P E A C E, HDV, and Premiere Question

HDV wrote on 1/4/2005, 12:22 PM

How about some peace. I'll quit pushing my views. You have not made me change my mind; I haven't changed your mind.

I would like to know the following and any help would be appreciated. Note that I know hardly anything about NLE's.

1. CineForm claims that Premiere is a better product, in combination with Aspect HD, I believe. It's supposedly a lot faster than Vegas and Connect HD. What's the truth? What's the price difference? How much is Vegas?

2. What's the minimum system you need, and what software to edit Sony HDV? How much would it cost?

3. The analog HD output on the Z1 camera -- if you hook up HDSDI converter, is it close to HDCAM HDSDI output quality?

4. How would you record the HDSDI output onto a PC? What system would you need and how much would it cost?

5. What is a good audio editing software?

6. I would like to edit footage from 2 cameras, as if it would be A/B roll.

7. Is the Cineform Aspect HD codec superior and can you use it with Vegas? If not what codec would you use so you don't have to go uncompressed? Or is Vegas taking care of that? How much disc space you need if you start with 25 hr raw CF25 footage?

8. Are there any decent inexpensive monitors that would be usable with the online editor? Which ones and how much would they cost?

9. The Z1 grab looks more contrasty than the DVX frame grab. Is the lattitude lower on the Sony? How many stops is it for each camera?

10. Peace again.

11. I have Vegas 3 that I bought long time ago and never used. Can it be upgraded to Vegas 5 or something or would Vegas 5 or 6, or whatever be cheaper, if I have the discs?

Thanks

Comments

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/4/2005, 12:47 PM

I might suggest that you look into the HDV: What you need to know. book it will answer a few of your uestions, however. The minimum for editing is something like 3.0 or higher system (assuming your editor isn't a beast that is poorly written). Vegas is a very well written program, and probably one of the cleanest written editing softwares that I know of (granted thats not a lot but a program that can potentially run on a 500 Mhz cpu w/ 128 MB ram tells me that it's definately not bloatware.

Look around on the products portion of this site to see how much $ it would be to do the upgrade. I think it's like $200.00 to upgrade from 4 to 5. It might be the same to upgrade from 3 to 5.

as for everything else I don't know for certain the answers, but I'm sure someone here does.

Dave

(EDIT: I typed this on my palm when I checked the forum via wifi, please forgive my typing errors :)

flippin wrote on 1/4/2005, 12:53 PM

If you happen to be a student or teacher, the academic discount for Vegas 5 gets you in currently for $170. (This is an unabridged version and it is not an upgrade price, BTW).

Best regards,

Lee

farss wrote on 1/4/2005, 1:09 PM

1. Haven't been able to read that into anything from Cineform. Certainly though PP is a quite capable NLE and I've used P 6.0 for a while but even with PP the workflow is nowhere near as intuitive as it is with Vegas. PP is probably a more traditional style editing system like Avid etc. Vegas kind of breaks out of that mould so if you're thinking longform with high shooting ratio PP might be a better product.
2. I think a P4, Vegas 5 and the CF plugins.
3. Only tried that with SD to SDI 4:2:2 converter, stunning results
4. Any of the HiDef capture cards but you'll need a high throughput system and SATA RAID 0 drives
5. Vegas, that's why I bought it, oh and it'll edit HDV as well.
6. Vegas has unlimited audio and video tracks and you can use it as an A/B roll editor.
7. It's a very advanced codec, check out their website, you should love it. Plenty of screen shots showing why their stuff is better than DVCPRO HD!
8. To get enough res if you need to see native HD then nothing cheap, HP have (or had?) one which we've bought and so do Sony, think 23" LCD. The HP unlike the Sony does have component ins so you can view the stuff straight from the camera. Except two probs, it shows it as 16:10 and you need to tweak the monitor for the different 701 color space.
9. Sorry, couldn't really say. I'd guess technically as they're all 8 bit systems shouldn't be that much difference.

Strongly suggest investing in SPOTs book, cheap and lots of good info in there.
Bob.

Barry_Green wrote on 1/4/2005, 1:53 PM

<<CineForm claims that Premiere is a better product, in combination with Aspect HD, I believe. It's supposedly a lot faster than Vegas and Connect HD. What's the truth? What's the price difference? How much is Vegas?>>

CineForm also makes a plug-in for Vegas, so really the question comes down to, which program do you prefer to use? Which workflow is more satisfactory? As of right now, none of the programs can make a video that you can play back to the camera, although hopefully that will be rectified very soon.

As for which is best, most of the people on this forum will of course endorse Vegas, which just has an incredible workflow. It's so much faster to get a project done in Vegas. But there are an equal number of Premiere adherents who would suggest otherwise. Personal preference, really.

<<What's the minimum system you need, and what software to edit Sony HDV? How much would it cost? >>
Cineform recommends a minimum 2.8GHZ Hyperthreaded PC. That would let you run basically real-time using the Cineform wavelet codec. It wouldn't really give you real-time performance when using the native HDV files, but -- one of the awesome things about Vegas is that you could use the CineForm codec for doing your editing, and then switch over to the original raw .M2T's from the camera if you wanted to, to extract just that tiny little extra bit of quality for your final render. A compatible PC would cost well under $1,000.

<<5. What is a good audio editing software? >>
Again, a great point for Vegas. Vegas has perhaps the best audio support of any modern NLE. And for more audio support, you can chain over to Sound Forge. If using Premiere, they sell a package that includes Audition (which I believe is an Adobe re-branded version of Cool Edit, isn't it?)

<< Is the Cineform Aspect HD codec superior and can you use it with Vegas? If not what codec would you use so you don't have to go uncompressed? Or is Vegas taking care of that? How much disc space you need if you start with 25 hr raw CF25 footage? >>
Cineform's codec doesn't necessarily give you better quality than the original footage, but it is *much faster*. So it lets you edit your footage more efficiently. As for space, you need about 13gb for each hour of HDV footage. To edit from 25 hours of source, you'll probably want a 3:1 ratio at least, so at least a 120gb hard disk.

HDV wrote on 1/4/2005, 2:04 PM

Thanks a lot everybody for the info so far. I thought that the prices would be a lot higher.

SonyKSA wrote on 1/4/2005, 2:55 PM

11. With a registered Vegas 3 serial number, you have a couple upgrade options.

Upgrade to Vegas for $199.95
Upgrade to Vegas+DVD for $299.95