Well, I'm beginning to get a sense of the frustration more experienced Vegas users are having. My old copy of Premiere Pro is looking mighty tempting right now to edit this in, but it means having to re-acquire the tape since PPro 1.5.1 doesn't allow import of m2t files.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

Haven't tried it yet but CS3 is claimed to now support m2t files.
Have to say Edius looks like a damn fine package, the developers have retained the same ethic that SCS used to have. I feel Edius to cut vision and Vegas to mix audio could be a good combination.

Bob.

How big is the project? I just threw a 19gb DV file on the timeline & even while it's building peaks I can move around, & what not & it keeps 29.970 fps in preview on preview - auto & good - auto. threw some HD 1080i footage on the TL & it's not missing a beat. transitions & what not slow it down to ~25fps but it's still very viewable. thumbnails on TL & preview look fine.

it finally went to crap when I ran Excalibur's "strobe light" routing on a 5 minute clip and then put a video from my portal drive (USB2) on the TL under that one.

EDIT: noticed in the 3rd post you're talking about HD mt2's. I don't have any HD longer then 25 minutes right now.

Rendering a proxy file might help in this case.

Bob - Edius is about as an extreme opposite in work methodology as possible with regards to Vegas. I at least feel comfortable in PPro and can get things done, but learning Edius - I'm not so sure.

What about Edius has gotten your attention? I've been considering a copy of Edius Neo but it is pretty much crippled on many fronts and what little I have worked with it - trying to edit audio seems to be worse than PPro and Audition.

I haven't' found any clear cut information on working with the audio track in Edius - ie, sending out a video clips audio track for performing things like noise reduction, etc. If I could find something like that, I would consider Edius.

Vegas has treated me well up to this point, but I'm now beginning to find where it lacks some things I use - and the redraw issue is driving me bonkers.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

I've only had a quick one on one demo of Edius. Things I saw and liked:

1) Multicam. You get a master preview monitor and x smaller input previews. So as you playback you see what you'll get rather than chasing a tally light around. Simply the way it should be.

2) Fast to work with. Things like collapse sequence from that multicam and bring that into another sequence instantly.

3) Works in YUV

4) Handles XDCAM EX footage straight from the SxS cards.

5) Integrates with their media management servers. That's a big thing for broadcasters.

6) Lots of hardware support.

7) I can buy a turnkey system with local support.

Edius is from Canopus who are now joined to Thompson Grass Valley. These are companies that go back to almost day one of television. Many of us have bought Canopus products, their ADVC 100 and 300s are staples that just about everyone uses. Grass Valley make vision switchers, a friend of mine turns obsolete Grass Valley consoles into coffee tables complete with lights.

I do agree with your view regarding Ppro, Edius and Vegas. Ppro is the elephant, combine it with AE and PS and you have a monster that'll swallow anything. Great if you're an indie making a movie for the silver screen. Edius is clearly oriented towards the broadcast market. Vegas, well it's hard to figure out just where it's aiming its guns.

Bob.

Bob said:

Ppro is the elephant, combine it with AE and PS and you have a monster that'll swallow anything. Great if you're an indie making a movie for the silver screen. Edius is clearly oriented towards the broadcast market. Vegas, well it's hard to figure out just where it's aiming its guns.

I think your assessment is pretty tack on, Bob.

I'm a one man production company so to speak - I have to do it all. Now I'm beginning to find the tool I had thought I was going to settle on is getting in the way of my being productive on some of these longer type projects I'm beginning to work on - that's a waste of my time and I can't bill the client due to inefficiencies of the software.

I actually had to pull out my old copy of PPro 1.5.1 and recapture the footage - what a pain. Vegas capture of m2t was 8.5GB, PPro AVI - 24.5GB - Yikes! But I"m beginning to understand now why some are choosing to go with Cineform route - although the file sizes are larger - you are no longer working in a compressed Long GOP file format - and I'm betting that the issue of black frames doesn't rear its head in this file format.

I'm beginning to get the sense of your last statement about Vegas - Those things seem to all of a sudden come to a head for me all at once. Edius, I'm still not too sure of since I don't work in broadcast - my primary delivery is web and is now becoming a little more DVD. The ability of Vegas to work so well with multiple formats on the timeline and edit audio has been a huge thing for me, but now those things are being offset by lackluster performance for me on longer projects.

I now need to figure out if I stick with PPro or try Edius and see if it's worth learning all over again.

