Tim, I have used the free Cineform intermediate codec included with Vegas for transcoding AVCHD - worked fine for my purposes.

MM should be showing you the video - not just audio only.

Also, be sure you understand that it is pure speculation on my part that putting a large number of clips in the media pool MIGHT be causing the stability problems you are having. I don't have much basis for that other than it is one difference in your work flow and mine.

One comment Bob made about long GOPs - I don't think long GOP should be impacting breaks at scene boundaries because Vegas doesn't have to look further back than the start of a scene (i.e., the start of the camera rolling) to reconstruct a frame at your cut. Or I may have just misunderstood what was being said there.

Jerry

Thanks, guys.

Regarding the GOPs, do either one of you suspect that the Vegas error message would associate the crash with the nefarious clip, or would it be what I've been seeing most of the time (exceptions and access errors)?

Tim, my experience which is with AVCHD end-of-clip crashes has been that the error messages do not reference the clip.

Jerry

Before switching to PP, I would give AVID Media Composer a serious look. I haven't switched over completely, but am doing more in MC as I get more comfortable with it.

Right now, I think it would be cost-prohibitive. I still have my copy of Xpress Studio, but I could never get it to talk to my JVC cam, communications with my JVC deck were inconsistent (they took it off the hardware list AFTER I purchased Xpress), and I could never find an efficient way to get HD footage into it. Everyone I asked had a 3 or 4-step process which usually involved some third-party software. In my opinion, if Avid says it'll handle HD, I shouldn't have to buy additional software to help Avid subsantiate their claim. The EOL announcement for Xpress was the final straw.

Use it. By all means use it. Become as familiar with it as you can. It has some things that Vegas will simply never have:

Support for a greater range of high-end proprietary formats (DVCPRO HD and R3D are the biggies in this category)

Support for timecode (Vegas does not use 'timecode' in the strictest sense, rather it assigns pseudo-timecode to clips arbitrarily, based on their position in the timeline)

Solid After Effects workflow. Sorry, but rendering from the Vegas Timeline to get something into AE is a royal waste of time. It's much easier to edit and have all of your transitions be interpreted correctly by AE than to re-render every time you want to change a cross-dissolve.

Greater plugin support. Cineform runs inside of PP, not as a separate app like for Vegas.

Greater Hardware support. BlackMagic Intensity Pro comes to mind as a popular piece of hardware that has enjoyed full support from day one.

All that said, there are things that Vegas does especially well, and no other NLE has been able to quite get right. But you already know that :)

Looks like I'll be trying to re-install XPress Pro and see what I can do. I don't even remember if it'll accept m2t files, or if I'll have to find 3rd & 4th party apps to make the files digestible for Avid.
Meanwhile, the mystery deepens. I've been able to do some work and actually encode a couple of timelines for DVD. Mind you, the footage for both these projects was captured from the GY-HD200 in the exact same manner (scene-detect enabled) and with the exact same settings as the current project which seems to be crashing almost any time I try to open it. These other two projects also crashed periodically, but I was finally able to open & work on them.
I tried disabling scene detect to capture some new footage I needed for this latest project, and even after verifying that scene detect was disabled, I start to capture and Vegas proceeded to detect scenes. I tried this several times, and nothing will allow me to capture in one huge clip. Well, I ended up capturing the footage into a test project that contained the new footage and nothing else. I was able to playback and work with the new clips without any problem (checked about 10 of them). I cleaned out the clips generated by my previous attempts on this particular tape and then opened my main, problematic project. I tried to import the recently-captured footage and...boom. exception/access violation error. 3 more attempts yielded the same result.
I know this is a long post and you guys are probably as busy as I am, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Sony certainly doesn't seem to be offering any substantive help...

I have been unable to render a 52 minute wedding video to a Bluray template without Vegas crashing - as I did all the CC in AE, it is only straight cuts in Vegas. Rendering to NTSC DVD template presented no issues.

To get a successful render from Vegas 8c, I went Save as .aaf. I loaded up Premiere Pro CS4 and imported this .aaf file. I then said Export sequence as Blu-ray Movie. I now have a complete render with no issues!

The AC-3 I rendered directly from the Vegas timeline with no issues.

"Support for timecode (Vegas does not use 'timecode' in the strictest sense, rather it assigns pseudo-timecode to clips arbitrarily, based on their position in the timeline)"

This is untrue and I have tested it. I took 2 clips and reversed them (put the second one first) then dragged "time code" on top of it. The first clip started at something like 2 seconds if I remember correctly and the second clip started at 0 and ended at 2 seconds.

