I would experiment with changing ram settings. HDV by itself is using a ton of memory.

Also search this board for HDVsplit.

farss said: Do your project properties match you media properties?

Yeah Bob - that was one of the first things I checked.

Are you finding V7 performance better than VP8? I'm not experiencing any real advantages of one over the other performance wise.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

I captured the footage with HDVSplit,
[i]Don't do that!![i]

That's your problem. This has been discussed at great length in many other posts, but when you capture with anything other than Vegas, you end up with an m2t that Vegas doesn't "like." There is a HUGE performance difference in playback on the timeline. Not subtle.

So, if you capture with Vegas, your problems will be gone. This isn't a Vegas 8 vs. Vegas 7 issue: it affects both versions.

You have ram set at 2048!??

No need for it to be that high. Bring it down to 128 or so

I have a quad 6600 and have no problems on playback at "best". But even with my old D950 dual core I could still do HDV playback at "best" (with no effects).

What do you have running for background tasks?

My main editing system here is a really old P4 running Win2K so V8 doesn't even run on it. The other home system runs V7.0d and V8, so far I'm finding that build of V7 more stable than V8 on that system.

I think on multicore PCs there mightn't be much of a performance difference between V7 and V8.

With V7.0e and V8 I've had some really funky things happen, after Vegas crashes I've had to do a hard reset. Just don't need that kind of grief and V7.0d does all I need to get the jobs out the door.

Bob.

Vegas 8 seems like the Vista of NLE's. It held much promise, but most people still don't want to use it.

john - I was under the impression that the Vegas Capture utility was not worth using and instead everyone seemed to recommend HDVSplit. That's why I was using it.

I'm recapturing the footage as I type this with the Vegas Capture utility - Hopefully your recommendation will resolve the performance issues I'm having.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

Hi Cliff,

And you DO need to drop the RAM preview. That holds ram for when you Build a RAM PREVIEW, (by highlighting and area and pushing SHIFT - B ) With the Ram preview that high you WIll have problems with normal playback. Unless you are using the RAM PREVIEW function a lot, Drop it down to 128 or so. You will see a difference. I did.

Duncan
(www.touchwoodproductions.com)

I have to agree. try setting ram preview down at 128 and see how that goes. I'm pretty sure you've got at least 4GB of RAM and you're probably running a 64-bit OS, but Vegas is still 32-bit. Even if you hacked it to be large address aware, I'd still try a lower memory settingbefore anything else. Even 1024 if you're dead set on having lots of ram set aside for previews and caching.

Rob Mack

I was under the impression that the Vegas Capture utility was not worth using and instead everyone seemed to recommend HDVSplit. That's why I was using it.For DV, you are absolutely correct -- the Vegas capture utility is pretty bad, and Scenalyzer is the way to go. However, for HDV, Vegas uses a completely different capture utility (which is why you get a dialog asking you to choose what you are going to capture). This HDV capture utility creates "special" m2t files that apparently have a different structure that permits Vegas to play them back at much higher framerates. These are played back with the Sony-created codec, whereas all other files are played back using the MainConcept MPEG codec.

I wrote about this a year ago here:

Prieview stutter again ...

after corresponding with Sony about the problem. This is why I am so certain about the source of the problem (although I agree that you should set temporarily try setting RAM preview to something like 512 MB).

johnmeyer - Thanks so much!!! Using the Vegas Capture Utility was the ticket - Performance is MUCH better. I honestly thought I was going to have to work with Premiere Pro again. This is the kind of performance I am use to in Vegas Pro 8.

Also, dropping the RAM preview amount down added to the performance issues as well - thanks to those who recommended making that change.

This is the biggest reason why I value these forums - they truly are helpful. Users genuinely help others without large amounts of egoic BS.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

A hearty "thank you" doesn't pay the bills.... we want money. You can send your "thankyou" (plus tax) to.....

:)

One question still lingers, why are people using HDVSplit?

I very, very, rarely need scene detection but if my memory serves me well there was all manner of issues with Vegas's scene detection and its HDV capture.

Bob.

One question still lingers, why are people using HDVSplit?As I recall there were two reasons people started using HDVSplit:

1. There was initially no scene detection in Vegas' HDV capture.

2. The DV Capture built into Vegas had (and still has) a lousy feature set, and Scenalyzer was (and is) better in every possible respect. Therefore people assumed that any external capture application would be better.

Now that Vegas has scene detection, I am not aware of any real benefit to using HDVSplit. I need to add, however, that I have not used it, so I may be missing something. On paper, however, it does not seem to offer any real advantage, and it has not been updated in over a year. I have used extensively the other program this same author produce (HDR AGC) and while it has some useful functionality (which is why I use it), it is VERY rough around the edges.

Thus, my recommendation is that everyone purchase Scenalyzer for their DV capture, but that they use Vegas for HDV capture.

P.S. You're welcome! I am glad I was able to solve the problem.

P.P.S. Here is a link to a post describing some of the advantages of using Scenalyzer (and no, there is not an HDV version of Scenalyzer):

Scenalyzer Features

John, I am using HDVSplit and the captured clips are decoded by the Sony M2TS decoder m2tsplug.dll and give me a full 25fps on the Vegas timeline most of the time.

