Hey, im considering buying HC1 in near future. I have no previous experience with editing HDV material im in desperate need of about 4-5 minutes of incompressed HDV footage to test the workflow in Vegas. I want to check if my computer can handle applying effects etc. I was looking for it for few days now, googled but without any results. Can anyone help me with it? It doesnt have to be 4 minutes- any lenght over1 minute will do. Thanks in advance.

Hello Voitek
HDV isn't uncompressed, and if it were, no one would likely have it for download; the file size would be huge. There is a lot of HDV footage here on DVInfo.net, and on the VASST.com website for free download, however.
How fast is your computer? I'd be very surprised if it's too slow for Vegas/HDV.

Hey thanks for your reply.

I dont know if my question was asked in the right way: im looking for few minutes of footage in the same quality as if i would capture it from "my" HC1- in quality that you guys use when editing music videos and such for TV etc. Im fascinated with capabilities of Magic Bullet but one minute of DV footage takes about 6 minutes to render when some MB filters are applied. Most videos people put on the web are compressed for fast download time - i would like to test my computer with a "raw" hdv footage.

About my computer:

Desktop:

Amd Athlon 65 Processor
2800+
1,81 GHz
1.00 Gb Ram

Laptop:
Dell Inspiron

Genuine Intel CPU
T2500 @ 2,00GHz
998 MHz, 1GB of RAM

let me know what you think.

Hi Voitek -
There's lots of footage around - m2t files from ANY HDV camera are going to work fine - you'll have better luck finidng files from the later cameras - hc7 specifically, but it will be the same for you to test. Bigger bandwidth now for such huge files! Poke around this thread for links to files, should find some still active - there was quite a bit when the HC7 hit the market.

Your computer should do OK, I've got a 2600+ single core Athlon - it's doable but tedious. My dual core 3800+/2G RAM is more comfortable. Vegas7 is highly recommended - 6 seemed far more sluggish. That said, if you've got lots of disk space, (and you're going to need it), you can always transcode the m2t files to avi so the CPU doesn't bog down decompressing the long GOP - it goes faster if all the frames are already uncompressed, but the files will balloon about 4x.

Think of it like this - the individual HD frames are about 4x the info of SD, so the HDV/m2t compresses somewhat to get the video on the same tape that miniDV/SD fit on... look up "long GOP" to understand how it achieves this... and if you try to edit native m2t, not only do you have to modify 4x as much info on each frame, but you've also got to recreate the other frames - by transcoding to avi, ALL the frames are created, thus easing the load on your computer...

Editing HDV is definitely a horsepower hog, and the more filters you apply, the longer it will take to render - patience is important!

DB>)