Is Vegas 5b ready for HD

Laurence wrote on 9/11/2004, 8:54 PM
One thing I've wondered about HD video is if my computer will keep up. It's a 3 gigahertz P4 with a 533Mhz frontside bus with 2 gig of ram and about 500 gig of WD hard drive space.

I took the sample from the new Sony HD camera that was posted yesterday, rendered it in my best guess of what actually might come straight off the camera, and loaded it into Vegas.

The video by itself played almost smoothly, but of course the transitions were extremely jumpy due to the mpeg 2 encoding. I tried to selectively pre-render the video, but only DV resolution transition render options were available. Will this be fixed in an update soon? I would love to go HD when the new camera comes out, but I want to make sure my computer is up to the task before I make the jump. My guess is that rendering transitions will be a neccessity with systems like most of us have. Am I missing something?

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 9/11/2004, 9:10 PM
First, the vid from the Sony HDV cam download is a windows WMV, not MPEG2. In other words, Dr. D took vid from the camera, created a project, and rendered it to WMVHD
Second, that's a rendered project from the camera, not raw video.
Vegas is HDV ready as far as editing, but I'd say it's not optimal. However, Sony has announced at NAB that they'll have HDV support in Vegas at some future point in time.
Datarates for HDV aren't terribly different than DV.
- 720p (1280 x 720, progressive), at approximately 19 Mbps data rate
- 1080i (1440 x 1080, interlaced), at approximately 25 Mbps data rate
-DV (720 x 480, interlaced) at approximately 25Mbps (hence the name DV 25)
Your computer is likely somewhat up to the task, but there are other issues to consider. Datarates are just a part of the question.
I've been playing with the Cineform stuff with HDV from the JVC. Works pretty sweetly in Vegas. Same with the raw MPEG files.
display to a monitor is another story. Currently, you'll only be able to use external by converting to avi, or resampling on the fly. Previews suck at that point. So, you'll want another screen. I'm doing a triple head from Matrox at the moment, predominantly for that reason. (Check out the P650 or Parhelia from Matrox)
Laurence wrote on 9/11/2004, 9:35 PM
The WMV file was totally unworkable. I rendered the complete file as an HD mpeg-2 to simulate what would come off the camera. I don't know the exact settings so I just used one of the presets except that I changed the frame rate to 25 to simulate PAL. I know this wasn't an exact test but it should be in the ballpark of what I would get off this camera. Do you know what typical HD MPEG settings would be so I could do this more accurately?
rmack350 wrote on 9/11/2004, 11:01 PM
I see what you're getting at here. I have, on occasion, put a wmv file on the timeline and the rendered it back to AVI so I could work with it comfortably.

You're wanting to render this WMV back to something approximating Sony's HDV format so you can see how it plays in Vegas. What you really need is either a codec or a mpeg spec. My guess is that eventually you'll need a codec that does very specific encodes that produce a target data rate.

May as well wait. It'll get here. Are you dying to get an HD camera right this minute?

It sounded like Sony was well on their way with this. The footage was editable and rendered pretty quickly on a 2.4 GHz PC. Sony EPM described it as "barebones". Your computer seems to compare favorably. I wouldn't worry.

Rob Mack
Laurence wrote on 9/11/2004, 11:40 PM
Yeah that's exactly what I was trying to say. The sample footage was pretty simple transition wise. It could easily have been done with a system that would glitch like crazy on the transitions. The last thing I want to do is spend almost 4K on a camera only to find that I need to spend another couple of grand updating my PC.
rmack350 wrote on 9/12/2004, 12:03 PM
You mean glitch on playback-especially through the transitions. I agree anyone who wants to be an early adopter of one of these cameras and edit in Vegas should get hold of a few sample clips and whatever codec or upgrade is needed and then just try it out. Or wait for other people to be guinea pigs.

External preview is going to be an issue, of course.

Are you trying to make the purchase before the end of the tax year?

Rob Mack
Laurence wrote on 9/12/2004, 7:31 PM
Probably not that soon. I just worked on a project using the Panasonic DVX 100a that was destined for film transfer. I thought it looked good but it was nowhere close that posted Sony HD clip! Right now I'm still exploring issues like "can I edit HD video smoothly on my current system?" and "can I actually burn HD DVD's with the finished products?" and "will the new Sony camera shoot regular DV resolution at both native 3:4 and 16:9 in the meantime?" and "will HD format transfer well to film for those rare occasions where I do such a project?" and "Can I render HD footage to standard NTSC and PAL resolution DVDs?"
seeker wrote on 9/13/2004, 8:28 PM
Laurence,

"...can I actually burn HD DVD's with the finished products?"

What do you mean by an HD DVD? I am under the impression that HD does not have a commercial disc format. In other words, there is no disc that you could put in a DVD player that would cause HD to come out. You can't rent HD DVDs. So I doubt that you could make one.

-- Seeker --
farss wrote on 9/13/2004, 8:42 PM
To answer a few of the questions:

Yes, the camera will shoot native DV25 in 16:9, don't know for sure about 4:3 though. No, there'll be a PAL version and a NTSC version as far as I know as the frame rates are different (no surprise there!).

There are a few players that'll play WMV 9 HD off standard DVDs I believe. There's also one on the market here that'll play XVid off normal DVDs. Not exactly HD but better than SD.

Vegas seems to work fine with HD, only tried at 720p using HiRes stills but seems to run no worse than DV25. However thats far different to HDV which uses mpeg-2 compression, for that you'll need the Cineform plugs.
The thing I'm interested in is getting it out of the system to a HDCAM deck. I know we'll need a beefy system and yes the decks cost but offering this as a facility should attract a lot of business. No doubt in the future the networks will accept footage as HDV but for the time being I think they'll only accept HDCAM. Other option might be to give them a H.264 file.

Bob.