Many years ago, I quit reading software and hardware reviews of video related items in ANY video industry related website or magazine. It has always been the case, IMHO, that the reviewers in these articles are being paid by the OEM vendor or have a biased pre-disposition to never report bad information about the product they are reviewing. In all cases the magazine posting the review also carries advertisement copy from that manufacturer, and reviewers, don't want to incur the wrath of their bread and butter customers.

I think it's safe to say that industry rag reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt, no matter which NLE is being praised. In the 15 years I've been in this biz, I've never read a truly critical review of a video product. If you want a critical review of a software product, go hang on the product forums and count the number of unhappy moans and groans...Sony, are you listening?Sebaz is right on. vegas will never hit the big time if it can't clean up the perception of its reliability probs.

> 9 handles AVCHD like a sorry old horse with arthritis. Hit play in the timeline and it stutters for five seconds until it goes up to full speed. Unless they fixed that in 9.0b or c (I only installed the trials for 9.0 and 9.0a)

You cannot say much about the version Videomaker has tested, as long as you have not used it yourself. Can you?
In case there are NLEs that handle AVCHD better than Vegas, I would be interested to know. Myself I work with AVCHD in Vegas all the time, and it works just great.
Ingvar

I think it's safe to say that industry rag reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt, no matter which NLE is being praised
Agreed!
Nevertheless.. since we use Vegas, it does not hurt that it gets this award. And it is well deserved. I guess that many, who use Vegas on a daily basis, are still not aware of its full power.
Ingvar

Well,

I can tell you in no uncertain terms that there are NLEs that handle AVCHD better than Vegas. And I can say that Vegas' handling of AVCHD is less than ideal. Primarily, it seems, because of legacy issues.

I am glad to know that Vegas works great for you. May I ask what other editors you have used or currently use?

With a strong machine, Vegas handles it well. I have a 3.0ghz core2 duo dual core machine that handles all forms of .h264, SD and HD with relative ease. If I do not like how it does it or I am on my weaker machine, I kick in Production Assistant and transcode it or proxy it. All options are available with Vegas and that is handling.

Last time I fired up FCP it had to transcode it to handle it. It did it without saying at ingest. Adobe just barfed and coughed but got through it.

Yes I think there are optimizations that Vegas can have done, but few general purpose NLE's are doing much better.

One fun note, Cyberlinks Power Director consumer NLE (still a bit rough) does behind the scenes proxies for HD footage and makes the edit a snap. The rest of it leaves a bit to be desired but it is an interesting approach.

Does anyone see the same pattern we had when HDV hit the streets? Proxies, transcodes, native horrors? Consumer formats hit the prosumer NLE's hard when they do this kind of thing. I for one am patient and I am sure this will all shake out. Like HDV, I still like an intermediate when cutting a lossey format. Vegas does that job nicely.

Ditto on the AVCHD comments in the article being a joke. He probably put a few small clips on the timeline and did not try to edit them. I went to a videomaker video editing seminar some years ago and it was also a joke. We spent most of our time trying to get the NLE to work.

I think Vegas handles avchd great (relatively speaking). PP has the potential to be good but at the end of the day the final output is quite a let-down. Edius Neo has good RT abilities but that's about it.... a little too basic after that. MC and fcp can't even handle it in a native tongue. Then there's Pinnacle, Ulead, PD8, Nero.... all of which I don't even consider much more than toys.

I've come to the general conclusion that even though avchd handling is a bit rough around the edges in Vegas.... it's about the best thing going for this kind of work right now.

frankly i find this chatter about avchd being 'hard to edit' rather tiresome.

it's a consumer format, meant to go from camera to disk. it's not 'designed' for intensive editing, and vegas, being a so called 'pro' nle is best suited to 'pro' formats, which it handles very well.

if you want to edit avchd (and i do all the time), transcode it to a 'pro' format that your nle can handle. in my case i use sony's mxf - with great results. i gather from the forum that cineform handles it well, and there's no end of plugins to batch convert avchd to any format you want.

