Ok, my head is going to explode.....

I have just made the jump from the DV world (XL1s) into HDV (XL-H1a) and i'm having a nightmare.

To cater for the jump to HDV i've also bought a new PC which is a Dual Core 9850 AMD Phenom, with 8meg memory and i'm using Vegas 8.0c (vista sp1). Even on this super quick machine, attempting to work on M2T files on the timeline is pretty choppy.

So to allow me to work quicker, i've used TMPGENC to re-encode my raw M2Ts to 320x240 raw avi's to edit with. Once i've done editing, i'm renaming the folder with the proxy files in and pointing vegas to the original M2Ts ready for render.

Now, this is where the problems begin....after reloading up vegas and pointing it to the M2T file, every single shot of the edit is about 1.5 seconds adrift of the original edit...ie...a shot begins 1.5 seconds late and ends 1.5 seconds late, so every single edit in the veg file is incorrect.

Any ideas anyone ? I've edited the whole thing twice and even re-captured off the camera but i've run out of ideas. The thought of manually adjusting every clip by 1.5 seconds each way is going to take me days, what am I doing wrong ??

I only write this, Carl in the event you are able to return your machine and with no disrespect intended to it or to you. Your PC sounds nice, but the choppiness would pretty much be gone if you used an i7 processor. I barely have any choppiness with my Q6600 overclocked but for HD rendering it is still very slow. The 9850 Black you have isn't bad, but it is merely a revision of AMD's older chip that is actually being released very late in the game.

I know this doesn't answer your question, but I'm sure someone will come along with something to offer that relates to what you asked.

Good luck!

Yes, I hear lots of good things about the i7, and one is definately on my wish list !

I edit with the M2T files in Vegas 8.0c and the only time I have choppiness is when there are transitions, fades, etc and my preview settings are set to Best/Full and my project settings are NTSC DV (Widescreen) Try setting the preview window lower and see if you can edit any better. Also try setting your project to HDV. That also makes a difference.

One of the flaws of Vegas is that it doesn't dedicate enough processing power to the playback. On my quad-core, there is usually only one core actually doing anything.

Supposedly they fixed this with the 64 bit version of Vegas.

Hope this helps...