Vegas and HD

Rob Lohman · April 13th, 2004, 02:16 PM

Yes it does. How many tracks it can do realtime depends on your
CPU mostly but also on your harddisk (the more DV streams the
more it needs to read).

Again, give the demo a try to see for yourself (if you have access
to a PC).

Al Falaschi · April 13th, 2004, 03:21 PM

Vegas gives you RT previews for as many tracks and effects that your processor and amount of RAM can crunch. There is no "limit."

I do not have a blazing system so I can preview only a hand full of tracks at full res.

You can also change the the preview process between draft, preview, good and best. They are all 720 x 480 60i. I have found that I can get more tracks at almost an unnoticeable loss of quality on the preview setting.

If you start to add more tracks than the processor can handle, it dumps the frame rate down to compensate. There is an indicator at the bottom of the preview window that shows you how many fps you are seeing. I can view a couple tracks before I see the frame rate dip below 29.97.

Steve Crisdale · May 1st, 2004, 08:38 AM

Vegas 4 is proving to be the best NLE to handle HD captures/output I've encountered.

No real need for any HD plug-ins (unless you want the latest WMV9 HD encoder) and it works marvelously with HD10 footage. Just change the file extension .m2t to .mpg and import!!!

It's support for HD import of almost every flavour is outstanding, and it's HD output formats and ease of customising output without needing a techo's degree to select the best options is a satisfying relief compared to almost every other HD encoding module available....

Mauricio DelaOrta · May 27th, 2004, 11:44 PM

What difference would there be between importing the m2t files directly in vegas and using a plugin such as ConnectHD?

Steve Crisdale · May 28th, 2004, 08:34 AM

<<<-- Originally posted by Mauricio DelaOrta : What difference would there be between importing the m2t files directly in vegas and using a plugin such as ConnectHD? -->>>

Just my observations....others may have found otherwise.

Just by converting the m2t extension to mpg makes the HD10 footage easily openable/editable within Vegas 4. I haven't loaded any more than 3 clips into the timeline, so I can't report any performance degradation from doing more. I also have not used Connect HD or Aspect HD so I can't really comment on performance differences, though for my money Vegas native handles HDV just fine!! (I've also edited 1080i HD progam stream captures from a HD DTV card in vegas without any problems).
Connect HD may make a difference, but until there's a demo version available to see whether there are real world gains I'd suggest trying Vegas anyway.

BTW Vegas 5 can handle m2t's directly from the cam (or so Sony claims..)....so no need to use the JVC capture utility unless you really want to. I'll be giving this a try soon, so I'll report what I find as soon as I know.
The important thing to note is that with almost every passing day some new HDV capable enhancement is being announced or implemented, so just keep an ear to the ground and an eye on the web to see what may make your HDV editing life easier.....

Bryan Suthard · May 28th, 2004, 09:33 AM

Do you know if there is a way to output transport streams from Vegas 4 directly? I know it is possible in Vegas 5.

Steve Crisdale · May 28th, 2004, 08:15 PM

<<<-- Originally posted by Bryan Suthard : Do you know if there is a way to output transport streams from Vegas 4 directly? I know it is possible in Vegas 5. -->>>

Vegas 4 doesn't support m2t out unfortunately. Vegas 5 does, though I haven't tried it's ability to do so yet....

Ben Buie · May 29th, 2004, 10:15 PM

Actually Vegas 4 does export .m2t, there is a place in the settings for the Main Concept MPEG2 encoder to tell it to output a transport stream instead of a program stream. There is info on Cineform's webpage on exactly what settings to use.

For what it is worth, editing the .m2t natively is not a great idea, unless you are a really patient person. Also, there is more generation loss with editing MPEG2 natively because of all the uncompressing and recompressing going on all the time.

If you can afford it get ConnectHD. Even on our Athlon XP 2000 with 1GB of RAM and regular IDE hard-drives (no RAID or SATA), we can edit and playback the Cineform HD AVI format at 30fps with the preview window at half size (640 x 360) on the Best preview setting. Even with an hour of footage on the timeline with 6 or 7 tracks of audio and video.

On the same system trying to work with the .m2t files natively playback would be <10fps, and after adding many clips to the timeline as little as 2fps. The system bogs down really fast with MPEG2.

Just my 2 cents.

Bryan Suthard · May 29th, 2004, 11:31 PM

Ben,

I have read the note from Cineform but in my version of 4.0d, I cannot see the setting to choose Program Stream or Transport Stream on the Main Concept setting options. Please let me know what I may be doing wrong or is there something I else I need to set?

