There is no problem as long as you use one of the supported Aja cards. You can find the list online at Sony Vegas' site towards the end. Video Guys sell them, any they list for PC, will work with, and are supported by, Vegas. The real and only problem with SDI or HD-SDI is your hard-drive setup. Until SATA-6 gets fully adopted and more drives use this format you simply must use a muscular RAID array. No way around it especially if you intend editing. Also, if you have been using Vegas for audio editing all this time, why would you consider using anything else for video? I also started on Vegas audio and Vegas is what I cut my teeth on for video. I've tried all the other NLE's. Nothing else seems to make sense to me except Vegas. I mean, I can use them, but why? ? ?

farss - only BM decklink extreme is supported by Vegas 9.0c pro. and it seems only the HDMI in&out, not the SDI. I might be wrong about this, but it seems that is what the web site says. might try contacting Sony if you have Vegas 9.0c. Earlier versions had no Black Magic/decklink support at all.

Earlier versions of Vegas did have Decklink support but only for SDI. Component was supposedly not supported. I have been trying and testing this, I have spoken to SCS about this and BMD's engineers, the latter by phone. Also on my recommendation a local post house bought into Vegas, two expensive Supermicro systems and Decklink cards. All I can say is the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster in many directions. I put close to $10K into the venture, thankfully I had access to Digital Betacam decks for free.
Throughout all of this Ppro worked flawlessly, I should have taken what BMD had to say about Vegas more seriously. At the time I was not the only Vegas user getting the same response from BMD either.
The responses I got from SCS did nothing to fill me with confidence. The field order problem was "known", brilliant. The one and only sensible piece of information I did get was from someone on this forum. It appears to have been a known issue in Microsoft's vfw interface. Of course Microsoft abandoned vfw a decade ago and advised it should no longer be used.

Bob.

Thanks to all for the input.
wilgen - I didn't see the Xena in your system specs. Can you give me some info about the hardware/mobo you're using it with? All my previous systems, Jaleo, Media 100 844/x and Velocity are hardware accelerated and very specific about system configuration. That's been the source of a lot of my hesitation about moving to Vegas - the "open hardware" issue. I love not having to look at 15-100k like my older rigs, but it's nice when you hear, "I guarantee this configuration will work as promised." I do love editing in Vegas and have exported files to my other systems for SD output and also delivered HD by file. Really would like to rely on Vegas as a standalone, but output to tape in both SD and HD is going to be a must. Also, my wallet would love to hear that a AJA card and a RAID solution similar to a couple of G_SPEED/es and an eSATA card will do the job.

and farss - thanks for the word on BMD. I have a friend who is having the same field reversal issues with a decklink. He's on Vegas 7 with a decklink SDI card and I was hoping those problems had been resolved.

Ppro is cheap in the grand scheme of anything SDI. Using it to capture and then editing in Vegas solved all the Vegas problems for me. The BMD / Sony YUV codecs works fine across Vegas / Ppro /AE /FCP. I cannot be 100% certain about FCP, I did capture a DB tape from a telecine transfer for a FCP user and he never came back to complain.

Bob.

Atom- a few years ago during Vegas 7, the director for a film called Sammytown came to my small studio in our small town to do ADR in the middle of filmig! Don't exactly know why, but I drove 300 miles to the big city (after calling ahead) and rented a machine with an Aja Xena card, then drove 300 miles back, loaded my layouts (Vegas 7 was already installed) and began pumping footage onto the machine's RAID. The director found the clips he wanted and I recorded the ADR - 2 female actors and one male - through one entire night into the next day and burned to DVD when he was satisfied with the edits. Also printed the edits back to tape. turned out to be rushes for someone in LA. I did the ADR sync by eye and ear, that really seemed to impress him, no big deal to me. What impressed me was the amount of video we loaded and unloaded thru that AJA card and into that computer from the cams without a hiccup or any flaw from my trusty Vegas, which I insisted we use. I do not know what computer we used - black box, and the drive raid array used scsi drives. I know it was an AJA card however. I dunno maybe I got Lucky. By the way you don't list any equipment or system specs at all . . . hmm . . . I use mostly HDV and AVCHD now days and I hope to God I never have to go through those 2 & 1/2 days again! I print to tape all the time from Vegas to my Sony HVR-25U in 1080i HDV, probably hundreds of times. Never any problems. Obviously that is through firewire and you are needing an SDI solution. Aja worked for me when I needed it most

wilgen - thanks. It's good to hear a success story like that. I have been on the forum exactly one day, which I why I have no system specs up yet. I'll add details when I have a few moments, but for audio(and some video), we're using 8.0c, an Intel core2quad 8200 on XP Pro, Asus MB, Tascam DM3200 firewire for audio i/o, G-Raid 2TB storage. Not sure what the "hmm" means in your reply, but my intention was not to raise questions about yours or anyone's system specs, just before dedicating money to another system and Vegas seat, I'd like to see the components on a system where everything is working as it should. I see too many "unreproducable" problems reported here that are obviously due to the "open hardware" freedom Vegas gives us.
farss - thanks too. My friend is using the PPro in/Vegas out solution with his BMD as well. I'm just not going that route with clients in the room.
Anybody with the AJA cards on the forum? Anybody?

