I took the post intent to show us that not only is there room for improvement in Vegas's HDV capture, but that in fact other NLEs have already made this improvement.

Frankly, I agree. Vegas's HDV capture doesn't even work on my system, but even if it did, going back to the orignal HDV tapes in Vegas pretty much means a complete re-edit. Of all the areas in which Vegas could be improved and learn from other NLE platforms, HDV capture is certainly one of the ones that Vegas could improve most.

Not only that, but as some of us haver recently become aware, the majority of Vegas native HDV editing crashes are due to errors introduced into the clips during capture.

I have read countless posts on black frames, Vegas crashing on m2t waveform draws, Vegas crashing during HDV renders, etc. In my experience, most of these are due to errors during capture. This is something that needs to be fixed big time.

Uh, yeah, I guess. Certainly the capture tools haven't gotten enough attention. What do they really need?

I'll just take vidcap since that's all I use:

1) Bad! When I open Vidcap from within a Vegas project it just opens whatever was the last vidcap file I had running. Totally discourages the use of any more than just one master vidcap file. What should happen is that Vegas should open vidcap with the right vidcap file, or offer to open one of a list of files, or offer to create a new file. Ideally, either the Vegas project or Media Manager should keep track of the vidcap to veg associations, but barring that if vegas would open vidcap starting with a "file open" dialog that might be a good option.
2) Bad! If I chose to recapture offline media from within Vegas, Vegas opens vidcap with the wrong vidcap file and immediately dumps all the clip information into it. That's adding insult to injury.

3)Bad! No import or export of log files.


These are basics. Add to that some features that would be nice:
1)Consolidate adjacent clips. Allow for clips that are just a few frames apart to be captured as one clip. (This was something found in Media100 and was handy because it could speed up recapture, but it requires a different way of working with clips in Vegas. Vegas would have to have some mechanism of finding the footage it needs within the new consolidated clip. Which might bring us too...)

2) capture whole tape, convert clip entries to subclips or regions. (This kind of gets you into the style of capture that the Liquid user thinks is good which is to capture a whole tape as a file and just use Liquid's project file to find the clips. It's a database-ish way to do it and might be okay as an option. It'd certainly make captures go faster)

One big problem I foresee is that as cameras start to go tapeless, project managers are going to start resisting putting time into tape capture tools. That's too bad because there are still a lot of compelling reasons to use tape.

I think the Liquid user's preference for capturing one long file is just that, a preference. People do tend to bitch when things aren't done in exactly the way they're used to. I've heard it a lot here as we transitioned form m100 to PPro (but hardly any complaining about the FCP system over in the corner...)

The thing about sequences...I see no reason why SCS should resist this. Take a page from Flash: create a project file format (*.vep) that refers to all the veg files. Allow the veg files to be shown on a tabbed timeline. Keep the ability to have totally seperate instances of Vegas running.

Rob Mack

Blink, Laurence, and even Rmack350 ;-) ( I didn't think I would ever put "those" three names together in the same sentence ;-) ) have made very important points for vegas forum users. Rmack350 pointed out excellent "needs" and even blinks' points are serious.

Totally guessing, but I would think everyone's points would be high on the list-to-do or "buy" for Sony. A new version of Vegas (upgrade) hopefully will have some of this "fixes".

Now, back to basics...... "Blink------ stop playing with fire and gasoline! ---- Go the corner and write 100 times "Sony is King, FCP quacks, MS sucks and I'm a Canadian!" ---- make that 500 times for good measure! ;-)

Lol!

Vidcap has been a pet peeve for me since V3 (first time I saw it). I can't see any changes since then and I think capture has always been one of those things that Vegas gets by on with a barely passing grade.

Good or bad? Vegas is kind of simple and plain (and generally easy to work with). Vidcap fits in. I'd love to see a release of Vegas that just concentrates on refining existing tools.

Rob Mack

Rob, I've emailed SCS several times asking (and begging and pleading!!) for some simple improvements to VidCap.
Sadly, I'm still waiting :-(

Mike

Got to agree with Vidcap being £$%^^. I'm really glad of the modern HHD cams not needing to go via such a route. The amount of times I've had to use another app to capture video, and then port it into Vegas is embarassing to say the least.

The problem, as I see it, is that it's not nearly time for tape capture to be orphaned by NLE providers. It's still going to be around for quite a while but product managers looking at their budgets are going to be saying "Mission Accomplished!"

What a great phrase. Going to get miles and miles out of it for the rest of the century.

Rob

Even when and if tape goes away the fundamental problem with Vegas remains. It isn't timecode based. Even in a tapeless environment the problem is not solved.

Bob.

"Go the corner and write 100 times "Sony is King,"

LOL.

Actually thats what I would LIKE to write, and I guess that's why I'm so hard at pointing out the weak spots. I think Vegas is a great program and has HUGE potential. According to various NAB conferences, Vegas usage is up 51% and it would be nice to see that number climb even higher.