Funny you should mention, I was thinking of going with ConnectHD but to upgrade Vegas at the same time is too expensive a proposition for me.

Graham Bernard · May 30th, 2004, 12:16 AM

Elmer your comment, " . . . I need as many as possible since I do alot of motion graphics on multiiple tracks and not having to render before viewing would be essential." . .This is a bit of a non starter, as NLEs as far as I can gather need to render graphics. They need to do this from one frame to another as you apply some "effect" . .an effect might be moving the frame from one pixel position to another . . that NEEDS to be rendered. Now, when you add another track then this is"doubled-up", it may be more, I'm no programmer. Now, you asking for multiple Graphic tracks maybe doing track motion and changes in colour and depth of contrast. This is a lot of maths going on. A lot of maths that needs to maybe then be sent via a firewire connection to an analogue monitor - Lots and lots of work for a computer here!

My experience of Vegas 5 DVDA is that - as with previous incarnations of Vegas - you get as many tracks as you want. The trade off is this extra extra rendering needed to get the thing moving about. BUT, Vegas does allow for various "levels" of detail quality viewing., This ranges from "Best" through "Good", "Preview" and finally "Draft". Each of these quality step-downs allow for more and more "real" time viewing, at the "cost" of quality. Another thing is to set the viewing screen to as small as you can get away with. Now here's the thing. It's a BIG thing. AT LEAST VEGAS ALLOWS YOU TO EXPERIMENT with these stages! THAT'S the strength of Vegas .. . that's why I love it, that's why I've gone from V3 up to V5 and am totally besotted by it. NOW that Sony are in charge the future can only be rosy. I decided to get on board sometime back. It suited my "crazy" way of editing, and my general approach to graphics/film/music making and clients I work for. It wont be for everybody. BUT it is fun and with the Forums truly "bubbling" not only with a "lightweight" like me, it is also thronged with "Real Pro" video production professionals, very very available to answer questions and assist.

Best advise? As has been said - download a demo and give it a go. BUT remember - You Get Nowt for Nowt! - more graphics more tracks more maths . . slower and slower real time previews. You can't get around this! Real time previewing on simple video with a few transitions and multiple tracks on straight video editing? Vegas is truly amazing! You get to see stuff very fast. I use Preview mode and it works for me.

.. oh . . you can run Vegas5 on a very minimum set up .. you do need at least XP or 2000 . . I believe they have left ME and 98se behind now . . hey, for example I've run and made money running Vegas 4 on a Dell Inspiron 8000 running 256 ram with 1ghtz! It worked . .hard . .but got me the capital to upgrade to the MONSTA"! I've now got.

Sorry for long post but wanted to clear up a few things . .

Vegas? I love it .. . love it . . .. love it - HO! I haven't even spoken about Sony Acid Pro and Sony Sound Forge yet? These interface with Vegas in one shot! . . . . download those demos too!!!!

. . . Best regards,

Have fun,

Grazie

Steve Crisdale · May 31st, 2004, 07:04 PM

<<<-- Originally posted by Graham Bernard :
Vegas? I love it .. . love it . . .. love it - HO!
. . . >>>

I'll second that....

After mucking around in Premiere Pro, which proved a slug with HDV, and reading the observations by HD10 users of FCP on Mac, the feeling one gets from using Vegas with HDV is like cruising lazily past all those "I know better" types who are stuck going nowhere as they tinker with this plug-in and that setting and ponder what went wrong.......

Will Thompson · June 4th, 2004, 02:52 PM

I don't know on what system you were editing HDV with PPro, but even with the minimum requirements, PPro is hardly a slug.

Vegas may be a good, clean app, but give credit where credit is due. When I first bought AspectHD, my system was significantly under the min requirements set by Cineform; however, even while doing two streams of HD with a real-time transition, the only sluggishness I noticed was some dropped frames.

No tinkering or pondering here...