Occasionally I'll get a clip decoded by the MainConcept decoder mcplug.dll but this is typically the first clip on the tape that I anyway should be throwing away if I've prepared properly, or where there are lost packets because I had QUICK REC set on the camera for example.

There are 3 reasons I am using HDVSplit:

1) The Vegas HDV capture utility, the last time I used it, was not splitting the file quite at the right place. A few frames from the following clip were in end of the file of the preceding clip (or vice versa, I can't remember which). On the other hand HDVSplit splits them in the right place.

2) There is no naming by date/time with the Sony utility, whereas the HDVSplit gives fully flexible filenaming by date etc.. This is very helpful on a busy shoot with lots of tapes and multiple cameras. I could even make the clip names match the Scenalyzer filename format (which I used in the proxies workflow I had before I got a fast laptop).

3) I can get a full 1920x1080 preview on my 17" laptop screen for me and potential customers to watch while I capture, which helps sales. I don't think Vegas can do that can it?

A couple more things that are of relevance here:

I still have to run the TrimCapturedClips script to get rid of 2 repeat "frozen" frames from the beginning of my files. But I believe many users of the the Sony HDV capture facility also need to do this. In any case everyone check for repeat frames at the beginning and end of your HDV files because they are easy to miss and they make playback of a finished production just a little bit jumpy at scene changes if you leave them in.

Also in my case there was a big hike in the playback performance of files decoded by the MainConcept mcplug.dll since John wrote that post 11 months ago. I think it came with 8.0a. I discovered this because all my HDV archive clips had been smart rendered by Womble MPEG Video Wizard and were without exception showing "mcplug.dll" in the Vegas Explorer properties. Playback of those was very sluggish in version 7 and then became much faster for me in 8.0a, in fact on a par with HDV files that had not been Wombled. But note that 8.0b now crashes with those files (which is why I went back to 8.0a and smart rendered them all back into Sony flavour).

Long GOP sucks. Life was so much easier with DV. Fingers crossed that 8.0C fixes some things.

Nick,

Good info. Thanks!

I think we hashed out the need to trim the extra frames. If that is still a problem, that is something a script can easily do for you. I have a bunch of trimming scripts lying around and could easily modify them in a few minutes to trim head/tail of all selected clips, if that would be of any use.

jonask wrote an excellent script to deal with the repeat frames problem. It can still be downloaded from here:
http://web.comhem.se/~u82707197/vegas/Trim_Captured_Clips_v1.0.zip

Edit: If you use that script, don't forget to customize the 2 lines that change how many frames are trimmed, depending on the results from your system.

The original discussion on repeat frames is here.

I might add that this whole HDV decoder/performance issue is one issue where it would be extremely helpful if a Sony engineer could pop into the forum and give us an explanation like in the old days. It would save a lot of people a lot of guesswork.

That ain't gonna happen, I'm afraid.

I echo the sentiment about HDVSplit (and it's been written here by other a number of times before). HDVSplit was a great HDV capture utility in its time. It is freeware and thus a lot of people embraced it, mostly without problems. However, it has not been updated in over a year now and anyone still using it, especially when they have an alternative route, is taking a chance. There a really only two good options for capturing HDV for Vegas 8:

1) The built-in Vegas 8 HDV capture routine and
2) Cineform Neo HDV's HDLink.

Try either option and you will get decent (not outrageously fast, though) higher resolution preview rates, depending on your PC's CPU speed and amount of physical RAM. The only other option is to pre-render short subclips and then preview those at Best/Full. This option also works if you have enough RAM, but that gets pretty tedious.

So if I have a good proven workflow with robust captures that give me full framerate full resolution best quality previews in Vegas, why am I taking a chance? Just because a program doesn't get updated for a year doesn't mean there's something wrong with it. Quite the opposite. The HDV format hasn't changed in the last year and neither has my camera.

In my opinion HDVSplit is a mature enough program that has real advantages over the alternatives. But it needs verifying on individual systems and the playback performance of the captured clips needs comparing with the alternatives to make sure you're not at a disadvantage. Maybe some systems or cameras (Canon?) don't work well with it but on the five computers I have used it on it does a great job.

I don't know why but a few people here (myself included) use HDVsplit because the Vegas capture utility splits the clips a few frames late. With my HC3 my splits are consistently 3 frames late. I haven't a clue why this is happening but it is the case. Of course I now have HDlink so I will start using that as my capture utility, but I would still LOVE to know why Vegas capture is doing this on my machine.

Nick,

My points were directed generically to the use of HDVSplit and Vegas 8P. If you have no problems, that's great. However, don't assume that just because "HDV hasn't changed", it doesn't mean that programming differences among various HDV codecs don't cause problems. Some bugs in codecs only show up when you write a file with one brand of a specific codec (like the hardware MPEG-2 codecs built into various camcorders) and read it with another "flavor " of the same codec (like the MainConcept MPEG-2) . The codecs themselves may be standard, but the programming is not infallible.

If all MPEG-2 codecs were coded identically, then why are some free and some faster? They aren't all the same. That points out one advantage of a proprietary codec like Cineform. At least for now, other than that there are various builds, no one has written a Cineform "clone".