Recently I posted a long whiny screed complaining about native avchd preview in Vegas 8 and 9 on my off-the-shelf 2008 laptop. I produce daily news videos and really want to avoid pre-rendering.

So I decided to try shooting at the lowest quality setting on my canon hg20 (which really is an amazing camera for $600) -- LP mode at 5 mbps instead of the SP mode at 7 mbps that I had been working with.

I've got to say, after producing a test project with a few crossfades, the lower-bitrate avchd previews much better off the timeline.........there's a second of ramp-up for each clip and again after the crossfades, but it stays at 29.97 most of the time.

I shot some scenes at a night baseball game with lots of zooms, shakes and pans, and it previewed steadily throughout.

And the quality hit was much less than I had thought while avoiding LP mode all this time. I'm currently posting to youtube at 640x360, but even watching this on my hdtv in full rez, the difference isn't too noticeable.



I know this near-full framerate previewing can't be sustained after effects are added, but I think I've found a workable solution for what I do.

So, Sony, I'm sorry I fouled your cornflakes the day you rolled out 9.a. And to everyone else here, sorry for being a drag,
Vegas rocks.