DR-60 or Z7 CF unit

bruceo wrote on 4/15/2008, 4:56 PM
Is anyone here having any success working with M2t files form these units.

Over a year ago I got the DR60 and stopped using after a problem with Vegas crashing on import or on certain m2ts created by it.

Now with the Z7 cams I have I am really trying to go with a tapeless workflow, but so far nothing has changed. Vegas seems absolutely horrible with handling M2ts from this unit. The problem with solid state media is that every start/stop makes a new file so instead of Vegas referencing 4-8 source files for an project of 4-8 tapes it now references every scene for the project as a separate source clip which would be in the hundreds.

i.e. this project is approx 300 clips after 150 or 200 it looks like memory gets full and then Vegas crashes or if you watch the footage it often maxes the memory and crashes the MC encoder. The once yu save and reload the project it takes a very long time to load the project, whereas the 4-8 reference files loads almost instantly (unless you get a building peaks then that takes over an hour.....)

V7 was very dissapointing with the black frames and crashes building peaks issues I was just about to call it quits out of necessity. Then Vegas 8 seemed to almost solve the black frames and did solve the peak building crashes, but this ongoing problem for me is becoming ridiculous. We just spent the last 9 hours Fing with this...

I am currently trying to load as many clips as I can then i'm going to render them as one file and repeat until I have all the footage. I certainly hope that works and without smart render the degrade in quality and huge render time would have made it worthless, so hopefully this will be a stop gap until there is a proper fix or SCS goes out of business. I certainly hope not because Vegas has been my lifeblood and been a big part of creating a great lifestyle..., but I saw a Vegas blowout sale at B&H, which makes it look not too pretty..... Although just this moment I read the announcement of DVDA 5 with full BR support.... PLEASE SCS release a V8.0c with this fixed!!! Life will be good if that happens. :-)

Comments

farss wrote on 4/16/2008, 12:53 AM
I've used the DR60 for a 3 hour concert with the V1P, no problems.
However I only had a few clips. I suspect your Vegas problem is the number of clips so it doesn't matter which recording medium you use you'll have the same issues to wrangle, sorry.

One thing that does seem to help is turning off waveforms and thumbnails.

Bob,
Konrad wrote on 4/16/2008, 1:28 AM
Lots of folks are doing this without problem.

Your PC is not in your profile. OS, CPU, RAM unwanted utilities under control?

Konrad
Laurence wrote on 4/16/2008, 4:46 AM
I have to drag m2t clips in groups of about 20 or less to the timeline. I can't do many more than that at once without locking up Vegas. Aside from that I have no real problems working with m2t clips from the Z7 or anywhere else.
bruceo wrote on 4/16/2008, 9:38 AM
Yes I think the number of clips is one issue and then vegas isn't liking some of th m2t's I am not sure exactly why. Sometimes it might be a small quick start/stop clip that will crash it and then i had a 20 minute clip in the group of clips that I can import to the media pool and preview from the media pool and play in windows media player perfectly, but when I pull it into the timeline it crashes with a vbuffer stack dump. I tested on several machines with different configurations, but the same result.
bruceo wrote on 4/16/2008, 9:42 AM
"Lots of folks are doing this without problem."

Actually I don't think so....

Anyone who is actually shooting a real job on a DR60 or CF unit with many clips successfully in V8b please chime in or email me and I will go to your office and witness it myself.
michaelshive wrote on 4/16/2008, 10:11 AM
My experience is also that Vegas bogs down with alot of HDV clips in the timeline and there is definitely some sort of memory problem that needs to be addressed. One thing that did help me out slightly was to turn the project media view from thumbnail view to list view. See if that helps out at all.
bruceo wrote on 4/16/2008, 2:14 PM
"One thing that does seem to help is turning off waveforms and thumbnails."

Bob I will see if that at least helps with getting the footage on the timeline, but as far as editing, there is no way I could do it without waveforms and thumbnails. One of the reasons I can't stanf FCP, because Vegas got me addicted to these two things....
Laurence wrote on 4/16/2008, 3:59 PM
I do a lot of smart-render prerendering of sections. I'll put all the clips from a tape on a fresh Vegas timeline, edit it down to what I think I might use, put titles in solely to help me identify the sections which follow later on, choose the better audio channel, normalize that, then smart-render that into a clip with markers. When I'm done, I'll have clips with names like "Dr. Lentz interview", "Town B-roll", "Patient 1 inteview", etc. When I call up these clips, there are markers embedded in them (actually in a separate .SFL file) and when I click on these markers, I will see a title which describes the footage which follows. These compiled HDV clips are easy to deal with and since they are smart-rendered, are exactly what the camera captured.

I began this approach partially to get around the limits of Vegas handling HDV format m2t clips, but now that I'm doing it this way, I really like it.

When I compile these sections, if I do any processing like Mercali deshaking, then I render to Cineform instead of m2t.
bruceo wrote on 4/16/2008, 7:39 PM
Bob, turning off waveforms and thumbnails allowed me to drop all the clips on, and I was able to scrub much of the timeline where I happened to see quite a few black sections or black frames and if the playhead hit something it did not like Vegas would lock up.

I tried to render them all as 1 clip after I dropped them in and did not move the playhead around much to cause a crash, but the renders would always lock up.

The same footage captured from tape does just fine. Now i'm crapping about the 2 same day edits I have coming up next month. Hopefully 8.0c or at least 8.0b.1 is released to fix this nightmare.
Steve Mann wrote on 4/17/2008, 9:19 PM
"I have to drag m2t clips in groups of about 20 or less to the timeline. I can't do many more than that at once without locking up Vegas."

Make sure indexing is turned off in Windows.

Open your computer in explorer, right click on your hard disk drive, select "properties" and uncheck the Indexing option.

You can always turn it back on if this doesn't help.
Laurence wrote on 4/17/2008, 10:12 PM
That didn't fix the problem totally, but it did seem to help a whole lot. Thanks Steve.