I used a trial version of NeoHDV to capture video clips, which I have been editing with as I explore various options in Vegas 8. The trial version expired, so I then uninstalled it. Now when I try to get into the project captured with NeoHDV, Vegas shuts down. Do I have to buy NeoHDV to edit these clips, or is there another alternative?
Yes, I belive so. The Codec will still be in Vegas and you can convert to avi again within vegas (render to new track) IF you have original clips. Quality may not be as good as original.
Vegas should start a new project (where cinform clips are not used) OK. If it wont you may have another problem.
If you are going to be editing with HDV much you need the Cinform doec to be most efficient.
Okay, I can open Vegas without crashing. I tried to render as a new track. With an HDV template I get an error message. When I try an NTSC template it works fine.
Vegas 8P has an old version of the Cineform codec and my experience is that it doesn't work well with files that have been encoded by the V3 Cineform codecs. Your best bet is to go to the Cineform website and download the free NEO Player. This will give you a V3 VFW Cineform codec, but encoding is disabled. You may have to rename the Vegas file CFHD.dll in your Vegas folders to something like "CFHD.dll.old" to get access to the new V3 decoder.
If you ever want to use the old V2.8 codec for intermediate encoding in Vegas, you have to uninstall the V3 decoder and rename the V2.8 codec back to the original name. That's a lot of fooling around, so I suggest that if you like the Cineform codec (and money is no object, heh heh), you should just break down and buy a copy.
There's more details at the DVInfo Cineform forum:
As I understand it, when you install NEO Player, Cineform has set it to enable both the v3 encoder and decoder if it sees that Vegas is installed. David Newman, the CTO of Cineform, explained it in a previous thread here on the forum, but I can't seem to locate it.
Also if he had installed the latest trial vegas should have picked up the codec and it shold still be there. When you render to the new track make sure you use the right codec, the same version if pos as in your trial.
I think he said that, but then you would be getting NEO HDV for free. I have a paid (ugh!) version of NEO HDV now, but when I just was fiddling with NEO Player, it wouldn't let me encode from Vegas. The Cineform V3 codec showed up with all the Vegas video encoding options but it gave an error message like, " You can't use this codec for encoding." when I tried to use it. Maybe, David Newman will comment on this again.