Edit: PPro is just too clumsy for me to work in compared to Vegas Pro. I'm giving Gearshift a go with this project to see if things improve - challenge is the proxy render is going to take at least 4 hours.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

". So as you playback you see what you'll get rather than chasing a tally light around. Simply the way it should be."

CTL-SHFT-D may just do the trick for you in Vegas.

I have it assigned to a button on my Contour Shuttle and go back and forth between editing mode and playback effortlessly. And that's the way it is....

Going back to the original post, I'd like to investigate what's going on here.

I have an HD 1920 x 1080 project with over an hour's material on the timeline.

After opening the project, once the original thumbnails are drawn, which may take 10-15 seconds, it doesn't matter if I zoom in or out, the screen does not re-draw itself at all, it is instantly available, no matter what the zoom.

So what other factors are playing here?

Maybe graphics card - mine's a NVidia GeForce7300 dual screen.

By recent standards, mine is a relatively slow Intel 6700 Core Duo x2.

Clips are MXF from EX1, converted through Sony Clip Browser.

Other factors?

By definition the screen must be redrawn as you zoom in and out but I think what Cliff is having an issue with is when Vegas rebuilds the thumbnails themselves and that can take some time. I don't know why mostly it doesn't have to do that and at other times it does it a lot.

Bob.

Peter - Content was shot with a SONY HC7. capture done thru Vegas capture utility. Single clip of 8.5GB in size (Voice Recital so no need to start and stop camera).

Bob - I've always had the timeline redraw the clips when I zoom in and out - even scroll along the timeline.

As a footnote - I'm having to rerender the Gearshift proxy - I had not paid attention to the file type and I rendered out the file and ran out of disk space on my editing Raid0 setup during the night.

PPro - useless to me as it's sluggish and any time you apply even a simple filter - frame rate drops to nil. Edius - I don't think it fits with the way I do things - spent the better part of a day trying to do simple tasks - it reminds me of working in Avid - only worse.

For all its quirks - Vegas still offers the best solution for me to edit content - I just need to find a workflow solution for this particular project.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

> "I don't know why mostly it doesn't have to do that and at other times it does it a lot.

Yes Bob - I hope we can unearth an answer to that.
Something like "When XXXXXX is the case, Vegas will rebuild thumbnails and/or waveforms when the timeline is zoomed or scrolled."

I've tried on two different computers, different tyes of projects/files, and Vegas is zooming in/out just like an optical zoom - no redrawing visible.

So what is it -

Type of file?
Size of file?
A setting somewhere?

Could other users report whether thay have to wait for redrawing when zooming and tell us:

Project Settings
Type of file
Maximum length / size of media file
Any other data deemed relevant.

That is odd. Insofar as I can recall off hand my timelines always redraw.

- Ray
Some of my stuff on Vimeo
www.undergroundplanet.com

Let's at least get the terminology consistent, even if we 'invent' our own.

"Redraw". Happens faster than the eye can see. This must happen everytime anything changes on the screen.

"Rebuild". Happens slower than the eye can see, might involve regenerating the thumbnails.

Clif,
judging from your evaluation of other systems I suspect you've fallen into the same bad habits as me and they're hard to break. I'm also a throw it all onto the T/L, hack it around and see what I can make out of it kind of really bad editor. From what I've learned this isn't always such a good way to work and many editors have said they just couldn't edit in Vegas. I'm not the right person to explain this though, I haven't been an editor for decades and have only learned by trial and error and more the latter than the former.

Bob.

Well, this project with this one issue became a deal breaker for me - not being able to split the capture into smaller segments and performing a batch capture is a major issue for me. I'm sure it has to do with capturing native Long GOP m2t files. My old copy of PPro 1.5.1 still captures in Cineform AVI so I was able to log the clips and do a batch capture which was like night and day regarding the clips on the timeline - even with PPro 1.5.1, I'm finding the things I missed most about working in the app coming to light when I needed very specific features I just could not seem to get quite right in VP8 - as much as I want to keep working with Vegas, I'm beginning to see why users like p@tmasters made the switch to Adobe's products. No NLE is perfect, but I can tell you that between the redraw issues, a lack of customization of the interface, no proper FLV support, etc - I'm relegating VP8 now as a secondary editor and going back to Adobe apps which even after close to a year of using Vegas exclusively, I still find Adobe's apps easier to work in.