April 13th, 2004, 02:16 PM	#16
Rob Lohman RED Code Chef Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Holland Posts: 12,514	Yes it does. How many tracks it can do realtime depends on your CPU mostly but also on your harddisk (the more DV streams the more it needs to read). Again, give the demo a try to see for yourself (if you have access to a PC). __________________ Rob Lohman, visuar@iname.com DV Info Wrangler & RED Code Chef Join the DV Challenge \| Lady X Search DVinfo.net for quick answers \| Buy from the best: DVinfo.net sponsors

April 13th, 2004, 03:21 PM	#17
Al Falaschi New Boot Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Madison, WI Posts: 16	Vegas gives you RT previews for as many tracks and effects that your processor and amount of RAM can crunch. There is no "limit." I do not have a blazing system so I can preview only a hand full of tracks at full res. You can also change the the preview process between draft, preview, good and best. They are all 720 x 480 60i. I have found that I can get more tracks at almost an unnoticeable loss of quality on the preview setting. If you start to add more tracks than the processor can handle, it dumps the frame rate down to compensate. There is an indicator at the bottom of the preview window that shows you how many fps you are seeing. I can view a couple tracks before I see the frame rate dip below 29.97. __________________ Foreign Language Specialist

May 27th, 2004, 11:44 PM	#19
Mauricio DelaOrta Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Mexico City Posts: 49	What difference would there be between importing the m2t files directly in vegas and using a plugin such as ConnectHD? __________________ o--------------------------o Life is short.. Live it! Mauricio

May 28th, 2004, 09:33 AM	#21
Bryan Suthard Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Tampa, FL United States Posts: 135	m2t out from Vegas 4 Do you know if there is a way to output transport streams from Vegas 4 directly? I know it is possible in Vegas 5.

May 28th, 2004, 08:15 PM	#22
Steve Crisdale Major Player Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Katoomba NSW Australia Posts: 635	Re: m2t out from Vegas 4 <<<-- Originally posted by Bryan Suthard : Do you know if there is a way to output transport streams from Vegas 4 directly? I know it is possible in Vegas 5. -->>> Vegas 4 doesn't support m2t out unfortunately. Vegas 5 does, though I haven't tried it's ability to do so yet....

May 1st, 2004, 08:38 AM	#18
Steve Crisdale Major Player Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Katoomba NSW Australia Posts: 635	Vegas 4 is proving to be the best NLE to handle HD captures/output I've encountered. No real need for any HD plug-ins (unless you want the latest WMV9 HD encoder) and it works marvelously with HD10 footage. Just change the file extension .m2t to .mpg and import!!! It's support for HD import of almost every flavour is outstanding, and it's HD output formats and ease of customising output without needing a techo's degree to select the best options is a satisfying relief compared to almost every other HD encoding module available....

May 28th, 2004, 08:34 AM	#20
Steve Crisdale Major Player Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Katoomba NSW Australia Posts: 635	<<<-- Originally posted by Mauricio DelaOrta : What difference would there be between importing the m2t files directly in vegas and using a plugin such as ConnectHD? -->>> Just my observations....others may have found otherwise. Just by converting the m2t extension to mpg makes the HD10 footage easily openable/editable within Vegas 4. I haven't loaded any more than 3 clips into the timeline, so I can't report any performance degradation from doing more. I also have not used Connect HD or Aspect HD so I can't really comment on performance differences, though for my money Vegas native handles HDV just fine!! (I've also edited 1080i HD progam stream captures from a HD DTV card in vegas without any problems). Connect HD may make a difference, but until there's a demo version available to see whether there are real world gains I'd suggest trying Vegas anyway. BTW Vegas 5 can handle m2t's directly from the cam (or so Sony claims..)....so no need to use the JVC capture utility unless you really want to. I'll be giving this a try soon, so I'll report what I find as soon as I know. The important thing to note is that with almost every passing day some new HDV capable enhancement is being announced or implemented, so just keep an ear to the ground and an eye on the web to see what may make your HDV editing life easier.....

May 29th, 2004, 10:15 PM	#23
Ben Buie Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Atlanta, GA Posts: 184	Actually Vegas 4 does export .m2t, there is a place in the settings for the Main Concept MPEG2 encoder to tell it to output a transport stream instead of a program stream. There is info on Cineform's webpage on exactly what settings to use. For what it is worth, editing the .m2t natively is not a great idea, unless you are a really patient person. Also, there is more generation loss with editing MPEG2 natively because of all the uncompressing and recompressing going on all the time. If you can afford it get ConnectHD. Even on our Athlon XP 2000 with 1GB of RAM and regular IDE hard-drives (no RAID or SATA), we can edit and playback the Cineform HD AVI format at 30fps with the preview window at half size (640 x 360) on the Best preview setting. Even with an hour of footage on the timeline with 6 or 7 tracks of audio and video. On the same system trying to work with the .m2t files natively playback would be <10fps, and after adding many clips to the timeline as little as 2fps. The system bogs down really fast with MPEG2. Just my 2 cents. __________________ Ben Buie, Producer "On Our Way Up" - Shot Completely in HDV http://www.onourwayup.com HD Articles and Reviews at HDSource! http://hdsource.highlydef.com

May 29th, 2004, 11:31 PM	#24
Bryan Suthard Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Tampa, FL United States Posts: 135	Ben, I have read the note from Cineform but in my version of 4.0d, I cannot see the setting to choose Program Stream or Transport Stream on the Main Concept setting options. Please let me know what I may be doing wrong or is there something I else I need to set? Funny you should mention, I was thinking of going with ConnectHD but to upgrade Vegas at the same time is too expensive a proposition for me.

