Bill, do you mean that one capture to m2t and then render out in Vegas to some other format before more editing or to capture to CineForm and first then use Vegas?

Capture to Cineform before editing.

A slightly related question....

I've been capturing with Cineform but the file sizes are big....
With a recent project <one camera, cuts, crossfades only, simple titles> I thought I would speed up my capture time by using Vegas capture and editing the m2t files. I got stuck with the "black frame/gap" problems others have had, major pain to
'cover' those spaces....

IF I want to archive by printing back to tape (for now) the render time is incredibly long and my understanding is that the render is back to m2t format. If I then jack in my camera to an HDTV this would be the very best resolution I could view at this time....Correct???

I don't have an HD player yet, and haven't tried the HD DVD to DVD method.....and in my current project all the performances are over an hour so would not fit on a DL dvd.

Would it still be advisable to capture with Cineform, edit, Print-to-tape? or is there any benefit to capturing to m2t., edit, PTT ?

Eileen

p.s. even with a fast machine using "Cineform it takes about 2hrs15min to capture/convert 1 hour of tape from my camera which adds up to a lot of time capturing especially when I have a multi-cam shoot with several tapes to capture....

And, of course, there's another way:

(1) pull in all the raw m2t clips (many prefer to use HDVSplit for several reasons).

(2) Use GearShift to immediately make widescreen DV proxies for all those clips, not intermediates.

(3) Do you whole project with the DV proxies.

(4) When finished, use GearShift to automatically swap the original m2t clips for the DV proxies, then print to tape from that or render to MPEG2.

The advantage this gives is that most PCs, even relatively powerful ones, will deliver a much more fluid editing experience working with DV on the timeline than with m2t (or Cineform), in my experience. The DV proxies will take up about the same room as the m2t clips, while the Cineform files will occupy maybe 3x the space of the m2t clips.

I wouldn't get too bent out of shape about m2t degradation unless you did maybe 5+ successive renderings. But if you're the curious sort just do a test and see for yourself. Haven't done it myself, yet. I think the folks who offer Cineform had a web page that shows the degradation after 10 MPEG2 renders, and it's pretty obvious and serious then.

And yes, if you go the Cineform route then you can eliminate the raw m2t clips from your PC and deal strictly with Cineform.

Nice to have choices.

One reason I tried the m2t route was that I had a multi-cam shoot with about 6 tapes and the Cineform clips ate up all the space in my hard drive!
Close to 200 GB so with a very simple edit I thought I could speed up my whole process and save a lot of HD space by using the raw m2t method.
Too bad the 'black evil frame issue' ate up my so called 'time saving' by not having to convert.
Guess its time to explore HDV split and Gear Shift....
or wait and hope Vegas 8 fixes that stupid bug, AND is Vista friendly since I just bought a new laptop.

I've been using Gearshift but with Pegasys MJPEG proxies instead of DV proxies. There are several advantages to doing this. One is that it's even easier on the CPU than DV codec clips (unless you're previewing with a firewire box of course). I'm using deinterlaced 640 x 360 proxies which are a nice size on my monitor without any realtime scaling or deinterlacing. The colorspace is more similar so color corrections on the proxies look very good after shifting gears back to HD. The proxies are also a lot smaller.

I've also been using Gearshift with AVCHD clips. Right now you need to rename the extensions from "mts" to "m2t", but once you do that, it works very well.

I always do any rerenders to Cineform and I use the Cineform option with the fantastic John Meyers Deshaker script.

My biggest problem with the m2t approach right now is that I sometimes get m2t clips that are corrupted somehow and will crash Vegas. Using high quality HDV rated tapes and capturing with HDVSplit with the preview window turned off will minimize this. Each time I have a clip that crashes vegas, I have to fix it with Mpeg2Repar or Womble MPEG VCR, but once I do, the fixed clip doesn't preview as smoothly in the Vegas timeline. With the Gearshift proxy approach this is no big deal, but it should be fixed none-the-less.

One thing that people miss with Gearshift is that it does more than just work with proxies. Gearshift can also replace all the clips on the timeline with Cineform Intermediaries. You can do this before you color correct if you want. The advantage of doing it this way is that you only need to convert the footage you are using.

Riredale: Thanks for the explanation....
With the new NEO I'm not having all the problems capturing that I did with the previous ConnectHD so that's become a reliable way to capture but does cost a lot of time and HD space so the raw m2t capture was my effort to streamline my editing when I wasn't doing anything fancy or re-rendering numerous times.
I also notice that with the newer updates I'm now getting good preview frame rates using the m2t clips....but that damnable 'black' frame' issue destroys any time advantage gained from not converting to intermediates.....


Laurance: "I've been using Gearshift but with Pegasys MJPEG proxies instead of DV proxies"

Are those proxies an option within the Gearshift software? or are they found somewhere else?


thanks,
Eileen

Allow me to jump in here and Laurence can no doubt add his experiences when he comes back online.

GearShift is essentially an automated scripting tool. If you can manually convert m2t clips to Mjpeg manually (and you can) then GearShift can do it, too.

You manually create a render process in Vegas and give it a name beginning with "GSP " and then later when you are in GearShift it will show up as a rendering format along with the usual DV Widescreen and such.

Riredale:
Can you tell us how to ....
"manually create a render process in Vegas and give it a name beginning with "GSP "

Would this be a "custom" render template of some sort?

Thanks much,
Eileen