Using the MainConcept MP4 encoder, you can encode to any resolution you want in Vegas.

The Main Concept render does appear to give the option to output the full HD resolution frame size that the clips and project were set to (1080 x 1920) but seems to have lost the AC3 audio that was on the original inbound clips and on the Vegas timeline. I am testing the render and compatibility now.

I don't understand why Sony Vegas software engineers made the AVCHD option that works well for AC3 audio only 1080 x 1440 when their Sony HDR camcorders record with 1920 H pixels. Maybe DSE can comment on this.

-The resolution you're looking to output is 1920 x 1080, not 1080 x 1920 (unless of course, you're authoring digital signage).
-Sony Electronics bears no relevance to Sony Creative Software. In other words, expect Vegas to always be later to update features for newer camcorders. At NAB, Sony announced AVCHD support for 1920 x 1080 camcorders.
If you could figure out a way to get Sony Electronics to advance-notify all software vendors of their plans to change how their products work...perhaps you wouldn't see latency between formats and software.
Everyone seems to need to protect their own lil' turf.

Just to be clear here, you are aware that you can go into the custom dialog and save your own presets. Some codecs to play well with odd custom sizes, but my guess is that if you just save a preset 1920x1080, you'd have no problems at all.

Dave

Hi Spot,

Could you kindly open the lid on what kind of new AVCHD support SCS revealed at NAB? Isn't Vegas Pro 8.0b already supporting AVCHD?

I just imported some test .mts files (from a Canon HDD cam) on the timeline. The performance was far from stellar, even on my superfast machine...

So - is there something in 8.0c that improves the timeline editing experience of AVCHD material?? Appreciate your feedback since I am planning to invest in an Sony SR12, like many are.

Regards,

Christian

"Just to be clear here, you are aware that you can go into the custom dialog and save your own presets. Some codecs to play well with odd custom sizes, but my guess is that if you just save a preset 1920x1080, you'd have no problems at all."

Not with avchd.... the option is grayed out. It will only allow 1440x1080 (As I said before.... Vegas is lacking something awful compared to other programs when it comes to AVCHD) I am HOPING dvda version 5 will fix this.

If you want 1920x1080 with AC3 (without losses) then pretty much the only way to do it right now is render to uncompressed avi with a separate AC3 file and then import this to Ulead MF6.

"If you could figure out a way to get Sony Electronics to advance-notify all software vendors of their plans to change how their products work...perhaps you wouldn't see latency between formats and software."

Other programs/companies had no advance notice and they're doing just fine. Vegas is right now with avchd where Ulead was A YEAR AGO. There is NO excuse for this Spot.

Other programs/companies had no advance notice and they're doing just fine. Vegas is right now with avchd where Ulead was A YEAR AGO. There is NO excuse for this Spot.

Ulead (actually Corel) isn't a professional application that has to worry about any number of other factors. If you feel it's so incredibly easy, write it yourself. You're right. It's no "excuse" but there are plenty of reasons.
Why do you suppose that *no* professional application currently offers complete AVCHD support. No excuse for them, either?
There's "no excuse" for anything very much in your book, so there is little point in trying to have a dialog.

"Ulead (actually Corel) isn't a professional application that has to worry about any number of other factors. If you feel it's so incredibly easy, write it yourself. You're right. It's no "excuse" but there are plenty of reasons."

Oh please.

Reach a little further why don't you.

Define a "professional" application because I always thought a professional was a living being, and a pro will use what he/she needs to get the job done. If Ulead works (which it does) then I PROMISE you that there are people who make money from this (in other words... PROS) are using Ulead.

There is absolutely no excuse in the book for this lame duck avchd editing hack that Madison has put out. It is so far beneath Vegas's standard it's not funny. It's like they woke up at 10 am and decided that this should be out for download by 11:30am the same day.

To top it all off... Vegas being a "Professional" application , this rather junior attempt at avchd does nothing but HURT Vegas, and you're doing nothing but ADDING to the hurt coming up with these rather clumsy excuses.

I take a great pride in saying that I am a vegas user, but this avchd hack has hurt vegas and the sooner they get it corrected.... the better. It's rather embarrassing to know that a cheap off-the-shelf program like Ulead beats out Vegas.

And BTW.... it's NOT Corel... it's Ulead. Corel simply owns Ulead.

Hi,

So - is there some improved AVCHD support in sight or not? If SCS unveiled something at NAB - isn't this already public information than can be shared?

Christian

Christian,
Sony announced improved AVCHD support at the Vegas party, and Dave Hill spoke of it in their booth. As various manufacturers reel off their implementations of the codec, I expect we'll see a more broad availability in Vegas. But keep in mind that there are at this point, nearly as many oddball cameras not supported than there are supported.
We should expect better, but certainly not full framerate, performance in VegasPro 8c.
HTH.

