HDV works great on Vegas. It works fine on V7, too. It was a little iffy on V6, but only in that you couldn't get full playback speed on many computers, and you couldn't have more than 80 or so m2t clips up on the timeline at once.

I like working with proxies because they work the system so little, so complex projects still play back in real time. But Vegas handles HDV very well, especially if you have an upper-end dualcore machine. With quad cores, it's effortless (or so I'm told; I have an overclocked AMD 3800x2).

I personally recommend capturing the m2t clips with HDVSplit, a freeware utility.

I edit HDV in Vegas Pro 8 all the time, first version a and now b, and I don't have a single problem, actually to me HDV editing is one of the strengths of Vegas 8. It smart renders HDV (Premiere doesn't), and while DV allows you to use the video camera connected to the TV set to monitor the timeline while you edit, it seems HDV doesn't support this feature (not a shortcoming of Vegas but rather of the format itself), but Vegas can output any video that goes through it to the Windows Secondary display, so in my case I have a dual DVI graphics card, so one output goes to to the computer screen, and the other one using a long DVI to HDMI cable that goes to my HDMI switcher and then to my LCD HD set, and I can monitor in real time everything I do in Vegas and how will it look on the TV set.

My guess is that many of the people having problems with HDV and Vegas either have very specific problems which may be related to Vegas or not, but also many people have Windows installations that have gone messy over time and that causes some problems. I did a fresh install recently right before I received my copy of Vegas. And of course, forget about using Vista. Stick with XP for years to come.

If you have a powerful machine and you capture with HDVSplit and use those very files as your source footage then 8.0b looks pretty solid.

If the machine struggles then you can use Gearshift with DV or MJPEG proxies.

My problems with HDV are because I like to trim and archive footage, then bring it back in for further editing. I personally can't find a reliable way to do this yet for a big project.

Every NLE has some issues. If you have time I suggest you intensively road-test Vegas Pro against trial versions of Premiere Pro and Edius with some real life HDV projects on your machine and see how they stand up.

HDV with Vegas is a breeze. I've done HDV with Vegas for 3 years now without a serious issue - just a learning curve. If you want to trim, archive and bring back then do a "save with trimmed media" to an archive directory. Bring back re-edit and save again. Also you can chop your clips up into chunks and save them in different project file versions. I don't see a problem. Heck, a bunch of us now are heading into full 1920 progressive HD with Vegas. With my laptop a 2.4GH 2core duo I can edit HDV natively without an intermediary or Hvsplit. Preview is a bit slow at about 12 fps but it works. The final rendered files look stunning on my cheapo 42" Vizio LCD TV.

e6600, 3gig ram and never a problem editing straight m2t from camera, captured with sony. whatever problems i had, (and there weren't many) appeared to have been 80% operator error (ok, i didn't check ALL my settings), and 20% hardware issues (or rather, bad installations).

yes, people are having problems, (just check other nle forums for a comparison ;-)), but they're really pushing the envelopes with hardware / complexity of edits. and i can't thank them enough for doing so since by the time i have to do something tricky-dicky, any problems have been ironed out...

i'm talking from pal land, and i'm one happy vegemite....

leslie

Not that it necessarily makes any significant difference but, it seems that if you capture with HDVSplit, Vegas will use the MainConcept MPEG2 decoder when you import this HDV footage. If you capture with Vegas or load an HDV file which has been rendered with Vegas, it will use the Sony MPEG2 decoder. Curiously, the preview frame rate will be slightly higher on footage that uses the Sony MPEG2 decoder.

I'm not certain what charateristic of the HDV file causes Vegas to use one decoder over the other but surely it's something in the file's header. I've never gotten an answer to exactly what's going on. Perhaps this might be a factor in the black frame issue.

John

The majority of my projects are shot and edited in HDV and I've experienced none of the problems you have in mind (black frame included). Now I'm editing 1920x1080 P and so far no difficulties (but one should never tempt the gods).

i've never had any problems working with hdv in vegas 8...

Apparantly, what I DON'T know about editing HDV in Vegas could fill volumes.

I had hoped I could just import my camera's HDV footage into Vegas using the built-in capture utility, drag and drop the files to the timeline, preview them on an external monitor, and then print to tape... but it sounds like my workflow is going to be different.

Maybe I'll have to down-convert the files directly out of the camera to SD AVI files during capture and then I'll be working just like I always have???

No, just do what you described. Worst case, you won't get 30fps on your preview. Report back if that happens and the people on this friendly board will give you a couple of suggestions.

I've had pretty good luck with HDV and Vegas as well, and previewing on an external monitor-thought its not through firewire, just the old fashioned way.

A couple of clips that cause Vegas to crash, but they're usually very, very short, and I think there was already a thread on this that suggested a work around.

There is a free program on the net called "MPEG2REPAIR" that will usually fix clips that cause Vegas to crash.

If you're shooting HDV, there is NO reason not to edit HDV!!!

Working with HDV (rather than SD) will slow things down a bit... And I hate to preview at anything less than full frame rate... so... I have a 3 word solution:

Gearshift Gearshift Gearshift

You set up your HDV project and then build SD AVI proxies (of all the HDV files - Gearshift will automate this). Hit Gearshift and work on your project in SD with all the speed of an SD project. Hit Gearshift again and all your HDV files are restored for rendering your project in HDV. Hit Gearshift again to do further work in SD. Hit Gearshift again and once again, your entire project is HDV. It's so easy!

If the issue is monitoring the footage, I can think of three choices:

--output SD DV encoded video over firewire to a camera or other converter an dfrom there to an SD monitor
--Use an I/O card like and Xena or Decklink. Some of these can output HD in Component or over SDI
--Use a digital card to output over HDMI or DVI. Vegas covers this with it's secondary display feature, a BMD intensity card outputs HD over HDMI,
most graphics cards have DVI output and some support real HD resolutions, and I have in my hand a graphics card with HDMI output (I assume you can buy one but haven't looked)

Of all this, the BMD and AJA solutions are the more professional options but I really couldn't tell you what's truely working in Vegas.

Rob Mack