so please, let's give up on trying to make vegas a mongrel when it comes to avchd - i find vegas more of a discerning pure bred, racing through pro material with no problems at all. (ok, there's a few bugs here and there, but none are show stoppers for me).

oh, and that goes for stills as well - if you're going to throw large psd's / tiff's, even very large .jpg's on the t/l you're asking for trouble. i mean how much work is it to batch convert your final stills to png?

and yes, the review like all reviews is hog wash (even if it's nicely scented). real world editors have better things to do than write columns of prose - like write columns of rants in forums ;-)

Marc S:
Ditto on the AVCHD comments in the article being a joke. He probably put a few small clips on the timeline and did not try to edit them.
But I have! And I don't even have an i7, I have a Quad Core. As someone else here writes, AVCHD is a comsumer format. It works well for me, instant playback, no stutter. If I want to improve performance, I render my MTS files to to MXF, and they play back very nice in real time, also when effects are added.
See ushere's post, it is a very good read.
Ingvar

ushere:
>frankly i find this chatter about avchd being 'hard to edit' rather tiresome

Amen to everything you write about this!
People are trying to force Vegas to do something it is not optimized for. Maybe the solution to this would be to raise the purchase price, in order to better address the pro market. And get rid of those complaints.

If you have a Quad Core, or better - an i7, and plenty of RAM, I cannot understand that you should have any trouble with AVCHD. I do not have myself, and I am wondering if people run Vegas on machines that can't handle the challenge is to decompress AVCHD on the fly.

> if you want to edit avchd (and i do all the time), transcode it to a 'pro' format that your nle can handle. in my case i use sony's mxf - with great results. i gather from the forum that cineform handles it well, and there's no end of plugins to batch convert avchd to any format you want.
Hear hear - absolutely right!!

When people have problems - then for God's sake render to MXF and use proxy files! MXF is build into Vegas - no extra costs, and then you can edit and preview in real-time, with no (or very little) visible quality loss.
Ingvar

With a strong machine.... right.

Well, my 8 core with 8GB of RAM still struggles with it. Especially with the real stuff like the movie I just finished color grading that was shot on a 5D. I utterly HATE putting weak native formats on the timeline, but for numerous reasons, had to for this project. And it was a royal pain.

I'd love to use a good intermediate format, and I do. Cineform is terrific, but you have to buy it now, and it won't scale past 1080 unless you pony up $500. So I used DNxHD. Sony's MXF format is WAY too lossy for me to fool with.for anything but proxy cutting. That's great if I'm just cutting, but I need color work as well and that's not getting it done.

Final Cut Pro (and Avid) have it right. It should be transcoded, as it has no business on the timeline. But both those programs have a solid and accelerated codec to take it to. Vegas no longer has one bundled.

Cutting AVCHD on ANY processor in Vegas is problematic. Or rather can be depending on what you're doing and what's on the timeline. If you are "just cutting" then it's really not too bad. It's when you get to color that the problems start. And there are no nome machines that can decode high bitrate AVCHD on the fly. I get real time performance up to the 24Mbps consumer limit. But beyond that in the world of the 5D/7D it just falls down miserably.

And sorry, MXF has VERY visible quality loss. Every edge is gone. Do a render on anything with motion and difference it on the timeline. You'll see. For proxy work it MIGHT suit the job depending on format. But for those of us who are working on odd framerate stuff (overcrank/undercrank, the 5d's native 30.00fps, true 24p), that is impossible with the MXF implementation.

> MXF has VERY visible quality loss. Every edge is gone. Do a render on anything with motion and difference it on the timeline

PerroneFord,
I want to learn more about this.
First - what MXF Profle do you use? Main or 422?
Then, how can I "difference it on the timeline" to see the difference between the original and the MXF?

Ingvar

PerroneFord:
> And sorry, MXF has VERY visible quality loss

Ok, I have done some testing. I have a clip, 15 seconds long. Country side scenery, fields, trees with leaves, and one single car coming up from behind, passing in front of the camera, and then disappearing around a bend on the road.

