Vegas Video discussions from 2006 (Q1Q2)

[Tom Johnson]

picked up hc1 on saturday $1480 out the door at circuit city...lol this thing was $2000 back in jan...shoots nice stuff. I have been experiamenting with getting some good quality on the web with hd stuff and wondered if anyone has some setting recommendations for rendering using wmv for footage that was shot in 1080i. should be an intresting thread. i am using vegas but am open to any type of encoding program. trying to make a small excellent quality file. 5 minute video would like to stay around 80 megs give or take 10

[Paul Carlberg]

Tom,

I too, have a HC1 and I like the camera. I am new to video so take this with a grain of salt. For me, the best file size vs. clarity vs. display size when I render w/Vegas is at the 3mbps w/compression setting for both WMV9 and Quicktime. For a 3+ minute clip, I am getting ~70mb file sizes, w/display settings at 640x480. Keep in mind that I am shooting in HD which I find "crisper" than DV. With a 320x280 (or smaller) display, I'd get much smaller file sizes by a magnitude of 10x (~10mb) and quicker "streaming" but I prefer not to. Interestingly enough, shooting in DV vs. HDV, my file sizes are not that much smaller, all things considered. Hope this helps.

[Tom Johnson]

yeah thanks paul i will try out these settings. anyone using sorenson squeze here

[Joe Cooke]

Thanks for the tip. I'm editing with a pentium dual core 2.8. Don;t mind the $200 for cineform. Again excuse my ignorance, but is this the process; connect HD 100 to computer by firewire at which time HD connect will recognize my camera, put camera in VTR mode and simply download?
Thanks for your help

[Vince Debart]

The drives I have are 7200 RPM and I am running Vegas 5 SD. Will the slower hard drives I think 5400 rpm work as well...I am looking at laptops and a lot of them have the slower drives

Thanks

Vince

[Edward Troxel]

Generally speaking, the 5400 drives in today's laptops ARE fast enough to capture video and I have done so. I also capture to a firewire 7200 rpm drive on that same laptop.

[Ian E. Pearson]

Thats exactly right Joe. You have some options in HDLink(cineform capture utility) whether you want to keep the raw m2t file or convert to cineform avi or both. Little things like that. but from there you just close Cineform HDLink, fire up Vegas, and drop clips in the timeline or whatever. Piece of cake.

Vegas can capture and edit the m2t files or you can convert to Cineform in Vegas without buying Connect HD, but like I said before the performance of Connect HD is worth it. Plus you get the nifty capture utility HDLink.

[James C Sadeghi]

AMD Athlon 64 Processor
3700+
2.21 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, 250Space

Win Xp

Is that a okay computer to edit on?

[Vince Debart]

Thanks Ed.....

[Patrick King]

Edward,

The DV-PC Recorder Canon offers with its XL-2 has a "Performance Check" program that tasks the hard-drive and measures the sustained write performance.

The 7200 rpm drives in my desktop peg the graphs upper limit at greater than 30mb/sec. The 5400 rpm hard-drive on my laptop struggles to keep above the "minimum" line of about 4.5mb/sec, but it does stay above that if I've disconnected it from the network and ensured that no other programs are tasking the hard-drive. But the laptop does stay just above the line and so is satisfactory for capture. As a test, an external 7200 rpm USB drive on the laptop pegged the chart like the desktop's internal drives.

[John Kang]

I converted an hdv clip to dv via Sony's Fx-1 camcorder to my laptop.

The same clip I've worked on with 8 minutes of video and some simple effects took less then 15 minutes, if I remember right.

I cut the edit to two minutes for a web version to be converted in Microsoft's WMV format. I added "Do not distribute!" on the entire two minute clip. It took a little over two hours! I even had the music deleted from the clip.