Thanks Spot for jumping in here with your expertise. I appreciate all you have given the community with your training and time.

Also, I apologize for possibly confusing others with the two numbers by stating the position backwards. I think most understood I was referring to 1080 vertical and 1920 Horizontal.

I understand the custom video settings for AVCHD are now fixed at 1080 x 1440 and grayed out so we can't change them. All I was looking for from you and anyone who may have some official notice on this is whether this grayed out option will soon be "lit up" in the next or later release.

It's not just the resolution specs that appear better but I also wonder if the render time would be less if we do not have to reconfigure the screen res from 1920 AVCHD original clips to 1440.on the project output. Of course, my camcorder also offers a setting for 1440, so I plan to use that until Vegas gives the choice. In addition, shooting also with the Z1U, the two cam clips on the same timeline wouild be a match as well. At least in frame size.

Hi,
Spot, thank's for your comment. Highly appreciated, as usual :)

Nice to hear that 8.0c will improve the situation. You wrote: We should expect better, but certainly not full framerate, performance in VegasPro 8c."

Actually, I'm already now playing back (on the timeline) AVCHD mts files (at Best/Full) resolution at full frame rate!!! Ok, I'm running a fast QX9650 @ 3,8GHz...

But a simple crossfade brings the fps down from the original 29,97 fps to about 7..8 fps. If at least these crossfades would work in realtime in 8.0c, it would be great news. The only way to find out is to test when the update is available...

Probably you do not have any hard numbers to present? How much of improvement will we see? Well - knowing that there IS at least some kind of improvement - is reassuring. This was more like a retoric question that you don't have to bother to answer...

I my case (SR12) Im' dependent to the Sony codecs, so let's hope they play well together with Vegas :)

regards,

Christian

Chris- I am interested in a couple parts of your post. You are not the first to make these claims and I would like to know why, or how you did it..

You reference being able to put mts files on the timeline and play back. Not questioning your claim on frame rates as I have no way to test your computer but my question is how you got Vegas to see a file with extension "*.mts"

Since I have an SR12 and Vegas 8b too we are on that same playing field. The *.mts files do reside on the camcorder hard drive but when imported to the computer hard drive via the PMB software, they are converted to "*.m2ts" file extension. These can be easily seen by Vegas and dropped to the timeline. If I try the same procedure with the *.mts files copied directly from the SR12 hard drive Vegas doesn't even see them in the folder. My Sony 8b does not recognize the file extension "mts" However, if I go into windows explorer and rename the mts files to m2ts, they can be seen and dropped into the Vegas timeline and played. If this is what you meant, then we are on the same page but if you are indeed seeing mts files with that extension in Vegas browser, then something I have here is missing. BTW you are not the first to make this claim and I'm concerned there may be something I am not doing right here.

Notice DSE didn't give us the exact improvements we would see in 8c. I'm sure NDA and all. I do recall, at NAB the statements were exactly as he said so we will have to wait and see. Also, in a demo of the new DVDA 5.0, I saw the AVCHD option choice listed with the Full 1080 x 1920 res for DVD rendered output for burn so my bets are that Sony will be "improving AVCHD" in this direction. Wish I had asked more at the time but I just didn't have all the questions ready due to only having a couple days experience with the AVCHD camcorder. It arrived the day before my flight to NAB and I shot it the first time out the window of the plane. :)

Hi Don,

Sorry if I made you feel confused. Well, I am a little confused myself. First, I don't have the SR12 yet - I'm just (eagerly) waiting for it to arrive next week ;)

What I did was that I downloaded (via one of the threads here) a file that was shot with a Canon AVCHD cam. The file's name is "austin1.mts". I have no idea how this file was generated, but I can drop it directly on the timeline as is. So at least my VP8.0b swallows fine this particular file with the .mts extension.

However, I noticed whe looking at the rgb-scopes that the file is lacking contrast, and at the same time lots of rgb-levels are missing (could almost say every second is missing). So this file has undergone some kind of processing, of what kind, I don't know.

I have been trying to locate a genuine SR12 mts file to experiment with, but haven't still found. Would you be so kind to provide me a short clip? Then I could at least confirm if I'm able to drag it to the timeline and play it as this mts file I have (if it is really an mts file - I cannot tell).

Christian

Absolutely!

I get a file, confirm that it won't be seen in Vegas 8b and then I'll upload it to my own server for you to download via the right click trick. Let me go to work on that now and I post the link for you here. I hope this is ok with the forum rules. It's in the interest of science. :)

Be back in a bit...

OK I am uploading now as I type this. It should all be up by 2030 EDT

I'm giving you three clips.

2 of the girl are of 1440 H pixels and the MTS file is dragged and dropped to my computer hard drive direct from the camcorder hard drive. The m2ts is what I get when I take that same file and import it with the Sony PMB utility that comes with the camcorder.

