Never is a big word. I am convinced Vegas will interface with the deck control of the Decklink cards, and also support some of the other things it could do with them.

I'm using a Decklink Extreme card to shoot tapeless D-5 (uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2). Vegas doesn't support this card directly, so I use Decklink's Deckcontrol app, which has worked 100% reliably for me, to capture to harddisk.

Afterwards I just boot up Vegas and edit to my heart's content, and it looks quite gooood.

XPRI is $90K or so, perhaps you can outsource this transfer?

Don't want to hijack this too much, but how do you record to hard disk? A notebook? One of those stand alone hard drives? Now, if you could get this going with High Def stuff, you'd really really have something.

"how do you record to hard disk? A notebook? One of those stand alone hard drives? "

Ha-ha-ha! I'd like that, but this has a data rate of 270 Mbps, compared to say Panasonic Varicam HD at 100Mbps or regular DV at 25 Mbps. Even a hotrodded gamer's PC can't keep up (really!).

Recording D-5 direct to disk requires real workstation hardware with a 64-bit bus all the way between the 64-bit PCI slot for the Decklink card -> the CPU -> the disk RAID controller, a fast CPU, 2GB of fast RAM, a 10K RPM RAID0 SATA or SCSI array (with room for 100GB per hour of video). I am not aware of any desktop PC that can handle it.

My bad. I have so much to learn. So, this is a studio setup then, right? What do you use it for, if I'm not being too nosey. I'd also love to get more specs of that workstation if you'd care to share.
This is something I've be interested in for a while- especially as it does not involve over-priced decks. Sounds like a very clever setup you have. If only it were portable!

Not yet.
What you CAN do, is transfer the HDV footage rendered for HDCam, to the Decklink print tool, and print that way. However, it's not totally reliable with their own tool right now either.

We just went through a similar hardware setup at the shop I work at. We ended up buying a Compaq WX8000 with dual 3.something Xeon processors.

The biggest problem was RAID arrays. We went through a few units with our vendor and had throughput problems with all of them but the very last one (which is too small and so is temporary while we finish a job). We initially started with an 8 scsi disk JMR enclosure which worked reasonably well for several months but then started to slowly fall apart until it became unusable when deadlines began to loom.

The biggest one was a Rourke unit with 16 disks run off of a fiberchannel card. Didn't work right. It seemed to me that big arrays like this could be a bear to troubleshoot. And good luck getting a "known to be working" replacement into your hands. These things are just too expensive to find a "spare" unit.

If you look at the Apple site you will see that their XServe RAID tops out at about $13k. This evidently will work with a PC as well. Then you need a fibre channel card. Apple's is $500.00 so I think something comparable for the PC ought to be about the same. Then you need a cable kit which looks like it would be $150.00 for a pair of cables.

That's the basics for that disk system: $13,650.00. Now, add to that a service contract, heavy duty UPS, rack, or better yet, a Noren rack to cut down what must be a hellish amount of sound, or perhaps a server room to isolate the noise, air conditioning...You get the idea. Doing real HD is expensive. HDV, however, will be relatively cheap.

I definitely recommend that service contract.

On the Black Magic Design card, it sounds like the issue of Vegas actually working with it isn't that big a deal. If you can capture and print with the BMD app, and then edit in Vegas, that's pretty good! Sure, Vegas can't control the deck directly and it can't use any acceleration the card might provide, but you can use the BMD codecs and do your edit. The biggest downside I see is that Vegas processes color in 8 bit space rather than 10 bit (afaik). That's too bad.

Rob Mack

I shoot both on soundstage and on location.

Of course I'm tethered, meaning the camera has to be linked by wire to the capturing workstation. This is a single Belden 1694A coax that can run up to 1000 feet before running out of steam. I have a 100 foot length and a 50 foot length that can be connected if needed, and this goes a long way....

Of course it's a pain in the ass, but I'm smiling anyway. No tape and uncompressed quality that matches the very best you'll ever see on TV.

Vegas handles the BMD 10-bit codec just fine. Of course any processing will be done in 8-bit RGB, but I'm still better off than if I had started with 8-bit RGB or 8-bit YUV.

Some math will show you that 8-bit RGB can hold about the same amount of practical video information as 10-bit YUV.

Sure, 16-bits per color for effects and color correction would be nice.

Perhaps in Vegas 8.0? :O)

On the workstation side, I bought a Supermicro workstation chassis (which is really well designed) and a Supermicro motherboard. That with a fast CPU and 2GB of hyperfast Corsair CAS 2-2-2 RAM (very rare but kicks butt!), 4 x 10,000 rpm WD Raptor drives and a fanless nVidia video card (important, no substitutions for this application) cost me about $2K. The Decklink Extreme card added less than $900.

HD is far more expensive to handle, don't go there unless you really have to.

