The DroidX records at approximately 15 frames per second. I suspect that the long render time has to do with frame rate conversion.

For what it's worth, I have a DroidX and I love it, though I've never used it as a second camera on a shoot.

to musicvid: My motivation is that the 3gp is unplayable on my system, it updates a frame every couple seconds. And I don't trust the colors. What would you suggest I convert it to in order to get reasonable realtime playback?

to John Cline: Yeah, the frame rate that Vegas thinks it is is something like 15.15fps. Funny thing, but windows itself, when I query props, thinks it is 13fps.

So that begs the question: how do I play this dang thing within Vegas, and how do I edit that along with a second camera clip which is 720 30p?

James

Uncompressed is not an efficient "intermediate" codec for NLE. Doing a forum search for the word in quotes will lead you to a wealth of discussion. Since it is 720p, personally I would try DNxHD 145 (free), Sony MXF, or Cineform if you have it installed.

So that begs the question: how do I play this dang thing within Vegas, and how do I edit that along with a second camera clip which is 720 30p?

Basically, render the droid footage to a 30p intermediate and place all your video in a 720-30p Vegas project.

However, as aptly pointed out by John Cline, the frame rate conversion itself may pose some additional challenges which we can tackle once you have decided on one of the visually lossless intermediates.

If you are able to upload an actual sample from your Droid to MediaFire, one of us can play with it and perhaps offer some more specific suggestions.

i just recorded a 15-second clip with my droid x. it plays fine in vegas. i rendered it out as mp4 1280x720, took about 1 minute. so, about 4-5 times real time.

i'm running win7 64, vegas 10b 64, on an i3 w/4gb ram.

your system specs are not very detailed, but on a p4 w/xp, 8 hours is probably in the ballpark.

if you want to playback and edit droid x or canon mov files, you're going to need a faster system. shoot me if you want, but that's where your bottleneck is.

and yes, if you absolutely have to edit that clip on that machine, converting to mxf or such may get you through it...

I just updated my specs. The problems I stated are with a brand new quad i7 machine. So something doesn't quite add up.

dlion, I'm curious what frame rate your clip was?

James

I've been using MXF at 50 mbps as an intermediate. Sorry I can't help with the 3gp although I did transfer some from my son's camera phone once. I don't remember much about it except that his was not great.

The frame rate conversion from 15 FPS to anything else is a different bucket of snakes. I had that problem this weekend. Pay attention to the resample option.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=744325&Replies=9

whoa, makes no sense.

interesting: windows says frame rate is 12, type is windows media. vegas says 15, type is quicktime.

i'm running qt 7.6.8. you? maybe a qt issue?

otherwise, i'd look at the black viper win7 tweaks.

if you have vegas 9e installed, try the 3gp files with that.

uninstall/reinstall vegas.

all i can think of, with an i7, you should be getting at least what i got, stability and much faster speed. maybe you've got a bad ram chip?

Many thanks to you all for the help. Here's an update.
No matter what I did, with V8.2 I could not get the 3gp file to render faster than about 30x the length of the clip. Playback was horrible too. BTW, I made sure resample on the clip was disabled and it made no difference.

I reinstalled QT 7.6.9 and still not good.

I downloaded the trial of V10b and all is suddenly golden. Plays back without a hitch and renders to either Cineform or DNxHD in less than realtime.

I've been reading up on the use of and intermediate format for editing and am leaning toward DNxHD. Thanks for the pointers.

Question: is the demo version supposed to be crippled in any way? I ask because sometimes it would not let me render, giving me instead the 'save as' menu when I'm sure I selected 'render as'. Normal behavior?

James