Ok,
I'm considering using Vegas for HDV and blu-ray. I'm reading mostly positive but some trouble about stability etc..
Basically, what's the bottom line?

Is this app. stable on HDV?

thx

Personally I have not had problems, but I am only a casual user.
If you check on the SCS Vegas forum several users are tearing their hair out over it and talking of jumping ship.
Version 8.0c which should have some fixes has been a long time coming with no word from Sony. Full Blue Ray authoring will not be available until this release.
Quad core PC users seem to have the most trouble.
Hope this helps
Malcolm

thx.

I am considering partitioning my Mac Book Pro for windows. so I would be running Vegas under XP with a Core duo 2 Intel processor and 2 gigs of RAM

David,

I've been editing HDV for 2-1/2 years now with V7 and now V8. I built a Q6600 system a few months ago which includes a Sony BWU-200S Blu-Ray burner. It is very stable and produces awesome HD movies. My previous machine was a P4/3.0 ghz, 2.5 gig of RAM with XP and it did fine, just slower rendering times. Your machine should be okay.

Though DVD Architect 4.5 won't author Blu-Ray disks with menus, you can burn to BD from the timeline. Sony does include authoring software with the burner which will suffice for me until the free DVDA upgrade from 4.5 to 5.0 appears.

Disks are too expensive right now so I render to HD files and copy them to a data BD, data DVD or flash drive to my PS3 hard drive and play them from there. I have one BD-RW I re-use for now.

I struggled with a couple of other NLE's years past that caused me huge amounts of freeze-ups, lock-ups, re-installs, complete pc OS installation etc..., until I finally tried Vegas Studio Platinum a few years ago and found relief.

I now use V8 Pro along with DVDA and Cinescore, and wholeheartedly recommend Vegas to anyone who asks.

Jamie

Thx,
that's good to know about the limitations of 4.5
I need to produce a saleable blu ray. Meaning titles etc..I simply will advertise the upcharge for the disc cost. The other drag is the speed of the burners. I'm sure 4 and 8x burners are right around the corner.

DVDA 5.0 was supposed to be out this month, so hopefully soon. THe Cyberlink BD software supplied works fine for menus, but I like the option of using markers in the Vegas timeline for creating sub-chapters (scene selection menus) in my disks with DVDA.

FYI, the BWU-200S is 4X.

Jamie

A-Vegas as-is, will produce "saleable Blu-ray discs". What you don't get are menus. There are many low cost authoring tools (can't be used as replication masters tho) that can burn the AVCHD files with menus.

B-Vegas is very solid with HDV, and has been since 7c. There were early versions of 7 that had problems with more than 80 HDV files on the timeline. Work around was to not shut off the camera as often (giving you very short files) or turning off t/c detection at capture.

There are indeed, a few folks talking of "jumping ship" in very old posts in the Sony-owned forum; research their posts and you'll see they generally have this sort of attitude about everything in the app. Kind of a Chicken-little thing. ;-)

4x burners can be had right now.
I burn at least 5 Blu-ray DVDs a week, if not more often, sourced from either HDV cams or AVCHD cams. They're saleable, just not replicatable. If you can afford the cost of BD replication, I doubt you're using HDV as a source.

OK, then.
Sounds like the weather is clear enough.

thx to all

There were early versions of 7 that had problems with more than 80 HDV files on the timeline. Work around was to not shut off the camera as often (giving you very short files) or turning off t/c detection at capture.

First let me clarify that I am a die-hard Vegas user and for the most part, recommend it highly.

None the less, it is only fair to point out that the problem of Vegas crashing with more than 80 HDV files on the timeline was never totally fixed, The number of clips was just raised significantly. I find this number to be somewhere between one and two tapes worth of clips. In other words, Vegas will still crash if you put two or more tapes worth of split hdv clips on the timeline. You can get around this by capturing tapes as single unsplit files or by prerendering your raw footage into larger clips, but be aware that there are still many people fighting with this problem.

On the plus side, we are expecting Vegas 8c any day now and hopefully this problem will be fixed once and for all. Aside from that I really love Vegas.

sounds good,
thx

I did post two other topics If u have any knowledge about them I'd like to hear.

I've been using Edius more and more for HDV because of Vegas HDV issues, but yesterday I tried using Vegas again to see if it has improved. First I dragged 48 clips to the timeline, which took around 1 minute. Then I pressed play and Vegas crashed out, back to the desktop. Maybe it's a 25P thing, but I think I'll stick with Edius for a while longer.

Richard

Strange! I have had long HDV projects on vegas but it has been very stable so far. Never had a crash but it may be due to dragging so many at one go i guess!

I love the work flow with Vegas but i'm fed up with the preview window. It's my view that Vegas cannot handle HD all that well for correct time playback in the preview window or out putting to second monitor.
Try putting a one hour edit down in HD or even SD at times and if your cutting to music on the beat it is useless i'm finding out.
I have held off a long time moving because i really like the way Vegas works for me, I can edit so fast but because real time playback is slow I will be moving on to either FCS or Avid.
Maybe both these NLE'S handle real time playback better.
I use a Quad core, 4 sticks of Ram etc... it's a purpose built machine for Vegas but Vegas has let me down.