Thanks, rmack350 and Coursedesign. Sounds like you've got it figured out, Coursedesign, for uncompressed SD and rmack350 is testing the waters with HD. Anyway to avoid the deck makes me very happy.
Interestingly, I read an interview in DV magazine where a guy talks about his setting up an HD studio. His take was that spending the money on uncompressed SD wasn't worth the money anymore. But y'all posts really make it sound like a much bigger leap. Oh well.
As a side note, a professional editor friend told me the other day that video editing is still in its infancy and in a few years a lot of the bugs will be worked out. I hope so. I can't wait for HD!

>Some math will show you that 8-bit RGB can hold about the same amount of practical video >information as 10-bit YUV.

I've calculated this to be the other way about:

10bit RGB will make a nice fit into 8bit YUV space, unless entirely full spread monochrome.

With some math. Especially when you consider the colour subsampling of broadcast YUV sources. Which RGB wastes its representation of as it goes into the pipeline and finally back out.

What we get with Vegas is the ability to do a rather good job of squishing 8bit YUV sources (e.g. DV25) into 8bit RGB. Even though the math suggests some cramping and rounding.

I wish someone can explain to me why anyone would want to stick with YUV? It is after all a systems based on a human not natural artifice, our eyes amd cameras, both film and video 'see' RGB, it is presented back to us as RGB, YUV was developed simply to squash RGB information into the bandwidth limitations of yesteryear. From the little I know the very high end systems now coming to market are entirely RGB, Black Magic announced some time ago that they would abandon support for FCP and QT, primarily because it couldn't work in RGB.
Maybe I've got this all wrong, I've posed this question several times and to date not a word of contradiction.

Bob.

YUV - because if you put video onto tape in consumer, prosumer and pro equipment - YUV is the domain in which that signal lives - digital or analogue.

However the statement is correct about RGB being the native domain of sensors and displays. However our visual cortex with rods for luma with no chroma and cones for luma+chroma without a shadow mask or RGB prism - I think we could run that through a few iterations of discussion before drawing a final conclusion.

YUV 4:2:2 gives us the ability to represent a colour picture with 720x480 (DV) or 720x576 (D1/DV) 16bit coded samples per pixel.

HSL, CMYK, RGB, YIQ, YUV, YCrCb are the names of the representations we force our images in due to our need to get the best out of the worst element in our workflow. So, yes, RGB data with floating point precision would be where to take our industry.

I wish Vegas would adapt its pipeline to cater for the best source being provided in the project. However, once the 3rd party SDK for plug-ins was published, for backwards compatibility and to prevent an up-roar with Vegas6 - I suspect that Vegas will continue to do a good job converting from any-bit-depth YUV/RGB into 8bit RGB. Not to a theoretical ideal that would impress your old maths professor but one I've slowly come to be OK with.

If the SCART/Euroconnector/Peritel connector had been made popular in NTSC countries then I am sure that we'd see more RGB based video on-the-wire. Devices touting support for "Progressive video" or "HDTV" but only supporting this through the YCrCb RCA/phono jacks is completely alien logic to the European consumer - yet one he is forced to accept. Roll on HDMI (or legacy DVI-I !).

Why does YUV still persist? Well, I guess in DV and many of the SDI forms, folks are not wanting to increase the dynamic range of the source where the casual translation will probably incur some rounding error in one direction or the other. Apart from the Thomson Viper, YUV is what we record and only more feedback from folks like you Bob will change this.

I think you'll find the new Genesis camera also records RGB. I'm glad to see you agree with me, at least re the logic (or lack there of!). I also agree with your comments re SCART, we run RGB from our DVB receiver and a DVD player into our TV and I too am bugged by the persistance of component interconnects. Almost all TVs sold here have RGB SCART yet very few of the devices to feed them have matching outputs, what a PIA.
I'd like to pose another idea too, my knowledge of CPUs kicking in here. I can see why on a serial data path like 1394 or SDI the bit depth has an immediate impact on bandwidth but with interfaces like PCI-Express offering many gigabits per second and given the internal design of any CPU, why the big issue of going from 8 bit to 10 bit, why don't we 'byte' the bullet and go for 16 bit, makes perfect sense to me, recording to HD in a camera I can see no downside to this, or have I just proposed the same solution as the Viper? Perhaps this is where the next generation is headed, is that going to be the next big thing, no more compression, just writing raw CCD data to hard disk and using a matching pipeline in post.
I know someone who was prepared to put up the money for a Viper but what to do with it in post was a real hurdle.

Bob.

Matt Norton, back to your original question: "I would like to be able to transfer HDV footage to a Sony HDCAM Deck using Veges. Is this possible?"

(I also posted this same answer to you on the Cow):

Please do your research before proceeding, otherwise you risk making some very expensive mistakes.