I have put the original clip, a clip MFX rendered with the Main quality and a clip MXF rendered with the 422 quality all piled up above each others.
I then have a parent track with several FXes added, if you are familiar with this technique, in Vegas you can use an empty track as an "adjustment layer" like you can in After Effects.

By turning each layer on and off, I cannot with my best willpower see any difference at all, with the naked eye. Absolutely no difference.
When using the New Blue Cartoonr, Pastel Sketch, Line Drawing and Hand Drawn effects, I do see a difference though.
The Main MXF has slightly less details in the highlights and in the shadows it seems.
However, the MXF 422 has the same amount of detail as the original, and for me it is practically impossible to spot any difference at all between the original and the MXF.

This is far away from your own experience that "MXF has VERY visible quality loss". I would like to know what kind of scenes you have where this is apparent!

When all this is said - I do revert to the original footages when doing my final render, although I use MXF as intermediate formats if I have to render to such, or AVI. The point - why MXF was brought up, is that AVCHD editing in Vegas is just ok because we have the opportunity to use MXF files if the original files turn out to slow down things too much!
Ingvar

I guess I should end my input here. After all, this discussion started about a review in a consumer video mag. When you take the consumer considerations into account, why would anyone argue? Vegas is easy. Vegas is less expensive. Vegas is powerful. Vegas works on a variety of hardware configs. Vegas does audio very well.

As for AVCHD... iMovie handles it better. After that, you have trouble finding a good solution without transcoding or proxies. Vegas handles the native files as well as the rest or better. For professional results, transcoding is still the best option on any platform.

PerroneFord:,

I get real time performance up to the 24Mbps consumer limit.
Consumer format, consumer bitrate performance. After that, all bets are off.

Cineform is a great intermediate. Oh, yes, you do have to pay for it. $129 for the native resolution of the 7D. I wouldn't be upscaling it to anything else until the final pass render and then it would be in Vegas to the delivery format, although upscaling does not improve anything.

FCP and Avid have a good intermediate format built in. Vegas gives us a choice in what we want to use. The cost difference with FCP or Avid is much more than the $129 of Cineform. Heck I can buy a much more expensive package from Cineform or someone else for the difference in the cost of running FCP or Avid.

In the end, all of the big NLE packages are good tools. Each has its advantages and disadvantages for a particular user or job. We pick what suits the needs. I personally disagree with folks who want to force any one NLE from trying to do it all. The result will be a nightmare of bugs, and bad case of bloatitis, not to mention cost. I don't want the film frame and perf tracking abilities in Avid. It sounds like Vegas may not be the package for your project. If I were you, I would fire up the one that is best suited to your needs.

Vegas stands out well in a consumer review, because it is reachable by that market as well as serving us in the professional/industrial market. It also offers a wide variety of workflow options.

ushere:
"it's [avchd] a consumer format...."

So that's why Sony just finished launching a pro end avchd cam, right.

This all sounds sooooo familiar... let me think back a minute.... ahhh yes.... back when they introduced mpeg2 editing. The DV crowd was downright shocked and horrified! :)

For me, the whole "consumer" thing ends as soon as you talk about Vegas PRO. If we're talking about Movie Studio, then yes I buy it. But Vegas Pro is a $600 NLE. That's more than some of these folks are paying for their cameras. And when I am paying as much for my NLE as my camera, or nearly as much, I have some different expectations than I do for something like iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker.

My complaint is not that you have to pay $129 for Cineform. My complaint is that it should be included with Vegas, even if the price has to be raised to accomodate that. And the reason is because it gives people the impression that Vegas is a viable professional tool for taking in multiple formats when in fact it is not. At least not yet. Vegas wants an AVI on the timeline. And I am ok with that. Avid wants a DNxHD or Meridian, and FCP wants ProRes. Edius wants CanopusHQ on the timeline. Again, absolutely expected in a professional grade tool.