Now, does the render time sound about right for something like this? I just can't believe that a DV project should take this long, even if it is adding "Do not distribute!" on the entire clip. I could understand if I was working on it as an HDV file and saving it in HDV format.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Yup, that's about right. Adding a title to the product requires that all pixels be rebuilt/recompress entire frame. You're transcoding as well as modifying.
Bear in mind that HDV to HDV takes less time than HDV to wmv. The fastest of all, is uncompressed, because compression is what takes the longest time.

[Jeff Mack]

John,

That worked great! Thanks for the info and Glen, thanks for the info on color correcting. I'm getting into it now.

Jeff

[Derek Miner]

Greetings everyone,

I've been browsing the threads here to get an idea what options are best for a project I'm going to be editing (well, co-editing). The producer wants to edit a 90 minute feature in Vegas 6 in his office. I have editing experience in Avid, Final Cut HD and Premiere Pro, but I've never touched Vegas. I don't anticipate too much of a learning curve on the software, but this will be the first HDV project I've done.

The producer currently has a P4 2.8 with 1 gig of ram and he told me this system was choking on the conversion of HDV (to Cineform files, I assume - he didn't specify). He is looking at getting an AMD dual core 3800 with 2 gigs of ram to speed things up on all the conversions.

We are going to start with about 20 hours raw 24p footage from a JVC HD-100. I was also the script supervisor on the set and I have time codes for most of the takes, but I would like to have scene detection to avoid logging everything individually before capture. Occasionally time code was reset within a tape because of power loss to the camera, so could be some issues if we need to recapture using an EDL later.

I am also going to suggest going with either Gearshift or Connect HD to help our conversions. I have thought about either a DV proxy edit or a Cineform HD edit. Disk space will obviously be an issue with 16-20 hours of Cineform files. It would be nice to be able to output a SD video with time code burned in to target footage that will not be used at all to free up disk space.

There will probably be a fair amount of color correction and some compositing (from green screen shots) in this project. Time (Final cut must be ready in June. Picture lock is probably by the end of May.) and cost are factors.

Here are some questions I would like opinions on:

If we had to rely on capturing an entire tape to m2t before splitting up individual sections, would there be issues with audio sync or time code that I should be aware of?

What kinds of limitations are there on performance in Vegas with large projects? I worked on a 90 minute project in Premiere Pro and we ended up splitting into three separate projects or else the computer would slow down and eventually crash.

Would there be any issues with copying the DV proxy files from Gearshift or Connect HD and using them elsewhere? (For instance, loading the DV files into my Final Cut system at home for test cutting.)

Lastly, any tips with dealing with 24p footage and time code would be appreciated. This whole project will be quite a new experience for me, and I want to know what to expect.

Thanks,
= Derek =

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

If we had to rely on capturing an entire tape to m2t before splitting up individual sections, would there be issues with audio sync or time code that I should be aware of?

No issues, or shouldn't be. we routinely capture 3-5 hours of tape, no problems.

What kinds of limitations are there on performance in Vegas with large projects? I worked on a 90 minute project in Premiere Pro and we ended up splitting into three separate projects or else the computer would slow down and eventually crash.

None, really. Not if you have a fast system, and RAM. most of our work is 30-90 mins in length, often with at least 4 hours of HDV on the timeline.

Would there be any issues with copying the DV proxy files from Gearshift or Connect HD and using them elsewhere? (For instance, loading the DV files into my Final Cut system at home for test cutting.)?

You'll be able to transfer the files to FCP, but FCP sometimes hiccups with the Vegas-originated VFW DV files. Depends on the machine.

Lastly, any tips with dealing with 24p footage and time code would be appreciated. This whole project will be quite a new experience for me, and I want to know what to expect.

Depends on the cam. If you're shooting JVC HD100 or Canon XL H1, nothing to worry about at all. T/C is T/C if all things are equal in the project. Vegas manages it just fine. Simply open a 24p project, start capturing/dropping in footage.
If you're shooting Sony HDV, consider testing 25p or 50i with the camcorder in advance. Converting this to 24p is very, very easy, and personall, I prefer the look.