The third MTS file is done in 1920 h pixels and dragged and dropped to the hard drive on the computer.



Now I have an admission here. When I tested the *.MTS files in Vegas they showed up???? and I was able to put them in the timeline without needing the file name switch to m2ts. I don't know what I was doing before but I could not see them. I'm sure it was something I did like not refresh the view or something stupid. Wonld'nt be the first time. So... you are off the hook on proving to me you can see the MTS but have fun anyway with the files. I guarantee none of them have been processed except the m2ts one which was transferred to my computer with the PMB software and I gave you a raw of that ( MTS ) for comparison.

The three files are at this folder:

http://www.tv-shopperb.com/CHRIS/
case sensitive link-

go there and right click on the files to download.

Don, all three open fine for me, cactus and two parrot/iguana/woman..this is on a fresh machine, fresh install of Vegas Pro 8, build 217

Hi Don,

Thanks for the clips. Was nice to see some material shot with the new Sony SR12.

Same here, all three clips can be placed directly on the timeline, and plays ok. I'm also on 8.0b (build 217).

Best of all, each clip plays at full fps (29,97) . But only if the project setting is the same as the clip that is playing. In other words, the 1440 x 1080 and 1920 x 1080 clips plays without dropping frames when the project is set to the same respective resolution, othervice not.

And this is - at best/full preview setting!!! In the preview window - or on the secondary monitor. Adding a Sony Color Corrector on the timeline does NOT drop the framerate at all!!! However, if two streams needs to be processed simultaneously (like crossfades or overlays), the fps drops to something about 10..12 fps at full preview quality. Then uou have to substantially reduce the preview quality to get back to fulls fps speed...

I rendered the 00080.mts file (15 sec + 15 frames) to HVD1440x108, 60i @ 25Mbit/s, and also included some heavy color FX (Sony Color Corrector). This process took only 22 seconds on my machine. Not bad. This seems very promising, at least when there is probably going to be some kind of improvement in 8.0c, with AVCHD.

I also rendered the same clip to DV (wide screen NTSC), with the same color correction, and that took only 17 seconds.

I ran all tests at the best quality setting. I am surprised how fast everything seemed to run. Or then, I had just not very high assumptions. Overall, it seems that rendering with these file types keeps my 4 cores fairly well busy (>96%).

I thank you for the clips. I am now even more eager to continue experimenting, when I reveive the SR12 next week. Great if you really can drag and drop material, directly from the cam, without any transcoding. Multitrack editing will be really difficult even for a fast quad core to handle, but, you can't get all at once...

For reference, my main system specs are QX9650 @ 3,8GHz, 4GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz, Nvidia 8800GT 512MB, XP x64.

Christian

EDIT: And please excuse me, the banding I saw in the scope window (what I claimed to be missing rgb levels), is just an display artefact. Youll see "missing" levels if you expand the height of the scope so that the 256 discrete levels shows on a height that is substantially taller. I fully understand that Vegas does not want spend unnecessary time drawing pixels in these gaps, but it however looks stange for an eye that is used to see analogue parade displays. They never have any discontinuities.

Thanks for providing those sample clips. I can confirm that they all load and play in my installation of Vegas 8.0b on my test PC, though at a low frame rate (as I expected since it's only a lowly P4-based machine).

Interestingly, if you look at them with a hex editor you will see that the 00080.mts file is bit-for-bit identical to the 20080413214234.m2ts file - the only difference is the filename and extension.

This suggests that it probably doesn't really matter whether you copy the file directly off the camera's hard disk as a .MTS file or use the Sony import utility to import it as a .M2TS file - the file format is exactly the same. (But the Sony utility does have the nice feature of renamimg the file with a name presumably based on the date and time the material was shot, which could be useful later.)

Mark

I've found my SR11 AVCHD clips import and play fine on Vegas 8b as well, at least on the 2nd-to-highest resolution setting when captured so far, at full preview/framerate, on a dualcore e6660 winxp machine.

What's screwy though, is - when I try to play the clips in windows media player, the aspect ratio is wrong; they're compressed on the horizontal axis - any ideas on that? If I use a different type of player though (zplayer?), they work fine.

-ken

Chris- Thanks a bunch for the information on your system. I was excited to hear you could play the clips at such a level. I can't. I'm playing the clips here with lots of stutter on a P4 3.6 Ghz Sony Vaio. Obviously, I'm in the market for a new computer to handle these HD projects although my P4 Vaio is doing fine for SD DVCAM editing now. Also, I noted your rendering times and was impressed. That thing must scream on DV video projects.

Is your system home built or did you buy it from a name brand mfg like Dell or Gateway? Do you have a BluRay burner in it? What is your internal hard drive design?