So let's stop fooling ourselves. If Vegas wants to play with the major apps, then the workflow needs to follow suit. But calling the sony MXF an intermediate is a great disservice. It's not good enough. Not by a long shot. Cineform is.

As for me, you're right. Over the weekend, I decided to fire up a different NLE. And now, I can do on my Core2duo laptop, what I could not do with 8 cores in Vegas. I can do absolutely rock solid 1080p playback at full framerate, with color corrections, keyframing, dissolves and fades, still images, etc. No rendering.

I'll still keep Vegas around for my 2k/4k workflow, and for some other things it does pretty well, but for me, the handwriting is on the wall... I wanted Vegas to work as a Pro level tool. I really did. It's a terrific bargain. But unless the Vegas folks commit to a full re-write, and a full re-think of how this product is positioned, it's going to be the most expensive consumer NLE on the market, instead of the cheapest Pro NLE.

It's funny, I was talking to a pro editor today. He said that in his shop, they reboot their editing computers about once every 6 months to a year... This is a pro shop doing broadcast work every day. I just laughed and shook my head. I've had to restart Vegas 9 32bit every day when trying to work with AVCHD footage. I try not to do it but sometimes I just have to. And the 64bit version doesn't yet support some of the codecs I need. Which is a real shame.

PerroneFord:
> But calling the sony MXF an intermediate is a great disservice. It's not good enough. Not by a long shot. Cineform is

Can you please explain how I can see the difference between an original AVCHD and MXF? When you claim this, is it the "Main" or the "422" MXF quality you are talking about? Do you have any samples you can post somewhere?

> My complaint is that it should be included with Vegas, even if the price has to be raised to accomodate that
Who needs it? And why?

Ingvar

"and there's no end of plugins to batch convert avchd to any format you want."


like what

"Can you please explain how I can see the difference between an original AVCHD and MXF?"

This topic was done to death some time ago. MXF aka mpeg-2, is a lossy codec even at 100Mbps. I guess starting out with AVCHD footage from consummer cameras the extra loss is kind of irrelevant.

How to see the loss is simple enough with Vegas. Original on one track, next gen above. Set top track to 50% and add the Invert FX. Anything you see other than grey is the difference. It can help to add an FX to the Video Master Buss to up the gamma so the not quite grey pixels are easier to see.

I agree with Perrone, they really should include a decent DI codec with a "Pro" package, Avid have it and so do Apple.

Bob.

"and there's no end of plugins to batch convert avchd to any format you want."

I guess he means Gearshift, Upshift or whatever they are called.
I have written my own, scripting in the SCS software adds tons of value to the products. Basically - if you are a programmer (like me) or at least understand scripting, you can add functionality to Vegas with very little effort.

Ingvar

> How to see the loss is simple enough with Vegas..

Thanks, now I learnt this.
However - I am puzzled! Look here:
There original footage is an MTS file from my Panasonic HMC 151, 1920x1080 50i. The size is 45 870 Mb.
Original rendered to MXF "Main" generates a file of 61 318 Mb
Original rendered to MXF "422" generates a file of 110 554 Mb

I am puzzled, because using the test-approach you describe, with the smallest file (Main), I see absolutely nothing at all! With the largest file, I can see a kind of emboss effects where I can see the contours of what is moving in the image.

> It can help to add an FX to the Video Master Buss to up the gamma so the not quite grey pixels are easier to see.
It sure helps. Adding the Brightness-Contrast FX, I can emphasize the emboss effect I see with the "422" MXF file, I can actually see the trees move in the wind, and the car passing by.

For the "Main" rendered MXF file, carefully adjusting the gamma and contrast, I do see some very faint noise, but it is impossible to see what the original fottage consists of, impossible to see trees and impossible to see the car.

According to this test, the smallest MXF file is almost perfect!
Is there any explanation for this? I am tempted to get the Cineform codec just to compare, after all the discussions about this.

Edited:
OK, so I rendered to uncompressed AVI, carefully using the project settings, same aspect ratio, upper field first etc. According to this test, uncompressed AVI is just hopeless. I must be doing something wrong?
Ingvar