Simon

Simon,

I assume you are setting the preview window to "Full" and "Best". Why do you need that for cutting in music? I know it's nice to see the best resolution when working, but I don't find it necessary, and lower it to the point (usually "full/good" with HDV) where I get full frame rate.

It's asking a lot of any machine to run back and forth to video files and play a snippet here and a snippet there, along with any FX, titles, audio, and music tracks involved, and then want it to play real time in the preview window in "full res".

Perhaps you could pre-render for smoother playback in "full res" and cut in then. I don't and have not pre-rendered, but assume it might help.

I'd be interested to know if other NLE's do so, on same spec machines and file types.

Jamie

Hi Jamie,
I'm cutting an exercise video which has people in time with the audio. I'm at this point in Draft mode auto and this is just giving me 23 frames, Display 524x288x32. I have undocked the preview window.
If i go into preview auto i'm down to 10 frames
This has allways been the major problem for me.

Simon

Wow, sorry you're having that big a problem Simon. That is a sign of something not right.

I don't know all the technical stuff Vegas "likes", but I use a Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphic card, ASUS P5K-E motherboard, Q6600, 2 each 2 gig Kingston KVR800DD2 sticks, and Seagate Barracuda drives (4 total) with Vista 32 bit. It handles HDV nicely, and I keep the preview window pretty much at Good and Full, or Best if not a lot of stuff thrown in to slow things down.

I also do not run anything in background like anti-virus software, auto-updating stuff, or other junk that can eat your pc's resources.

Best of luck,

Jamie

edit: Hey... I hit a hundred!

I use the same system as you except i use XP and the video card and mother board are both Gigabyte.
My last system was a ASUS board but i had problems with the north bridge overheating.

Cheers

I dont think I'm a chicken-little, but I find it hand on heart to say Vegas is solid - (how can it be when the Forum administrator on Sony Vegas forum is asking for beta0-testers to test a fix for vegas hdv capture?). But anyway, last night i rendered a 1 hour school play i'd finsihed shooting - 2 camera shoot with a Sony V1 and a CXanon HV20. Captured in Cineform Neo HDV.

1. 12 midnight -i start render using standard DVDA PAL template
2. I go to sleep
3. At 7am I wake and go to the PC (a typical quad-core XP 2Gb nvidea )
4. There is nothing on the screen - NOTHING but XP - no error message

I restart the render and go to the school embarrassed that I cant show them the dvd i promised (told them the dog chewed my homework).

I come back and same thing. Vegas crashed - no error messages. I didnt change settings and rendered a 3rd time and it completed finally.

So there you go. I just think there is no excuse for any commercial s/w to crash without leaving an error message. I work for the 2nd largest IT system integrator in the world and I see what is required to properly test software - Sony must have 5 people, half a biscuit and a dog testing Vegas............... (hey Sony prove me wrong - invite me to meet your testing staff)

Shame, because I prefer it to Premiere.

Hopefully that's about to change:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=125232

4. There is nothing on the screen - NOTHING but XP - no error message

I restart the render and go to the school embarrassed that I cant show them the dvd i promised (told them the dog chewed my homework).

I come back and same thing. Vegas crashed - no error messages. I didnt change settings and rendered a 3rd time and it completed finally.

So there you go. I just think there is no excuse for any commercial s/w to crash without leaving an error message. I work for the 2nd largest IT system integrator in the world and I see what is required to properly test software - Sony must have 5 people, half a biscuit and a dog testing Vegas............... (hey Sony prove me wrong - invite me to meet your testing staff)

Shame, because I prefer it to Premiere.

Did you look at event viewer?
I had an issuewhere I pre-rendeder supers in 1080p to m2t file and some of them were causing Vegas to crash when I added the file to the main timeline. There was an event listed indicating the mpeg decoder was root cause. I moved the pre-renders elsewhere so Vegas would leave them offline and the issue went away. Needless to say with about 100 clips in a 1:13 show it was quite time consuming, and the underlying issue of why vegas created pre-renders caused thecarsh was not resolved, but I got theproject done by replacing the pre-renders with nested VEG's. BTW got no response from Vegas as to why.
I agree it's esasperating. I now save the file with a new name periodically at logical breakpoints, so if I come in next day and it crashes, I can open older versions and not lose too much work. Grrr.

For the record, I'm using Vegas 7.0e and last night I dropped 6 tapes worth of HDV (.m2t) files on the timeline which was equal to about 120 +/- clips and have been editing and manipulating these without any problems whatsoever.

The only time I've ever run into Vegas crashing would be on rendering some projects but I have later discovered some of the rendering settings I was using caused those crashes and after changing them a bit, everything is just fine.

Jon

FWIW, there's a thread on the Sony Vegas forum right now where one guy (Q6600 quad core, Intel MOBO, Vista 64 with 8G RAM) said:

I now capture with HDVsplit but I capture the tape in its entirety first (with its preview off), then I use HDVsplit's option to scene detect capture files already on the harddrive (audio/video sync switch OFF). I haven't had a render crash in at least 6 months now and I'm rendering big 1440 timelines over to 1920 for Blu Ray.

A few other users are doing the same thing (one long capture) and it seems to have solved a lot of problems.
I'm not saying that this is a cure but it's a solution worth checking out.