But the people on the Liquid forum are correct in stating that the Vegas capture system is weak in comparison. I have Liquid. I like Vegas MILES MORE. IMO, the Liquid interface is so far behind when compared to Vegas, but then speaking quite matter-of-factly, it has an extremely strong capture system that allows batch capture, in/out, preview/ post view screens... and lots of other goodies. It's truly a professional grade capture system that's frame accurate even with HDV batch capturing.... which is not easy to find.

There are TONS of options that are unique to Vegas that other NLE's can't touch, but the same can be said for Liquid's logger/capture system. I can't see anything but good things for Vegas if it had something like this.

I think I missed that post, Bob*. Could you link to the thread where you explained this?

Rob

*bob's name added later solve a bit of confusion.

Explained what??

Edit: Additional info answers my question :)

Sorry, I'm in threaded view and was responding to Bob. The statement was that Vegas isn't timecode based, which I don't dispute but I was hoping he could link to some thread were he explained what he meant.

Rob

all i want for christmas is batch capture.....

i love vegas, but i have a fair few clients who work paper cut edl's before coming to fine cut, and having no batch capture is not only a pita, but could have vegas seen as a 'hobbyists' nle - my clients come from tv, where time code is still used extensively.

leslie

I use veggie toolkit to bring a tab delimited log into Vegas and then base the batch capture on that. It's a workaround (Thanks Randall!) but it gets the job done for me.

Rob Mack

Blink3x is simply an idiot that spends too much time online, which is his only social life.

Child services should be rounding up his kids for placement into foster homes any day now.

Vegas uses time into file, it doesn't read the timecode from the file. From the time it seems to work out which frame it should be accessing.
This has the upside that you don't need timecoded files for them to work with Vegas.
With consummer camcorders TC is a pretty iffy thing anyway.
DV is a strictly consummer tape format as far as Sony is concerned.
DVCAM is the pro format, only with that can you preset TC in a camera.

I used to think none of the above mattered, it was all old school and I was the smart kid on the block with the new toy. I'm a little less arrogant now.

You can work without real TC and systems that are TC based, I do, all the time. But get into serious shoots with vision and audio from all over the place and you realise why TC is the air that those productions breath.

I also do wonder how the problem with errant frames relates to how Vegas works being time based. A rounding error or some such could cause the wrong/no frame to be accessed.

Bob.

If Vegas capture sucks, why not to use HDVSplit. It works great.

I personally use it and don't have any problem. It splits files exactly where you stop and start shooting. If you don't want, you can capture the whole file, and then split later.

Now, can somebody explain to me how you can batch capture from HDV tape?

"Blink3x is simply an idiot that spends too much time online, which is his only social life.

Come on.... don't hold back now.... tell me what you REALLY think :)

"Now, can somebody explain to me how you can batch capture from HDV tape?"

See Avid Liquid 7.2

I hear what you're saying but might take the details with a pinch of skepticism, just because it's hard to really determine what's going on. Consumer DV has a frame count, with each tape starting at 00:00:00;00 (NTSC, which is DF. For PAL it should be NDF notation.)

DVCam lets you set the start TC, but I'm really not sure if it's actually recording TC in the data or if it's still a frame count. Maybe the start timecode is actually recorded in the cassette memory...

What you're saying about Vegas working in time rather than actual frames makes sense, it's probably why Vegas can mix media on the timeline, I think. I've been calling Vegas a resampling editor. And it rings true that this could have a relation to black frames.

Rob

Differences worth noting if for nothing more than a bit of history:

DVCAM uses locked audio.
Took me a while to grasp what that meant! It means that the audio sampling clock is a locked multiple of the video clock. It'll always be that x frames = y samples. Pretty simple stuff to capture and edit even in a linear tape to tape system digitally.

DV.
Building the PLL dividers back then that are needed to have the audio and video clocks running locked was expensive. DV solves that by permitting two free running clocks. This means that technically speaking 1 hour of vision might not contain 1 hour of audio on the tape. To correctly handle this the audio has to be resampled to the vision if you're working in a purely digital world. From what I've heard when DV first burst on the scene editing it was a PIA and it was considered strictly "consummer". Today I suspect most camcorders do have locked audio even when recording DV. One problem is I think DVCAM is proprietary to Sony.

DVCAM does let you specify preset TC. It's pretty common practice to set tape 1 to start at 1:00:00:00 and tape 2 at 2:00:00:00 etc. Vegas will correctly read and display that TC, it just doesn't really use it. If your camera is on the fritz and you loose TC or duplicate TC on the one tape no sweat for Vegas. Other NLEs may have a major dummy spit!

Where all this really starts to matter is on a big shoot everything is locked down to a master TC clock, including the audio. The high end audio field recorders record that TC as well, makes putting it all back together again much easier. Remember on those kinds of jobs the editor might know next to nothing about what was shot where. You'll also see clapper boards that display TC, so even the camera neg has a reference recorded into it visually as well as the camera motor running in sync with the master clock.

One thing that does seem to be changing is going to time of day rather than TC. Thanks to GPS, clocks can be locked with very little error or drift from satellites and you save all the hassle of cables and RF links running around the set.

Bob.