Bartman, your replies to musicvid and I aren't acceptable. You sound like an old man with a grudge. We only try to help here, but you seem to ask for our help from one side, and discard it from the other. It's like talking to wall.

Please understand that since musicvid and I don't own the source code of Sony Vegas, we can't FIX your problem in its root. We can't just find the bug, fix it, recompile the software, and give you the fixed version. For bugs like this, we can only suggest workarounds.

However, I will go the extra mile for you, and try to explain the situation to you better, but for the last time.

>a product aimed at the CONSUMER level should work with CONSUMER level cameras.

This is where your misconception lies. Your problem is really lack of historical knowledge. Please, allow me to explain.

Sony Vegas Platinum is a fork off of Vegas Pro, which was made to work with camcorder formats. These formats included DV, and later HDV -- formats that were designed for editing. You see, back in the day, only real camcorders could record video -- not cellphones, digirecorders, tablets, microwave ovens and their kitchen sink.

In 2005, when Apple started touting h.264 as the next best thing for *delivery* purposes (delivery meaning: playback-only format), HDV was supposed to be the format that HD cameras were supposed to record in. But HDV's reign was short. On paper, h.264 is twice as good as mpeg2's HDV, at half the bitrate. What this meant for camera manufacturers was: higher quality, in smaller filesizes (since consumers hated the 12 GB per hour on the DV/HDV tapes), and without having to deal with tapes (that consumers also hated).

So another division of Sony, and Panasonic, came together, and created AVCHD. A more edit-friendly h.264 format (special container, and special encoder switches to help with editing), a format that was to kill HDV. To this day, AVCHD is the most heavy of the "camcorder formats" as it still requires lots of CPU power to decode. But since it's somewhat edit-friendly, editors like Vegas don't have huge problems with it. They manage for the most part.

Here's the kick though, and please pay special attention to the following.

Seeing the big impact h.264 was going to have to the camera world, companies like Flip, Sanyo, Kodak, Samsung, and many others that were not *camcorder* companies traditionally, started jumping to the "digirecorder" bandwagon. Problem was though, instead of using the edit-friendly AVCHD h.264 format, they went with "generic" h.264. Instead of following the well described standard (which is available for a fee), each one of these companies just licensed random cheaper DSPs, that were recording a version of h.264 that was not meant for editing. A version that was very difficult to decode without a DSP.

Absolutely *none* of the editors until the past year could deal properly with these formats! http://eugenia.queru.com/2008/06/17/i-hate-samsung/ Even Apple's iMovie, the most user-friendly editor around, had trouble editing these files! EVEN APPLE had to come up with something terrible like this http://eugenia.queru.com/2009/10/16/regarding-apples-iframe-spec/ in order to deal with the bruhaha of generic h.264 digirecorders. The thing was (and still is) unmanageable. As you can read there, you are not the first person FRUSTRATED about the situation! I've been where you are now since 2008.

Only *very recently* editors added hardware acceleration to assist decoding these formats! And that, only after Canon's still picture division (which obviously didn't even bother co-operating with their camcorder division to use AVCHD, or they couldn't use the same electronics since AVCHD requires faster and more expensive DSPs), started putting generic h.264 on their dSLRs, and so wedding photographers started shouting left and right about how unmanageable these files are! All of us with these dSLRs, had to use Cineform! Cineform had become our religion, because there was simply no other way!

The good thing about this, was that when professionals started requiring better h.264 support, video editing companies started taking notice. Before that, digirecorders were simply rogue products, that never cared about anything but themselves in the chain of usage. And since these manufacturers never cared about editing companies, editing companies never cared about them either. It's not about what people buy the most in this case, it's about co-operation between these companies, in order to get access to SDKs and APIs etc. Otherwise, companies would just waste money going blind towards trying to deal with these unmanageable formats.

Vegas got this "better" h.264 support with Platinum 10 for the first time, just a few months ago. Before that, it was a DISASTER. Obviously, since you're still using this very first implementation of their new h.264 decoder, bugs still exist. But I believe that Vegas Pro, which uses the same codebase, but it's a bit newer, has your bug FIXED (in my tests, at least). This is why I'm saying that all you have to do is wait a bit for a FREE update on Platinum 10.0. If and when Sony does that, your bug *should* go away! Until then, you should indeed use Matrox AVI, which is the free alternative to Cineform.

Basically, what I'm saying is that GOOD software support for these out-of-spec cameras will come, but it will take a while. You should have researched before you bought a digirecorder. In my writings I always mention how bad of an idea is for a normal consumer to buy a digirecorder instead of a camcorder. I never suggest them. I realize that you bought the Playsport model because you want to play with sports, and no camcorder would give you that form factor. But when you take the decision to buy a camera that never passed any validation test in terms of recording format, you should live with the consequences.

I did the same thing when I bought my two Canons dSLR/digicams. I knew where I was diving into. And I bought them by preparing myself: I also got myself Cineform. Without Cineform, these cameras would have been trashed right now. Because there was nowhere to go at the time. NO EDITOR on this planet could deal with them!

>Not like Kodak has only been around a couple years.

No, but Kodak being Kodak, went with the cheaper solutions and didn't bother to license AVCHD. And so they went with solutions that look good on paper, but they're a nightmare to deal with in post processing.

>It's like buying a car then having to go somewhere else to buy an ignition key to start it.

No, it's not like this. It's like you bought this instead, http://www.motorcycle-usa.com/photogallerys/2007_Bimota_shop.jpg which was hand-made, OUT OF SPEC, and it's not street legal. So no wonder you don't have your keys yet!

Look, I'm not saying that it's your fault. You just bought a camera, you expect it to work. I get that! It's just that the state of things on ANY video editor are more complicated than that. And video codecs, especially h.264, is way more complicated than that too. You're a victim of complexity on the video editing side, and quick-profit/scamming on the cheap manufacturers' side.

To give you an example of the complexity video editors are into. Back in 2003 I wrote an editorial on my site about the state of video editors on Linux. They all sucked immensely. I got the fury of their developers. But it's 2011, and things are as bad on Linux as they used to. The Windows and Mac video world looks like heavenly playground compared to the video editing world of Linux. Even Ubuntu's CEO (Ubuntu is Linux's most popular version), has admitted that video editing sucks on Linux. And the reason? Complexity!

So, for the last time, please:
1. Install Vegas Pro trial in parallel, just to see if your bug is fixed, so you'll know what to expect in the near future from Platinum. It can give you hope.
2. In the meantime, follow the tutorial for transcoding to Matrox AVI. You will lose no quality with this intermediate format.

Alternatively, you could either:
1. Buy a REAL camcorder. If you're after extreme stability and compatibility, go with a tape HDV camcorder instead of AVCHD.
2. Buy another editor (good luck dealing with its own complex probs and quirks though -- nothing is perfect out there).
3. Buy Cineform (it's faster to encode/decode than Matrox AVI).

But none of these options are free. And they aren't free, because your CHEAP digirecorder came with a GOTCHA. So either please follow my two suggestions above, or stop editing altogether, and give the whole video industry the finger. I know I've come close to that once or twice.