As most of us with digicams and digirecorders know, using Quicktime to decode these files via Vegas and edit them, it often results in crashes, and very, very slow editing speed. Especially for Kodak digicam 720/30p MPEG4-SP files (not h.264 Kodak digirecorders, don't confuse them), the situation is abysmal under Vegas: crashes, slowness, more crashes.
So far, the way to go around the problem was by using proxy files. However, the proxy files tutorial is pretty difficult to follow, it doesn't offer you the full-sized videos to work with, and at the end, you risk more crashes, since you export the final video using Quicktime again.
So, I wrote a tutorial on how to go around all these problems. The trick is to not use Quicktime. To do that, we just re-wrap MOV to AVI (without video re-encoding), in order to "force" Vegas to use the ffdshow decoder rather than Quicktime. And the results are in: 15-17 times faster playback (on my P4 at 3Ghz I got full 30 fps speed consistently, out of the 2 fps that Quicktime would give me), and it doesn't crash! Here's the tutorial:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2009/12/11/editing-kodak-digicam-video-files-on-a-pc/
On the bottom of the article I offer another tutorial, to do the same for MJPEG 720p MOV files. MJPEG via Quicktime is much stabler/speedier than the lame MPEG4-SP Kodak situation, but using that tutorial it still makes your editing experience twice faster. It might not be a big deal for people with really fast PCs, but users with older/slower PCs (Core Solo/Atom architecture or older), might still find the workflow useful. It's still a 2x increase anyway!
So far, the way to go around the problem was by using proxy files. However, the proxy files tutorial is pretty difficult to follow, it doesn't offer you the full-sized videos to work with, and at the end, you risk more crashes, since you export the final video using Quicktime again.
So, I wrote a tutorial on how to go around all these problems. The trick is to not use Quicktime. To do that, we just re-wrap MOV to AVI (without video re-encoding), in order to "force" Vegas to use the ffdshow decoder rather than Quicktime. And the results are in: 15-17 times faster playback (on my P4 at 3Ghz I got full 30 fps speed consistently, out of the 2 fps that Quicktime would give me), and it doesn't crash! Here's the tutorial:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2009/12/11/editing-kodak-digicam-video-files-on-a-pc/
On the bottom of the article I offer another tutorial, to do the same for MJPEG 720p MOV files. MJPEG via Quicktime is much stabler/speedier than the lame MPEG4-SP Kodak situation, but using that tutorial it still makes your editing experience twice faster. It might not be a big deal for people with really fast PCs, but users with older/slower PCs (Core Solo/Atom architecture or older), might still find the workflow useful. It's still a 2x increase anyway!