Maybe SONY will get it right in the near future, but I've lost money now on this edit due to wasted time via a lack of needed features that SONY could not deliver when called upon - yet my old copy of PPro 1.5.1 along with Audition 1.5 was able to.

Guess the idea of a forward thinking NLE isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

I stand corrected, Insofar as I can recall off hand my timelines always "rebuild".

Upshot is till the same no matter what I wanna call it, takes longer than it should to rebuild the media on the timeline.

- Ray
Some of my stuff on Vimeo
www.undergroundplanet.com

This is what I was trying to establish - using the mouse wheel, I have just zoomed from a timeline with 1 hour visible, in to sample level and back out again, and not once did I need to wait for rebuild of either thumbnails or waveforms.

I can't believe this is unique, so it must therefore be down to a difference such as type of media, size of media, or another setting or difference.

Be nice to know what ...

e6600, 3 ram, nvid 8500 - no problems at all with zoom in / out t/l with sd. m2t rebuilds thumbnails every time. and some times remarkably slowly.

pity can't get head and tail thumbnails....

leslie

Honestly, I can't see this problem myself. What do I have to do to experience it?

I have some really large m2t clips on my hard drive so I should be able to do it.

What do I have to do to see this problem?

Well, given the vent I had regarding Vegas Pro, I realized that how I was working was the limiting factor in being productive - not the application. The content shot was my first experience shooting a voice recital. I left the camera running instead of stopping and starting as I ended up doing for the second performance 10 days later.

So now I know that I can't record 40+ minutes of HDV footage in one take and work with it in Vegas Pro - that's not a realistic thing to do with Vegas Pro. You can't do in and outs to setup a batch capture with HDV so the stop and start of the camera on this kind of work is the workaround it seems.

I realize now that my assessment of Vegas was unfounded as I'm still learning this whole thing called Video.

Sorry for being such a n00b.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | solovj.com

You're not a n00b at all, you're just expecting Vegas to do basic editing tasks but unfortunately you're using the wrong tool.
You should be able to mark in/out points in the trimmer and send those clips to bins. Once done you start adding clips from bins to the T/L. Simple, basic, editing workflow that Vegas doesn't offer.

Thinking it's your fault for not buttoning off is wrong.

Bob.

Vegas "kind of" does this in that you can mark up regions in the trimmer and then see the regions in Vegas' explorer.

Personally, I think it's a kludgy solution but evidently someone at SCS said "That's good enough, lets move on".

I usually use Vegas for non-editing tasks but on the one 10 minute piece I did for a nonprofit a while back I really saw the light about capturing complete tapes and then marking them up into regions in the trimmer. We had some interviews that meandered aimlessy for 20 minutes and regions were the best way Vegas had to organize things. (Oddly, I found that my bins seemed like they were getting corrupted. I'd put subclips into them, use them, and then later find they were in different bins. Very wierd. Regions + Vegas Explorer was more reliable.)

I'd very much like it if regions could be put into bins. I tend to use the project media window more than the Vegas explorer.

As far as Vegas redrawing the timeline poster frames...I have a project file with 6 reels of DV clips on the timeline and they all redraw instantly. I also popped an hour long file on to see if that made a difference. It doesn't. But these are all DV. Vegas has a lot more decoding to do if it's going to show you the frames of some long GOP media.

The solution is the same one customers have asked for since day one: more options for what gets displayed on the timeline. If Vegas could display nothing but a colored bar (matching the track color) this wouldn't be a problem. If it could just display first and/or last frames it wouldn't be a problem. Or a user defined poster frame - no problem.

Rob Mack

I discovered for the first time subclips - it felt similar, but in a round about way to using a source window to mark ins and outs like most every other NLE. It seemed to work pretty well considering.

Vegas Pro DID NOT like the Cineform AVI's I had captured with PPro 1.5.1 - the clips appeared to jump frames and looked erratic - fortunately, I still had the single take m2t file and was able to make subclips from that in the trimmer.

I'm really trying to give Vegas Pro an honest shot as I prefer its work flow due to having worked in Acid Pro and the methodologies are similar. The kinds of work I shoot doesn't require super high end capabilities - I just want a solid NLE that can do cuts, dissolves, color correction and runs reasonably well on just about any computer. I guess if I had loads of $, I'd go with something more robust like Avid Media Composer or even a MAC with FCS, but it's either VP8 or my old copy of PPro for the time being.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com