You could (as opposed to should) render your project in Vegas to file and print to a rented HDCAM deck over HD-SDI using Bluefish or Decklink or other HD-SDI board (print using their own capture/print utilities). You could lay off 4 channels of audio to HDCAM as well, in multiple passes. But as far as creating an HDCAM master is concerned, do you have any experience doing this? Will you have the hardware- the trilevel sync gen, the computer, the raids, the hardware scopes, the proper audio monitoring etc etc? Do you know how to do a professional-quality mix for this type of delivery? Have you done color correction for HDCAM layback? Do you know what to expect from the upconvert? Do you know how to QA an HDCAM master? If you have any doubts about any one of these, then production of your master is best left to an experienced post house, somebody who has done it over and over. Call a real HDCAM-capable post house and they'll tell you how to proceed (what to bring, what to expect, here's what it'll cost).

When it comes to mastering in HDCAM, I strongly advise the "rent a deck and hopefully it all just works" or the "find a garage shop that can rent a deck for the afternoon" approach.

SonyEPM,
why PTT from Vegas? Why not xfer the project to XPRI directly?
If the Vegas files are stored on the same raid system that avoids another step (and possible recompresssion?), export the Vegas project as XML for upload into XPRI and finalise there.
We're well aware of the costs and equipment involved, we can get those with the necessary skills re grading and QA, we expect a steep learning curve ourselves, so far I don't see any insurmountable hurdles and this does seem doable, lagoon at the XPRI forum on COW has been bringing footage from JVC HDV cammy onto XPRI, admitedly painfully but still doable. What is not clear from what he's telling me is how much easier it would be to offline (or nearline) in Vegas and then transfer to XPRI for finalisation.
Our plan is to build a post facility specifically targeted at the Vegas community, such a facility would be a huge prestige boost to Vegas. There doesn't seem much point talking to the local Sony guys, most haven't even heard of Vegas, they'll gladly sell us the decks and that's about it, that's why I keep hammering away at the forums and I have to say I've never found it so hard to spend money!

Bob

The decklink card and blackmagic as a company has and to what have spoken with the president...always be a mac, but not "anti-windows" company. Grant started Digital Voodoo, which is what you must think when you're thinking of a company dropping Macintosh for the lack of other support. Blackmagic has a unique relationship with Apple as do AJA. They are companies who currently thrive on making a product that is mysteriously always up to date with Apple. I work at a television network and operate/maintain over 50 decklink cards from the bottom to the top and all in between. I will say, although supported, Windows is definitely not treated as an equal with the cards Just this week they upgraded the drivers to support HD 1080i in Premier (not that premier could handle it anyway). Now as a developer of video software, I can tell you that Sony would be completely backwards by not allowing "QuickTime" support and the driver for the 422 port. It's nothing about the BlackMagic drivers as they provide an interface to the QuickTime API and from there anything can edit with them. I've used them with Drastic QuickClip Pro (although unsupported and not the most stable), Avid Xpress Pro, Pinnacle, and many others that are not supported and may not work for everyone. Especially if you're pondering the purchase of something that is compatible, say a J-30 or J-H series deck... (which will run you 15K - 50K), the cost of the 295 (SD) to 500ish(HD) is worth a try and using their app isn't that bad since it does offer timecode and re-gen of blacking. Look at the updates to the drivers from last week and you'll see the cards now also do up and downconverts for HD signals along with full support for DVCPRO. AJA and Bluefish make good products too but the drivers are not there. I currently find myself spending too much time re-editing or troubleshooting the OS on windows which is why I do that work on the Mac, I use the windows to ingest from the E-VTR since MXF support is temporarily limited although being supported as we speak and almost ready.

To the other poster up from here....
For HDCAM anything, or "real" HD (uncompressed or anything running over a video cable and NOT a firewire), I would recommend tossing the extra 10K to 20K for a full Final Cut system, CPU included, with 5TB of storage...and rent the deck to save the $90K. Then forget about the mac and go have fun on the PC and you can have a decent amount of footage without shelling out the "fees" for Avid DS, Liquid Chrome, or Sony's option. The xServe RAID systems are the most reliable systems we use, being RAID 50 they are dually redundanat along with doubly fast (dual stream uncompressed HD supported with the proper configs...check the AJA and apple site).

And just my $.02 about systems in general. There's plenty of talk around here about what systems work best and in my experiences, buy Opteron, because they are the closest thing that the x86 systems have to the G5's or SGI MIPS....they too are a clean set of instructions without the crap tacked on from numerous hacks and accidents. BOXX technologies is the best by far for any sort of workstation. While AMD motherboards may not publicly support PCI-Express yet...Can Windows even handle the bandwidth to graphics? It will be some time for them to harness the power that the faster bus can provide, and to write specific instructions to the GPU's. Discreet was the last company that I can think of to actually force you out of the windows environment and into theirs. The EDIT was a great system but as can be expected from somethine even more proprietary than SGI or MS, it was squashed

Have fun editing, or compositing, or converting.