AVCHD and Vegas 8.0C

newhope wrote on 9/16/2008, 5:15 AM
I spend my time editing between Final Cut and Vegas these days.

I recently bought a Panasonic HDC-HS9 camera for 'non-professional' use but find it a useful adjunct to my trusty PD150 which must be replaced some time soon with a Pro/SemiPro HD camera... but I digress....

I've imported directly into FCP from the Panasonic camera. The M2TS files get converted to Apple ProRes on the import in faster than real time on my Mac Pro Dual 3.0GHz. The files sizes are about 10 times larger but play perfectly at 1920x1080 in FCP and are easily edited.

At first Vegas couldn't import the AVCHD directly but now with the release of Vegas 8.0C it can. They come in natively with thumbnails but when I try to play them in Vegas on the same Mac Pro (booted into Windows XP) the files stutter and jerk and are basically useless for any serious viewing or edit decisions. I can of course convert them but this happens in much less than real time after the import which is a serious waste of time.

So the question I have is, if Apple can get FCP to convert on import, why can't Sony get Vegas to give us an option, if selected, to do the same and at similar speeds to FCP?

I love Vegas, I've been using it professionally for corporate and training videos since Vegas 4 was released and with DV it works fine. However my editing platform of choice for AVCHD has to be FCP until Vegas does it better than 8.0C can.

New Hope Media

Comments

Silverglove wrote on 9/16/2008, 7:03 AM
I'm using AVCHD clips on my MacPro/Bootcamp/WindowsXP with no problems. Are you importing/converting on the Mac side then transferring to the PC side? When I use FCP, I use the log/capture method. When using Vegas, I just import directly from the camera with no conversion and they playback without issue.
Cheno wrote on 9/16/2008, 7:41 AM
New Hope,

Vegas 8.0b and 8.0c worked with AVCHD just fine on my machine. No import issues at all. I'm working with Canon files, not Sony or Panasonic but I know initially Sony stuff played better. With the 8.0b HDV reader patch, that mucked up AVCHD reading on my machine and I had to uninstall and wait for Vegas 8c -

All of the other "professional" NLE's that are mainstream give you the option to convert files on import. Vegas is merely a straight transfer of the files and I think with that in mind, it's allowed more flexibility to edit just about everything without conversion right away, most other NLEs weren't format independent and needed the encode to provide something that could be read on their timelines. Pros and Cons to this.

With the new ProRes decoder from Apple, I've been importing to FCP, transcoding to ProRes and then I can use on either system with awesome results. Vegas plays the ProRes footage very well and as good as Cineform IMO. That could be a solution.

cheno


warriorking wrote on 9/16/2008, 12:55 PM
Working with AVCHD files from my HG10 Canon are flawless with my setup as well, no problems with 8.1 or 8.0c....
Quadcore Q9550 2.83Ghz
8Gig DDR2
Vista Ultimate 64Bit
Rosebud wrote on 9/16/2008, 1:40 PM
None of you are talking about your preview setting (draft, preview or best), external or internal ?
Please, can you give us more details ?
Thx
Gilles
Sebaz wrote on 9/16/2008, 2:15 PM
Both have their pros and cons. While FCP allows you to do a snappier and real-time editing with the ProRes 422 files, the truth is that ProRes is not lossless. You have an extra generation of information loss, which might not be a problem to you and many others, but I prefer to keep as much of the original as possible. Vegas is good at accepting straight AVCHD files, which Premiere and FCP don't. At least FCP converts them to something, while Premiere doesn't even do that.

I'm a bit puzzled by your statement that you have jerky playback on an 8 Core machine (that is what the Mac Pro is, right, 2 Quad core CPUs?) I switched from a 2.4 Intel Core 2 Duo to a 2.66 Core 2 Quad and I jumped from 17 fps to 27 fps in 8b and with 8c sometimes I get 29.97, although at times it gets jerky and goes down to 14 fps, I think if there's too much action going on. But I would think with 8 cores and at 3 Ghz you should be playing the timeline in real time.

One things that occurs to me is that you might be using the playback quality at less than full. For AVCHD, it always has to be full, since I can tell you by experience that when you set it to half, even in Preview quality, it lowers the fps. I suppose because of the way the codec works trying to resample the size takes more CPU than playing it back at real size.

The other thing that comes to mind is to get into the internal preferences to elevate the number of threads that normally tops at 4, but since you have 8 cores, I would set it to 8 and see what happens. In case you haven't read how to access the internal preferences, you just have to press Shift when you select preferences from the Options menu, and you'll see a tab called Internal. Once in there go to the bottom and type thread in the "Show only prefs containing", and then change the two that say 4 to 8. After restarting Vegas try again and if you don't see any improvement in rendering times and playback you can go back to the internal preferences and change them back to 4.
newhope wrote on 9/16/2008, 3:55 PM
A great collection of replies, thanks to everyone.

I'll need to check my playback settings in Vegas to see if that is the problem, I'm in render in FCP as I write so can't do so at present. I'm thinking that it may be the cause for jerky replay.

I don't have any problems importing into Vegas now that 8.0C has been released, it's the replay problem I am experiencing so will check that out as soon as I can reboot into Windows.

The Mac Pro is a 2 x Dual Core bought before the Quads came out. I'm not importing into FCP to cut in Vegas, can't see the point at present though I have the ProRes codec for Windows and have tested it successfully in Vegas.

If I can get Vegas to function well with AVCHD then I'll import directly in Vegas and edit there depending on my editing needs. The posts in this thread give me confidence that I can achieve that by looking at my settings in Vegas.

Thanks again and I'll post again once I've had the chance to get back to Vegas and try changing the preview settings.

New Hope Media