I just made a discovery that may be of interest to some other forum members. I recently purchased a Sony HXR-NX5U camera. I shot some test scenes using the following settings:
1) 1920x1080@30p, 24 Mbps (AVCHD), audio - 16-bit, 48 KHz PCM
2) 1920x1080@60i, 24 Mbps (AVCHD), audio - 16-bit, 48 KHz PCM
When I tried to import these clips into Vegas 8.0c, build 260, the imports failed with the following message:
Warning: an error occurred while opening one or more files
The system is low on memory. You may be able to reduce memory usage by closing other applications.
To make a long, tedious story much shorter and more interesting: I discovered that if I set the camera to use Dolby AC3 (stereo) sound (256 Kbps, 16-bit, 48KHz sample rate) instead of PCM, I could successfully import footage shot at the highest resolution and bit-rate that the camera is capable of (1920x1080@30p, 24 Mbps AVCHD).
Before I discovered the AC3 work-around, I spent a lot of time researching this issue on the web and the only suggestions I could find for dealing with this problem were 1) transcode the footage to some other format that Vegas can handle or 2) upgrade to Vegas 10. I do not find either of those alternatives very palatable. Since I record my audio separately on a Sound Devices 744T (with Sennheiser MHK-8040 mics) I don't really care what format the camera audio is in, so long as I can discern a hand clap in it for synchronization purposes.
So it looks like Vegas 8 does not know how to deal with PCM audio in an .m2ts file, but it can handle AVCHD video up to the maximum bit rate allowed by the format, in either 60i or 30p frame rates, so long as the accompanying audio is in AC3 format.
I also had no problem rendering the 30p AC3 clip to MP4.
1) 1920x1080@30p, 24 Mbps (AVCHD), audio - 16-bit, 48 KHz PCM
2) 1920x1080@60i, 24 Mbps (AVCHD), audio - 16-bit, 48 KHz PCM
When I tried to import these clips into Vegas 8.0c, build 260, the imports failed with the following message:
Warning: an error occurred while opening one or more files
The system is low on memory. You may be able to reduce memory usage by closing other applications.
To make a long, tedious story much shorter and more interesting: I discovered that if I set the camera to use Dolby AC3 (stereo) sound (256 Kbps, 16-bit, 48KHz sample rate) instead of PCM, I could successfully import footage shot at the highest resolution and bit-rate that the camera is capable of (1920x1080@30p, 24 Mbps AVCHD).
Before I discovered the AC3 work-around, I spent a lot of time researching this issue on the web and the only suggestions I could find for dealing with this problem were 1) transcode the footage to some other format that Vegas can handle or 2) upgrade to Vegas 10. I do not find either of those alternatives very palatable. Since I record my audio separately on a Sound Devices 744T (with Sennheiser MHK-8040 mics) I don't really care what format the camera audio is in, so long as I can discern a hand clap in it for synchronization purposes.
So it looks like Vegas 8 does not know how to deal with PCM audio in an .m2ts file, but it can handle AVCHD video up to the maximum bit rate allowed by the format, in either 60i or 30p frame rates, so long as the accompanying audio is in AC3 format.
I also had no problem rendering the 30p AC3 clip to MP4.