My biggest problem with editing native m2t on my 3.06 P4 isn't processor speed. It's that ridiculous "two black frame" bug that keeps poping up seeming at random.

V7 definitely handles m2t much nicer directly on my P4 3.2 system. Edit all the time with it. I would say it is very very difficult in V6 to edit the m2t directly.

Built-in Cineform Intermediate avi does have limitations outside of Vegas, is it only encoding?

My clips are usually short, so I do most of my work in HuffYUV lossless codec if I have to go outside of Vegas, say to Deshaker.

V7 made m2t's much easier to handle.

Edited:
And Laurence, I may not be paying attention, but I have not noticed any 2 black frame problem on my footage. I've looked at many of the posts on that, but I could not find any clear way to duplicate the problem. Is there a test that can be done to see if a system has this problem?

Where you see it is on rendered SD downrezzes. Beyond that I can't find anything that recreates the "two black frame" problem consistantly. It just pops up at random every so often. It doesn't happen frequently, but it happens enough so that I find myself having to really look at my final renders carefully to make sure it's not there.

Several times I've seen it on projects that had already gone out. Nobody has complained, but it is frustrating to me. I like things to be polished and random glitches like this just drive me up the wall.

Some of it is just the law of averages. If you do a short project, your chance of running into one or two of these two black frame glitches is small. Usually when you rerender it it goes away.

The frustrating part is when you have a longer project. I can almost guarantee that any project long enough to take several hours to render is going to have at least two of these. If you rerender, you'll probably have a glitch either in the same place, or somewhere
else so you have to comb through the final render again. It is just incredibly frustrating.

As stupid as this may sound, I am using Cineform largly so that I don't have to sit through my final projects with my eylids glued open looking for these random blackouts. It's really stupid, but that's the situation I find myself in.

I would LOVE to hear some official Madison acknowledgement that this bug exists and that they are working on it. It really is a big deal to those striving for any kind of consistant level of quality.

So with Vegas 7, I capture via firewire as I always have but the files captured will be M2t? I thought I saw a thread arguing that M2t files were not good to work with. Something about color accuracy maybe? Or maybe this was pre-Vegas 7?

I'd sure hate to spend the dough on 7 if 8 is looming just far enough on the horizon to disqualify me for a super-cheap upgrade.

The color accuracy just has to do with color correction. Have you ever increased you color depth before correcting colors in Photoshop? Have you ever applied audio effects at 24 bit resolution before dithering the audio down to 16 bits to put on a CD. This issue is the same thing. The M2T format has enough color depth to show the colors you shot, but it doesn't have the extra headroom that you might want for color correction. It's not designed for rerenders either.

None of this is really a big deal if you just do what Vic suggested: pop the m2t clips into a project and any time you need to color correct or make some sort of a composite, just "Render to a New Track" using the already built-in HD1080i intermediate. It really is pretty simple.

I think V6 corrected the color space difference. HDV capture uses a separate, internal capture program. Looks pretty much the same, you should get the option on start of capture program. I think current V7 fixed some m2t timecode issues?

Which cam will you be using?

The technology is really being pushed with m2t files in that only 1 frame out of 15 is a "real" frame; the others are created from that master frame by sending difference information. That said, m2t editing works great, it just takes a LOT more CPU horsepower.

V7 does a much better job with m2t than V6 did in several respects. First, it doesn't tax the CPU as much, and secondly, you can load the timeline with clips, whereas in V6 my system would crash with about 70 m2t clips.

Yet another factor is that m2t was not really meant to be an editing format but rather a highly-compressed delivery format. There are examples on Cineform website showing degradation from repeated m2t compressions.

I, too, have the BlackFrame issue. If I see one in a clip, I can cut that clip out and pull in a new copy of the clip. Some times that fixes it, and other times the black frames reappear. So I would conclude it's a Vegas internal housekeeping issue, especially since the picons on the timeline appear perfectly normal if you zoom in to the individual frame level. PITA.

fldave,

The cam is the JVC GY-HD110.

Curious if the people with black frame problems use "Vegas exclusive" tools or third party tools like Connect HD or HDVSplit for capture? I have tried HDVSplit once but only on a single test. I always use Vegas?

I use HDV-Split and asked this exact question a while back. The answer was that people get this problem with a Vegas capture as well. It's not on the capture that I get the black frames. It's on the render. If I take the exact m2t clip that gave me problems and drag it into a new project, it will be just fine.