Amen to that Atom. i am very curious about what is working now days also. I have not seen anyone's use of an AJA card on the forum either, and I have an upgrade cycle coming due soon. I'm also very unsure. I find your comments (and Farss') regarding the Blackmagic cards are timely. looks like I might choose something different. Could either of you be more specific about what you have found out re., BM's cards ?

What can one say. Both AJA and BMD are still in business and both used a lot on other NLEs. I haven't tested either with V9 and I know of no one who has.
I think you're looking at the issue the wrong way around. If you're interested in expanding your business into the broadcast world then you're up for some serious capital investment if you're going to be using VCRs. We're talking about $100,000s. At that point the cost of the NLE and the hardware to run it on is kind of petty cash.

At the same time factor in that the days of tape are numbered. I can't say if it's next year or next decade but clearly no one is developing new tape formats, the writing is on the wall.

Bob.

I totally agree, Bob. I've bought the last Digibeta deck I ever will. Our delivery has been Beta SP for SD and file for HD for a few years now. Still have several clients bringing in HDcam tapes that we downconvert for SD delivery. It still would be nice to have a Vegas solution for i/o and I have heard from Douglas Spotted Eagle on another forum that he is successfully using the AJA Xena with Vegas 9. My request for his system and storage specs got no reply so far, though.
I'm happy enough with Vegas, that I'm probably going to spring for a system and give it a shot. I'm going to keep hunting for sucessful user, but my current plans are for a corei5 750, Asus MB and a pair of GSpeed/es. And yes, an AJA card. Unless I hear of any horror stories that change my mind about purchasing, hopefully I'll post a glowing review with full system specs in the next couple of weeks.

We made a decision on Friday to dump some of our Axio hardware and install a couple of AJA cards on our PPro systems. I don't know if my employer would let me try out a Vegas install on one, but if he does I'll let you know how it works out.

The catch here is that our integrator has it from AJA that Kona cards will work under Windows. Since we're a mixed MAC/Windows shop with Premiere very much out of favor this appeals to us. We could move the Konas to FCP systems someday. So IF I can test at all I'll be testing Vegas on a Kona under Windows. Very non-standard.

Rob Mack

From the horse's mouth:

...both XENA and KONA cards be used on either platform.

Yep. And there it is.

Whether I'll be allowed to check how things work for Vegas is another matter since I rather doubt that anyone in our shop would be too eager to play russian roulette with a PPro edit system. They barely work as it is and adding Vegas to a system would probably just result in some finger pointing the next time premiere crashes (later the same day, most likely).

But I'll ask.

Rob

Some news.
Today we tried out a BMD HD card in a quite old Pentium D system running Vegas 9.0c. Just vanilla SATA drives and we captured DB over SDI just fine. Monitoring out SDI to a 17" Panny SDI monitor worked a treat too. We're going to try capturing HD SDI as well from an EX30.

Three problems.
1) Still seem only able to capture 1 audio stream from the digibeta tape.
2) Audio is captured as 16 not 24bit.
3) The 16:9 flag gets lost.

Bob.

Hmm. Looks like I should make a checklist of things to test on the AJA card. My employer is game to install Vegas on one of our edit systems.

Rob

Hey Bob. That's exciting news. Deklink HD Extreme, I'm assuming, right? Which drivers? I'll be anxious to hear your HD capture tests. Also, does HDMI work at least for monitoring?

Audio is captured as 16 not 24bit.

I thought DigiBeta audio maxed out at 20 bits?

"Deklink HD Extreme, I'm assuming, right?"

Yes, the card appears to be the Decklink HD Extreme, no longer available.
Sorry no clue as to drivers etc.
One other thing I did note was we had little joy without the 9 pin 422 cable connected. The card appeared unable to sync to a free running TPG.

Bob.

...the Decklink HD Extreme, no longer available.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/decklinkhdextreme/

Doing quite well, too.

I recall two updates to it during its long life:

PCI-X -> PCIe, and 1.5G HD-SDI to 3G HD-SDI.