Outputting audio through Firewire

BGil wrote on 6/27/2004, 11:20 AM

Does Sony have any plans to allow Vegas to output an audio signal through Firewire? I've been using FCP lately and I must admit that it's a great feature because anything that will play out to a NTSC monitor in full-res, frame rate, and quality, when combined with firewire audio output, will go directly out to tape with zero rendering needed. The problem with FCP is that it's real-time previews are somewhat less than what Vegas can do. This IMO would be a relatively easy feature to implement and would speed up the Vegas workflow considerably by enabling render-free print-to tape.

I was wondering if there was some workaround that other people here use. I was thinking about just converting the sound coming out of my sound card to the proper analog connector that goes into my camcorder but as I said, it's analog. I'm not sure I want to deal with the loss in sound quality.

Does anyone know if it's possible to use a firewire audio driver or audio device with Vegas? I was thinking that I could just change the output device setting in Vegas and all would be well. Any thoughts?

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/27/2004, 8:21 PM

The reason for the difference is that FCP has to render those segments. the audio needs to be interleaved in Vegas for you to have audio and video on the Firewire bus. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, including Vegas.
Which do you want? Rendering the entire file either in the background or before preview, or having realtime all the time? You don't get both...not without hardware.
You can use the audio out from your sound card to feed the television or VCR, but understand that you may experience dropped frames if you haven't rendered out the file. And a rendered file, will print to tape with audio going down the firewire bus. So...there is not much point because the render accomplishes what you're asking for.