Please upload somewhere a 3 second video of your camera, and give us the URL and we can test it for you if it works with the latest version or not.

I'll see about doing that tonight.
I found software called "Blaze Media Pro" and with a trial download I was able to convert an avi to mpeg2 and it seems to work when I imput the mpeg2 into VMS! Only thing I noticed was a slight downgrade in quality. Anyone else used the Blaze Media Pro?

Don't change from avi to mpeg2, there is a loss of quality as you saw. Instead, just upload a RAW, as comes out of the camera 3 second clip to test it with the new version.

Euginia:
Thanks for helping. Can I just email you a clip when I get home from work today to check out?

This leads me to my other ?: Normally I render my work from in to Mpeg and then in DVDA I burn my movies. Am I shortchanging my quality by doing this? Most of my work consists of jpeg's and wav or mpeg files out of my Sony Handcam MiniDV.

No, for DVDs it's ok, because dvds will only playback mpeg. However, in the case we are discussing here, if you change from .avi to mpeg and then edit and then export, you will be exporting to mpeg twice, and that's twice the loss of quality. While with formats that vegas supports, you only have a single generation of loss by converting to mpeg.

Thanks for sending me a test file.

ok, my honest opinion:
Sell that camera on eBay. Its format is simply non standard and it creates lots of problems.
Vegas does not support this format at all on version 8. After I installed the ffdshow freeware codec pack, I was able to get it on Vegas to show video, but it has NO audio! Only VLC, another freeware player, can playback the audio, but it has no video!

Then, I loaded that file on Premiere Elements 4 (which I received today by mail). Elements only supported its audio, but after ffdshow, it was able to show video too.

So, if you want to keep that camera, buy Premiere Elements 4 and install ffdshow. Although I would suggest you buy another camera. If you do want to keep Vegas, install the Lagarith open source codec, and then load on Blaze or another application your videos, transcribe to Lagarith (warning: the files will be huge), and then load the Lagarith files on Vegas. The reason I suggest Lagarith compared to mpeg is because Lagarith is a lossless codec, while mpeg is not. A lossless codec does not lose quality during re-encodings.

BTW, that camera supposedly comes with VideoStudio 9, did you install that app instead?

Eugenia - Thanks for the reply. Thank goodness that's not my camera! See, I am making a highlights video for my son's football league. There are 10 teams and it will be shown a big screen in an auditorium.

During this process I receive all kinds of video containing football plays the coaches have chosen as highlights, mostly not very good in quality but this is the first time I've had these types of issues. This camera tops them all and really changes my opinion about personally ever buying Samsung products!

Since I want to keep using VMS I may try the Lagarity codec. I found the site but don't understand how this process works. When I load the codec, does it automatically get imported into Blaze?

After you install Lagarith by right-clicking "install" on its .inf file, you check if it shows anywhere with Blaze's exporting dialogs. If not, it means that Blaze does not support the Windows media API and only does its own things. If yes, then you can use Lagarith with it.

Sorry I am not sure what "Export Dialogs" are.
Are you saying that if I just download it and then use Blaze to convert, it will work if it recognizes the codec and if it doesn't I will get a file error (like I do now when I tried to convert)?

You sent me a screenshot showing various codecs on Blaze. If Blaze is to support Lagarith, it will show up in that drop-down box in your screenshot. You simply select it and you export via lagarith. If it's not there, after you install lagarith, then it means you can't use it with blaze.

Got it! Will try it shortly.

I got lost reading all of your interesting blogs!!!

hmm, I have an easier workflow for you. This one might just work with VMS6.

1. Install VLC and use the Wizard to export the audio to WAV floating point uncompressed (unfortunately the mp3 export VLC does is buggy). Save the audio files with the same name as their video files, but with a .wav extension.
2. Then, install ffdshow and now Vegas *should* be able to playback video, but
not audio.
3. Import the audio you exported from VLC to Vegas.
4. Manually sync the audio to video (they are separated now you see). The audio will be a few milliseconds smaller than the video. You will have to zoom in to the timeline and time-stretch the audio (CNTRL+mouse drag on the right side of the audio clip) to match the video's length. On small clips there won't be a visible problem, but for really long clips you might experience a small A/V sync issue.

That's the only way to make it work on Vegas (this workflow worked for me on VMS8 with ffdshow installed), unless you want to move to
Premiere Elements 4+ffdshow.

Actually, you know what? I don't need the audio because I am laying a music track over the clips. I really only care about the audio. So I just need to do teh ffdshow step, then, right?

What about that Lagarith Codec? SHould I install that and render my files to avi normally using the lossless Lagarith Codec or stick with Mpeg 2 default template?

If only you care about the video, just install ffdshow and you should be in business. If VMS 6 is able to use the DirectShow technology on Windows, then after a reboot you should be able to see video on Vegas, but not audio.

It worked! I installed the ffdshow program, rebooted my PC and when I opend VMS 6.0 and imported an avi clip both the AUDIO and VIDEO played just fine! What is ffdshow and what did it do? Is it just a codec of some sort?

>What is ffdshow and what did it do? Is it just a codec of some sort?

It is a pack of open source codecs, reversed engineered by the community. With ffdshow you are able to playback most kinds of videos out there.

>When I upgrade to VMS 8.0 (Platinum) will this FFDSHOW still be there and
work with 8.0?

The video will. But for the audio, I don't know. Over here, on both my VMS8P and Pro8, audio doesn't work. You might be getting audio just because you had another codec installed separately, one that I don't have and is not included with ffdshow.

Ok, that makes sense.

Last question for now:
Are you a fan of rendering to .avi before sending to DVDa or will I get as much loss as just rendering to mpeg2? Either way, DVDa will be rendering to mpeg anyhow for the dvd burn, right?

Thanks so much for your help, I am so truly appreciative.

PS> Advice on how to make video play back in slow motion on purpose?

Nevermind on the slow motion ?. It appears this feature is not available in VMS 6.0, just in the full version. Is it in 8.0 VMS?