May 30th, 2004, 12:16 AM	#25
Graham Bernard Old Boot Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: London UK Posts: 3,633	You get Nowt for Nowt!! Elmer your comment, " . . . I need as many as possible since I do alot of motion graphics on multiiple tracks and not having to render before viewing would be essential." . .This is a bit of a non starter, as NLEs as far as I can gather need to render graphics. They need to do this from one frame to another as you apply some "effect" . .an effect might be moving the frame from one pixel position to another . . that NEEDS to be rendered. Now, when you add another track then this is"doubled-up", it may be more, I'm no programmer. Now, you asking for multiple Graphic tracks maybe doing track motion and changes in colour and depth of contrast. This is a lot of maths going on. A lot of maths that needs to maybe then be sent via a firewire connection to an analogue monitor - Lots and lots of work for a computer here! My experience of Vegas 5 DVDA is that - as with previous incarnations of Vegas - you get as many tracks as you want. The trade off is this extra extra rendering needed to get the thing moving about. BUT, Vegas does allow for various "levels" of detail quality viewing., This ranges from "Best" through "Good", "Preview" and finally "Draft". Each of these quality step-downs allow for more and more "real" time viewing, at the "cost" of quality. Another thing is to set the viewing screen to as small as you can get away with. Now here's the thing. It's a BIG thing. AT LEAST VEGAS ALLOWS YOU TO EXPERIMENT with these stages! THAT'S the strength of Vegas .. . that's why I love it, that's why I've gone from V3 up to V5 and am totally besotted by it. NOW that Sony are in charge the future can only be rosy. I decided to get on board sometime back. It suited my "crazy" way of editing, and my general approach to graphics/film/music making and clients I work for. It wont be for everybody. BUT it is fun and with the Forums truly "bubbling" not only with a "lightweight" like me, it is also thronged with "Real Pro" video production professionals, very very available to answer questions and assist. Best advise? As has been said - download a demo and give it a go. BUT remember - You Get Nowt for Nowt! - more graphics more tracks more maths . . slower and slower real time previews. You can't get around this! Real time previewing on simple video with a few transitions and multiple tracks on straight video editing? Vegas is truly amazing! You get to see stuff very fast. I use Preview mode and it works for me. .. oh . . you can run Vegas5 on a very minimum set up .. you do need at least XP or 2000 . . I believe they have left ME and 98se behind now . . hey, for example I've run and made money running Vegas 4 on a Dell Inspiron 8000 running 256 ram with 1ghtz! It worked . .hard . .but got me the capital to upgrade to the MONSTA"! I've now got. Sorry for long post but wanted to clear up a few things . . Vegas? I love it .. . love it . . .. love it - HO! I haven't even spoken about Sony Acid Pro and Sony Sound Forge yet? These interface with Vegas in one shot! . . . . download those demos too!!!! . . . Best regards, Have fun, Grazie

May 31st, 2004, 07:04 PM	#26
Steve Crisdale Major Player Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Katoomba NSW Australia Posts: 635	Re: You get Nowt for Nowt!! <<<-- Originally posted by Graham Bernard : Vegas? I love it .. . love it . . .. love it - HO! . . . >>> I'll second that.... After mucking around in Premiere Pro, which proved a slug with HDV, and reading the observations by HD10 users of FCP on Mac, the feeling one gets from using Vegas with HDV is like cruising lazily past all those "I know better" types who are stuck going nowhere as they tinker with this plug-in and that setting and ponder what went wrong.......

June 4th, 2004, 02:52 PM	#27
Will Thompson Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 75	I don't know on what system you were editing HDV with PPro, but even with the minimum requirements, PPro is hardly a slug. Vegas may be a good, clean app, but give credit where credit is due. When I first bought AspectHD, my system was significantly under the min requirements set by Cineform; however, even while doing two streams of HD with a real-time transition, the only sluggishness I noticed was some dropped frames. No tinkering or pondering here...