HDV and Vegas 8 solid?

[David Morgan]

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

[Malcolm Dyer]

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

[David Morgan]

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

[Jamie Hellmich]

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

[David Morgan]

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.

[Jamie Hellmich]

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

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

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.

[David Morgan]

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

thx to all

[Laurence Kingston]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

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.

[David Morgan]

sounds good,
thx

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

[Richard Hunter]

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

[Sean Seah]

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!

[Simon Denny]

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

[Jamie Hellmich]

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

[Simon Denny]

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