to each:

1. Basic color correction is available by clicking the "i" button under the input and selecting the color adjust tab.
These settings currently only render when the input is playing on the output, but the next version will include an option to render them on the preview windows as well.

2. This was something planned for a future release, I would be interested in knowing what control surfaces you currently use so these can be investigated.

3. The next release due any day now includes better color keying that allows a "tolerance" value to be set for a particular color, effectively allowing a basic chroma key.
There is still a long way to go before this would produce results as good as a professional keyer but it is a start.
jvanhoose  
#3 Posted : Wednesday, July 21, 2010 5:25:04 PM(UTC)
jvanhoose

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1. Hmm - hadn't seen the little "i" before - very good. This looks like it would definitely get us headed in the right direction (now, if I could just pick the white color in the video and have it automatically set the values, that would be super great). This is a good start, but a few things would make this REALLY awesome (these are not dealbreakers - but really NICE to have items):

A. The ability to apply a raw signal gain (this is really good for some productions - as gain on cameras tends to introduce quite a bit of noise - but gain on the console side, less so).
B. The ability to control the traditional brightness and contrast would be good.

Now, if you REALLY want to make my day, integrate the ability to trigger a vectorscope display (so I can dump some test gear) and that would be REALLY good.

2. Currently, I have a couple of different control surfaces (right now, have the Mackie MCU Control devices) for audio. They are certainly fine. Not sure that these would make sense for the video world (I am a pretty big fan of my traditional T-bar's in the hardware video switch world). I know that NewTek has some units (I think theirs is called the RS8) that are fairly specific to video - but I don't know much about it. Personally, I would love to see control surface capabilities implemented like this:

A. I would pick a basic console that could handle at least some of the key elements. The Mackie units have some fairly good control (and motorized faders - which is a really nice trick) - but I would not be tied to this at all (after all, I would deploy something specific for this environment). The main things that I would really want to see controlled are:

a. Trigger cut/transition between sources.
b. Have a way (i.e. T-bar) to control rate of transition (for a manual control).
c. Have a way to trigger an overlay, overlay position, etc.
d. Have a way to select different transitions (obviously, down the road when more sophisticated transitions are supported). I can count the number of transitions that would be really useful on the fingers of 1 hand (with a thumb left over), but the ability to select them live is REALLY nice.

B. Provide a way to map MIDI channels and buttons to various controls inside the V-mix product, that way, if there is some new "super duper" control surface that comes out that is even better - it is just a customization away. This would even be better if this "customization" could be exported as a configuration file that could be posted (that way, if someone spends a bit of time figuring it out, then they could post it and share it with the world).

3. This sounds good. Honestly, 9 times out of 10, I don't need "live chroma" - but the ability to map out a background color range can be quite useful. Like I said before, this is a kind of future need - but would be really nice to have.

Just out of curiosity, are there any plans for incorporating support for some type of "plug-ins" for in-stream video and/or transitions? Just asking - seems there are some out there in the wild, and it would be really nice to have that type of add-on functionality available (could be a killer features against the consoles).
admin  
#4 Posted : Wednesday, July 21, 2010 11:55:38 PM(UTC)
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For the brightness and contrast, you can achieve these levels by increasing the color bars evenly (for brightness) and playing with the black and white stretch bars (for contrast)
Signal Gain would be classed as an increase in brightness.

Are there some examples of these plug-ins you could provide? Most plugins for video would not work in a real-time environment. Also I would be interested in hearing what other transition effects you would like added.

There are plans in the future to release a "Studio" version of vMix that would contain a lot of these high-end features, but at the moment the emphasis is on continuing to make the current set of features work reliably.

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