Thanks for link!

Other posts I read mentioned VASST and some of their utilities for conversion. I'll grab a copy since the price is good and your recommendation cements the deal.

BTW - do you know why PMB and Vegas behave differently regarding the smoothness of the playback? I'm very curious as to why Vegas drops frames and PMB doesn't.

Thanks again for your help.

Hi,

I have also the same cam and applications, and noted exactly the same. However, look closely at PMB, I would claim that it does not preview at full resoluition. That's one explanation.

The key word is preview. PMB just has to show the ACVHD material in one window, at fixed (and probably limited) resolution. Vegas has more processing layers, due to the fact that the souce material, your project - AND the preview ALL can have different resolutions.

Try to set both your preview and project to the same matching resolutions and framerates as your source material. At least for me it makes a huge difference. Probably works for you too :)

In any case, you need a fast machine to edit these files, a quad core does not hurt at all. Hopefully Vegas Pro 8.0c brings some improvement in the timeline playback, since it seems not to use all cores efficiently.

Christian

Christian,

PMB does not display any info about the playback resolution so I cannot absolutely tell what format or resolution that it is rendering the preview output to. I have to assume it is native to the source file.

The video playback resolution looks as good in PMB as it does on the camera display. In PMB, the playback is very smooth without any judder. FYI - I shot the video in HD:HQ (1440x1080i).

My computer is running 3.4Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 2Gb swap, Win XP Prof, and over 1 terabyte of disk storage.

While playing back in PMB, the CPU was running at 100% for the first half of the run time (3:54 total run time). Page file usage was running at 650MB. The CPU settled down to about 80% utilization for the remaining half of the video.

In VegasPro 8.0b, I set the project to match the media settings and then tried just the preview (without dragging to the timeline) and then I tried it by placing the clip on the timeline. In both cases, the CPU only ran at around 85% utilization. The page file usage steadily increased in size to around 960MB and then settled down at that level throughout the total run time of the clip. The playback quality was very poor. Lot's of judder to the point that it would be unusable for editing/review purposes.

It is amazing that Sony co-created the AVCHD format and cannot handle this format in their own NLE properly. The format was originally designed to improve both compression and data rates during capture and playback as compared to the HDV and MiniDV standards.

From what I have seen thus far, they missed the mark as there are many dissatisfied customers and just as many conversion utilities popping up to do away with the raw AVCHD files.

So, it looks as if I'm going to buy the VASST Upshift program and give it a try until Sony figures out a solution.

It is amazing that Sony co-created the AVCHD format and cannot handle this format in their own NLE properly.

While superficially this seems correct, Sony Creative software has about as much to do with AVCHD as I did ( NONE ). Sony is a HUGE umbrella under which Dozens if not hundreds of sections don't always (if ever) communicate with one another.

As far as AVCHD, it's still a format that's being developed in reality. I'll give it a few years to see some real solid codec and NLE Support for it. Just be glad you can do anything with it in Vegas at all, Avid and Adobe can't even touch the stuff as far as I know, and I hear plenty of complainers in the mac world about it as well.

Dave

Hi,

Just gave PMB a closer look. I shot some venetian blinds at a small angle, and I claim that PBM is only showing half the vertical resolution, like only the other field (of the interlaced) is shown. CPU usage is in the low 30%

Vegas preview is completely smooth at full resolution, but CPU usage remarkably higher (evidently some additional processing required to display the preview video), at 60..80%. Note that I'm running on a very fast Qx9650 quad core.

There has been some info around that 8.0c will improve the preview. Hopefully its not only a rumour :)

Christian

"It is amazing that Sony co-created the AVCHD format and cannot handle this format in their own NLE properly."

This is exactly the kind of thinking that makes me nervous. This line of thinking sure isn't the consumer's fault... Sony cameras... "Sony" Vegas....Consumers don't know the difference.... why should they?

There are those that believe Madison has failed in the first round of avchd editing, and I'm one of those people. Other NLE's beat Vegas to the punch with avchd inclusion and they have done a better job at making it all work. There are other NLE's out there that playback MUCH better than Vegas does, and fortunately they can't edit anywhere NEAR as well as Vegas can. Vegas does however render avchd a bit faster than others.

However having said all of that, Madison has proved the point many times in the past in that they are more than willing to learn and to improve, (which is probably the most important thing in this industry) and I feel quite confident that avchd improvements are on the way.

"Sony is a HUGE umbrella under which Dozens if not hundreds of sections don't always (if ever) communicate with one another."

Hi Dave,

Some of what you allude to may be true. But, I don't believe that Sony (any division) is that dumb. Are they?

OTOH With all the marketing hype that Sony Creative has been putting out there (since 7.0e - over a year ago) about AVCHD support, you'd think that by now (8.0b) that Vegas would not be having the problems that it does.

BTW - I tried the VASST Upshift product. Converted a 140Mbyte AVCHD clip (3:47 length) to MPEG-2. The resulting file was "gi-normous" weighing in around 800Mbytes! Also noticed degraded video quality due to artifacts in sharp contrast areas both horizontal and verticle.

I just can't get over how smoothly PMB plays back AVCHD clips and how poorly Vegas does it. Something is wrong with Vegas and the workaround is strenuous at best. Hope they fix it soon.