New Sony camera, now comes editing with Vegas 9

[Eric Kruis]

Hi everyone,

I just bought a Sony Nx70 camcorder, and I have Sony Vegas Pro 9 on my desktop. Core i7 cpu, with 9 gb ram. As I mentioned in another forum on this site, I have been having trouble with the avchd (mt2s) files. On playback the video is choppy. With each cut to a new scene the screen goes black for a quick few frames.

Is it practical to edit avchd natively in Sony Vegas Pro 9, or should I convert to say avi? I tried using Neoscene trail version but the files become 3x larger than the original footage.

I guess in summary, should it be a problem editing NX70 native footage with SVP 9? My camera allows 28mps recording, is that too much for it to handle?

[Jeff Harper]

There are a couple of things. Yes, for a single camera, not multi camera, you should be able to edit your files with no problems.

The issue on how your PC handles the files has to do with the PC not Vegas. If files are located on a slow or congested drive, that will interfere with smooth playback. If files are located on a USB drive, especially USB 2.0, that can and will slow playback.

The confiiguration of your PC and how it's running it the primary issue. When I edit files off my my 2tb storage drives, it can get choppy. But when I move the files to my much faster "work" drive (that has nothing on them but the video I'm working on), it does great.

It's a PC issue more than anything. Speed up things and the video will play back better.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Eric

I used to edit AVCHD files on my DuoCore 2.2GHz and that used to get choppy...what happens is the preview starts off fine and then it needs to buffer the footage but it still plays back.

I doing 24mbps AVCHD natively on my i7 with 8 GB ram and it's as smooth as you want it and that's from an external USB2 drive. However when the scenes are a little complex or you have multiple tracks the preview goes from full res to half res sometimes but even previewing half 1920x1080 still looks good!!!

You preview on a piece of raw AVCHD should be silky smooth unless you are shooting at a very high bitrate and render speeds from HD to SD should be around 1/3rd of realtime if you machine is working correctly ( ie: a 6 minute clip should render in around 2 minutes)

One thing I was always done is use two monitors..setup the machine for dual monitor use and then just drag the preview window over to the second monitor and drag it to full size and set the preview to full and best. An unrestricted i7 should give you a nice big preview with no hangups and if you are still getting choppy then you might need to do what Jeff suggests!!

Chris

[Jeff Harper]

Chris, your USB drive is likely much faster than mine, it is older and useless for editing. A friend of mine can't edit from USB drives either, for some reason, but we mostly edit multicamera things, that might be why.

[Steve Game]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Chris, your USB drive is likely much faster than mine, it is older and useless for editing. A friend of mine can't edit from USB drives either, for some reason, but we mostly edit multicamera things, that might be why.

Unlike Firewire and SATA transactions, which self manage themselves, (Firewire is a peer to peer interface and SATA has autonomous DMA), USB needs the CPU to manage every transfer. This means that as much as 25% of the CPU bandwidth can be used on a system that is borderline to decode AVCHD in real time.
I have an old 5400rpm 2.5 inch drive in a firewire pocket housing that easily copes with HDV on a laptop that struggles when a 7200 modern USB2 pocket drive does the same task.

If an external drive is needed, an ESATA one would be a better proposition.

Steve

[Eric Kruis]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

I have tried a few suggestions out and have a few more tricks to employ.

Would disconnecting the internet on my pc, and disabling the anti-virus have any postive affect?

[Chris Harding]

Hi Eric

I very much doubt it!!! It would be a pain to have to unplug cables etc etc!!!

Ok a few more things to look at :

(1) Are your files on an external USB drive or on an internal drive??? If internal do you know the drive speed and interface type??? An old IDE interfaced HDD in your machine could be even slower than a newer USB drive!!!

(2) In my first response I failed to see that your Canon shoots up to 28 mbps !! Is this the footage you are struggling with??? Shoot a bit of footage at a lower bitrate at see the difference!!! I can shoot at my top bitrate which is lower than yours (24 mbps) and if I put an overlay clip on the timeline Vegas immediately drops the resolution to half when it needs to contend with both clips. Now if I use footage shot at just 4 mbps less the difference is amazing!! Vegas with sail thru even complex transitions and dual video tracks. Unless you are shooting for broadcast you can easily shoot at a lower bitrate and nothing will suffer!!! I shoot my Realty clips at only 13 mbps (they need no more) and Vegas eats the footage up without even a flicker!!! Once we are in the 20's things start to get stickier!!! but I do find that 21 is way easier on Vegas than 24 !!!

If you drives are reasonable then try the bitrate trick and you will see (or should see!) a dramatic speed increase unless something else is slowing the computer down!!

Chris

[Eric Kruis]

Hi Chris,

The footage is imported from sd card to internal (sata) hard disk. Sony Vegas sits on my C drive, and all the video captures are on my D drive.

For future recordings I will try FH shooting mode (17 Mbps) 1920 x 1080/60i. I'm just getting familiar with my new Sony NX70 camcorder. Lots to learn!

I guess part of it is I am used to editing SD video which the computer edits without a hiccup.

Thanks again!

-Eric

[Chris Harding]

Hi Eric

I would also be interested to see how much better Vegas performs with 17 mbps native footage too. I used to shoot all my weddings at 13 mbps with my HMC70's and they looked pretty good even at that much lower bitrate. When I got the HMC80's in February I started shooting with an upped bitrate of 17mbps and they wasn't a huge difference to my eye but since the camera could go to a max of 24 the last couple were done at 24 and seriously, again, no difference to the naked eye even when previewing full screen and best settings ...except as soon as I had two cameras in the timeline it did drop the preview to half.

It also seems that at 24 my SDHC Class 6 cards produced a few undesireable artifacts but luckily it was areas where I could just scrap. I am assuming this was due to the higher bitrate.

On an internal SATA your footage should fly so I am pretty sure that your issue is the fact that you are recording at 28 mbps and it works the processor a lot harder!!

Let me know if you experience a much smoother preview with the bitrate lower ?????

Chris

[Eric Kruis]

I am now recording with 17 Mbps bit rate and the video plays much better in Sony Vegas.

Thanks everyone for their suggestions, I do appreciate all the help I can get!

My new issue is getting the render settings right to author to DVD architect. Motion looks pretty bad (I shoot video of trains) when dumped to dvd.

Lots to learn.

Eric