Pro 9's "Device Explorer"-- terrific for AVC

Sidecar wrote on 6/20/2009, 7:53 AM

Downloading clips from AVCHD camcorders can be frustrating. Canon, for instance, provides very iffy software with the HF-S100 camcorder.

Vegas Pro 9's "View: Device Explorer" functionality is a terrific improvement over VP 8's "File: Import AVCHD Camcorder..." function.

Check out Vegas's always-excellent Help menu for details, but Device Explorer allows you to see all the files on a USB-connected AVCHD camcorder's SDHC chip, providing thumbnails and metadata. (Also works for XDCAM EX camcorders.)

Device Explorer puts an orange dot on the files that have not been imported yet. Very helpful.

You can then import all files, new only files (the ones with an orange dot), or shift-click or control-click to select individual files.

By right-clicking on the device's name on the left side of the Device Explorer window to get Properties, you can determine which folder the files will download to. This is most helpful. I tend to mix multiple subjects on a chip and it's very nice to be able to sort and selectively download files to logical folders. This appears to be a serious shortcoming to the supplied Canon Pixela software. Of course, that software is for basic amateur editing and downloading, and assumes you have one drive on the computer. Vegas blows it away, as is to be expected.

I'm impressed with the improvement in Pro 9 over Pro 8. It's exactly the workflow capability I was looking for. Somebody's thinking.

Good job, Sony.

Comments

Nostromo wrote on 6/20/2009, 1:02 PM

Thanks for the heads up. Do you use the EX-1 or 3? I am thinking of renting one for a month long project. What sort of Xfer times are you seeing importing content and in what formats?

Sidecar wrote on 6/20/2009, 6:44 PM

I'm importing 201 clips from a (very) advanced amateur Canon HF-S100 that recorded to a 16gb Class 4 SDHC chip. The AVCHD High Profile files were recorded at the Canon's "MXP" max bitrate (24mbps) and are thus large. It is taking its sweet time, to be sure. I just noticed there is a different application running in the background, though, that is undoubted effecting transfer speed.

Importing to a WD 1TB Green SATA drive on a 2003-era Pentium 4 machine with only PCI bus, not the full SATA PCI-E 300 data rate. Not sure what slows the process or if it will get faster with a new machine and a faster PCI Express bus.

Perhaps a Class 6 SDHC card would be faster, also.

Appears to have taken about 28-30 minutes to download 201 .mts clips totaling 9gb. [That's 53.5 minutes of video.] Building Audio Peaks after initial import took several of those minutes.

So it looks like it imports at about one half real time.

By comparison, transferring the 9 GB of imported .mts AVCHD files from the 1TB drive to a 500GB USB 2.0 WD My Passbook drive took 7 minutes. Obviously, some serious processing is going on during import.

By the way, this Canon HF-S100 rocks. 3-sec preroll so you don't miss the action; advanced face recognition autofocus with user selectable face selection (it's like a fighter pilot's target designator--little boxes float over faces and you can select which box is the face you want to stay in focus); external mic in; full audio, iris, shutter controls; manual white balance if desired; built in 8 megapixel still camera; on-board flash for stills and an LED for video "fill"; 1080-24p; CMOS chip; extremely tiny "beer can" form factor. Lotta bang for the bucks.