Is there a codec similar to Cineform but free? I have a lot of AVCHD footage to edit. I tried with Huffyuv, and about 4 minutes of footage took about 10 GB, so it's out of the question. And Cineform Neo HD, the only one I could use in Vegas, is $600, definitely out of my range.
The Cineform VFW version that comes with Vegas is useless, I don't even know why it's there. I tried using it to pre-render, and to render normally, and it gave me an error on both. I rebooted and tried it again just in case, but same thing.
While I was in Argentina recently, since I videorecorded a lot of my family and friends, and I only have two 16 GB SDHC cards, when I finished one I copied the whole contents to the hard drive of my mom's computer and then in turn copy that to either two double layer DVDs or four single layer ones.
When I came back to the US, I found the nasty surprise that a lot of the footage has visual glitches in it at random places, and because of those glitches, the stupid Pixela Imagemixer software cannot edit them. Well, it can, but when it comes to actually finishing the movie, it stops with an error.
Because of this, I have no choice but to edit all the footage in Vegas, which really pisses me off because it will mean recompressing all of it, something that I was going to avoid using ImageMixer, which smart-renders AVCHD. The problem here is that Vegas by itself will not render AVCHD to 1920x1080, only 1440x1080, and it shows a quality degradation. If I had buttloads of hard drive space I could render to Huffyuv and then load it up in DVDA 5 and set it to compress to AVC 1920x1080 at 20 Mbps, which would at least give me a better picture quality, but for that I would need a humongous disk if I'm going to work with Huffyuv, or a better codec that doesn't show any degradation. So I really need an intermediate codec that doesn't have a huge space footprint but also free. I know I'm asking for too much, but well, there might be something out there.
The Cineform VFW version that comes with Vegas is useless, I don't even know why it's there. I tried using it to pre-render, and to render normally, and it gave me an error on both. I rebooted and tried it again just in case, but same thing.
While I was in Argentina recently, since I videorecorded a lot of my family and friends, and I only have two 16 GB SDHC cards, when I finished one I copied the whole contents to the hard drive of my mom's computer and then in turn copy that to either two double layer DVDs or four single layer ones.
When I came back to the US, I found the nasty surprise that a lot of the footage has visual glitches in it at random places, and because of those glitches, the stupid Pixela Imagemixer software cannot edit them. Well, it can, but when it comes to actually finishing the movie, it stops with an error.
Because of this, I have no choice but to edit all the footage in Vegas, which really pisses me off because it will mean recompressing all of it, something that I was going to avoid using ImageMixer, which smart-renders AVCHD. The problem here is that Vegas by itself will not render AVCHD to 1920x1080, only 1440x1080, and it shows a quality degradation. If I had buttloads of hard drive space I could render to Huffyuv and then load it up in DVDA 5 and set it to compress to AVC 1920x1080 at 20 Mbps, which would at least give me a better picture quality, but for that I would need a humongous disk if I'm going to work with Huffyuv, or a better codec that doesn't show any degradation. So I really need an intermediate codec that doesn't have a huge space footprint but also free. I know I'm asking for too much, but well, there might be something out there.