I just returned from a week in Iowa, where I attended my cousin's wedding.

I have a Canon HG10 which shoots AVCHD video footage. Three days before the wedding I received an email from my cousin asking me to film the wedding...after making sure she knew this wasn't going to be anything professional, I agreed to film it.

At the last minute, a buddy of mine also decided he wanted to film the wedding with his Canon GL2. I got permission and we shot the wedding. I stayed in the back with a tripod, for a sort of anchor shot, while buddy roamed the sanctuary getting various handheld "b roll" type shots.

Since this entire thing was so last minute, we didn't really know what we were doing. We kept both cameras rolling through the entire service for continuity of audio, we put a Rode Videomic on the GL2 which was out in the sanctuary and seemed to have better, clearer sound.

Anyway, to the heart of the question, now I have the wedding files on my hard drive in the following formats:

Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.0
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Bit rate : 14.9 Mbps
Width : 1 440 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Resolution : 24 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Interlaced
Scan order : Top Field First

Format : Digital Video
Bit rate : 28.8 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Colorimetry : 4:1:1
Scan type : Interlaced
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 2.778
I think mediainfo is reading my AVCHD resolution incorrectly as HDV res.

Anyway, since they're both different formats, how do I make them play nice in Vegas Pro? Can I just drop them in and start working with them as multiple camera angles even though one is DV and the other AVCHD? Or do I need to use something like cineform to transcode them both to compatible formats?

What a mess I have on my hands! I agreed to shoot the wedding as a learning experience for myself, the alternative was that the family was gonna set a camera in the back of the church and turn it on, and go sit back down. I'm not trying to be anything remotely close to a professional, and I realize having one track 16:9 and one 4:3 could be problematic, but there are some really good shots from each camera and so i'd like to cut between them, perhaps adding the blurred pillarboxes to the 4:3, like they do on the news, where it has a gaussian blur of whatever is near the image edges to fill out the 16:9 screen without stretching.

But first I need to figure out what I'm doing with the format. I can play with the rest later.

Tips/Ideas? I'll be doing my due diligence searching and reading, but I don't even know where to start at the moment.

You can just drop them in and go to work. I would do the entire thing is SD, and just set the SD footage from the GL2 to 16:9. That will cut off the tops and bottoms, but the footage will be the correct size to match the other camera then.

You've got some work ahead, but nothing a lot of us haven't tackled 100 times.

wow thanks for the quick reply. It's gonna be a learning process, that's for sure. I was worried about the different formats, I guess making things harder than they were. Does it just crop the middle portion to get 16:9 or can I slide the masking up and down to optimize the location of the cropping?

You can slide the masking up and down if you like. And it's keyframable, so you can have it change over the course of a clip.

Thanks, that will be fun to learn as i get there. I'm a total novice at this software. At this point I can't even get the audio to show up in vegas from the GL2....it's an AVI file with PCM audio according to mediainfo. Just shows up as a video track only. I might have to remux it or something. I could kick myself for just jumping in headfirst like this.

*edit*. I don't know what the problem was exactly, but I took the avi file from the GL2 into virtualdub and just extracted the audio via WAV file and it seems to be working in Vegas by adding the video and audio tracks separately.

Matt, if your camcorder will do it, you may want to consider doing a real-time down convert out of your camcorder to match the GL-2.
This way, everything will (hopefully) be SD 4:3 and you won't have to deal with the headaches of editing AVCHD.

On your audio issue, I might be mistaken but isn't the GL2 a model that can be set to record 4 audio channels (2 stereo pairs)?
If this is the case, it might explain why you're not getting the audio as it might be on ch. 3 & 4.

I don't think my HG10 can downconvert the footage natively, but I have a Quad core Q9400 with 8GB ram and it seems to edit AVCHD pretty well.

I just did my first rough-cut of the ceremony, I just switched between angles on the fly as I watched it, only having to go back once or twice to correct things.

I'm rendering it as a DVD compliant Mpeg to give the family a preview, since they had to miss the wedding and haven't seen it yet. Then I'll go back and fine-tune the cuts, add titles, etcetera.

The GL2 was using a Rode Videomic which outputs mono to each audio channel. I'm not entirely sure it was better quality audio than the built-in mic, but it is very very good, clean sounding. It probably was better than built in since it has the mic suspended with rubber bands (forget what it's called) and that was the roaming camera. Whatever the problem, the workaround worked fine, so I'm happy.

...I have a Quad core Q9400 with 8GB ram ...

Show-off :-)
Ignore my suggestion then as you have AVCHD editing taken care of.
BTW, almost any mic is generally better than the built-in model.