"Tim, I see from one of your previous posts you are working with 150 or more HD clips in a project. Are those all in one veg, or are they spread across several nested vegs? My guess is 150 HD clips in a single project file might be a challenge for any 32 bit NLE."

My time lines are usually around 2 hours (HDV going to blu ray). They have consisted of upwards of 500 clips, with effects, multi layers, alpha channels, dissolves, Titles, Mercalli deshakers, New Blu and Vdub cartooners... etc.

I don't crash at all.

I am totally 120% sure that most of the problems that people have are somehow or in some way hardware related.

Now avc is a different ball game. I find that I do have to walk a fine line with vegas... and if I step off of it.... crash

"This is untrue and I have tested it. I took 2 clips and reversed them (put the second one first) then dragged "time code" on top of it. The first clip started at something like 2 seconds if I remember correctly and the second clip started at 0 and ended at 2 seconds."


Vegas does not use timecode, all you proved is that Vegas can display timecode which is a completely different matter entirely.

Vegas uses time in seconds to about 5 decimal places into the file. If it did use timecode in the way being discussed you'd have a lot more issues with Vegas to deal with. For example Vegas will quite happily handle tapes with missing timecode and thank goodness for that. A traditional timecode based editor would spit the dummy immediately and force you to restripe the timecode.

On the other hand the way Vegas does things can leave your project marooned. EDL export is very dodgy at best and you cannot recapture media from a Vegas project alone, you need the Vidcap file to get it to work. To import an EDL I've written my own converter and with a lot of fudging been able to recreate a project into Vegas. As part of that process though I had to convert timecode to decimal time in seconds. If I needed to ingest from tape I'd have to have created a Vidcap file, it gets easier with SDI capture as the log files are human readable XML.

Bob.

"Vegas does not use timecode, all you proved is that Vegas can display timecode which is a completely different matter entirely.'

Well Bob... i certainly don't pretend to be an authority figure on timecode issues... but if I reverse the order of 2 clips and vegas reads the first one starts at 2 seconds and the second one starts at 0 seconds then vegas is certainly not blindly assigning time according to position. it's reading time from the clip in some fashion.... unless you have another explanation.

Meanwhile the post I was answering claims that Vegas uses a kind of "pseudo time code" that assigns time according to position.

Well Bob... i certainly don't pretend to be an authority figure on timecode issues

I can tell you that Bob is.
Take a look at the strange time code behaviour thread for issues that I discovered trying to use TC with Vegas.

Mike

"I can tell you that Bob is"

He may well be... but the point is he's off topic to my post. I was correcting some one else on a "pseudo time code" comment.... which isn't true. Vegas is in FACT reading time from the clips.

Bob himself admits that Vegas can DISPLAY timecode... which is my point in my original time code post.

Oy... that doesn't bode well for me, what with budget restrictions and all...

you cannot recapture media from a Vegas project alone, you need the Vidcap file to get it to work

I'm probably missing a detail or two about this. I know that if I feed a log that's just a tab delimited file into Veggie toolkit then that kit can import the entries to the project and I can capture (or recapture) all of that media without having a vidcap file.

However, maybe you're saying that you can't bring an EDL exported from Vegas back to Vegas and expect to recapture the footage?

I think you can also use the toolkit to go in reverse if you want to create a capture log. That could be useful if you're trying to migrate over to PPro because I've noticed that media captured in one doesn't seem to show its timecode in the other. If I drop media captured in Vegas into PPro (cs2) it doesn't see timecode in the file, and vice versa. Very inconvenient. So you could use the log created by Veggie toolkit to recapture the media in either program.

Rob

Thanks,
I just had a play around with this. Never really tried that part of the Toolkit. Yes, it seems it can create an XML log file.
I couldn't get Vegas to play along trying to recap offline media. Vidcap shows a red dot on the clip and TC in/out at 0. If I pointed it to the correct log file then all was good.

Also the Tookit seems ti use Ruler Time to work out in/out points.

All this got done to death around V5 time, maybe somethings changed since. If so I've not heard.

Bob.

Please define AAF thanks

From Vegas Online Help:

You can use AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) files to exchange projects between applications. For example, if your postproduction facility uses a tool other than Vegas software, you could provide your project as an AAF file.

Online Help has a lot more info if you're interested.

Mike

It's my understanding that VIDCAP takes a TC stamp at the begining of the capture then goes in to a regen mode ingnoring the TC on the tape. The resulting captured file does indeed have timecode but it does not necessarily reflect the actual TC on the tape.

I found this out the hard way once by making B.I.T.C. DVD's while capturing. I took the analog feed off of the camera and routed to a DVD recorder. The result was that at the end of the capture, the tc had drifted and the B.I.T.C. did not match the code on the captured files.

JAB