Marcus Van Bavel, pre-eminent software wizard at DVFILM.COM, has updated his Raylight program so that it now includes a plug-in for Vegas to allow Vegas to directly import and read and work with HVX MXF files!

The new Raylight 2.02 version's plug-in lets you drag files directly from a P2 card, or directly from a "virtual card", right onto the timeline, or right into the media bin. No conversion process, no unwrap/rewrap, just immediate editing.

There are currently some limitations (no on-the-fly 24p pulldown removal, etc) but this is a huge workflow improvement for those of us who use Vegas!

So, Barry...

Is Vegas still your primary NLE for P2 footage, or EDIUS Broadcast? Did you never fall for EDIUS too much beyond the excellent p2 integration. You had a Mac didn't you, too? Or, I guess you are onto DVRack HD 2.0 and just working with those avi's right in vegas?

Later,
Jason

Vegas is my favorite NLE for most purposes. EDIUS is brilliant for HVX/P2 integration, and still better than Vegas/Raylight (six streams of HD in realtime in EDIUS off the card; one stream of close-to-realtime from Vegas/Raylight).

DV Rack HD is brilliant, and its files can be directly imported into either.

I had a Mac, but I sold it off. It works well with the footage, but until they get on the bandwagon with true tapeless integration and MXF implementation on the timeline, I'd rather just stick with EDIUS & Vegas.

I'm just glad that my Vegas use with the HVX just got so much simpler! Raylight has always been a good product, but the conversion process really defeats the whole point of a tapeless workflow. Now there's no conversion process, it's much more EDIUS-like in that way.

How is the rendering quality. I 've been diaspointed with dvd quality(after rendering and burning) compared to edius. I do press the blue button before rendering with raylightblue. Am I doing somethig wrong; it was the trial version just before this current version. Thanks.

The readme says that sometimes Vegas doesn't recognize the quality change from pressing the raylight control button; I think you may have to change Vegas' preview window quality to "draft" and then back to "best" (or something like that) to make sure that your change "takes".

How is the rendering quality. I 've been diaspointed with dvd quality(after rendering and burning) compared to edius. I do press the blue button before rendering with raylightblue. Am I doing somethig wrong; it was the trial version just before this current version. Thanks.

I would contact support@dvfilm.com to get an answer to that question, and be prepared to upload a few short samples. In principle Raylight is just as good if not better than the other HD decoders, but the Main Concept encoder and its many settings are also a factor.

Raylight 2 also has a helpful red/yellow frame marking feature that warns you if you've accidentally rendered in some other mode than blue. It's an option in the configuration screen.

There are currently some limitations (no on-the-fly 24p pulldown removal, etc) but this is a huge workflow improvement for those of us who use Vegas!

Would this only be true for DV footage on the HVX - or does the 720p/24p footage also need pulldown removal (ie. stored as 29.97fps with the extra fields?)

Considering the HVX can store directly to a solid state device I can't understand why it woudln't be true 24fps.

You can shoot 24pn in 720 mode, which is just recording those 24fps per second. The other formats are interlaced formats and so, the HVX has to apply one of the 2 pulldowns to conform to that.

Jason

720p is always stored only as progressive; 480 and 1080 are stored as interlaced.

Even so, 720p may have pulldown frames (not fields, but frames); if you shoot in the normal 720/60p mode at 30 frames per second, each frame will be duplicated once.

720pN stores the direct frames, no manner of pulldown at all.