Anyone tried running Vegas on Mac Hardware?

[John Kirkilis]

I have about 500GB of 1080/24p AVCHD footage to log and edit. Most of the footage consists of interviews for a documentary. During the shoot, each question was not isolated as its own AVCHD clip. In addition, the Sony HDR-AX2000 split the clips along 2GB boundaries. The AVCHD metadata supposedly takes care of these 2GB boundries in savvy NLEs. After each day of shooting, the entire AVCHD directory from the camera’s memory card was uploaded to its own directory on a hard disk.

For reasons too long to go into here, I will need the flexibility to edit/render portions in both FCPX and VP. Each NLE appears to have different AVCHD workflows without an ability to share metadata on clips/sub-clips. My thought was to use VP to go through the AVCHD footage and render out physical media files that align with individual interview questions in a format that retains the 1080/24p quality and which can be ingested into both FCPX and VP11.

I realize that this would be a time consuming extra step, but it would allow me to get intimately familiar with the footage and add a layer of old-school, lowest common denominator metadata using file system directories and filenaming. FCPX’s and VP11’s logging and keywording could then be separately applied on top of the newly minted media files.

My questions are:

* Which format should I use to render out these intermediate files so that both FCPX and VP11 can log, edit, and render most easily?

* Is VP the best tool to perform this first phase, or is there a dedicated utility that performs these simple cuts.

System specs in profile.

Regards,

John

[Ben Edwards]

I am afraid there may not be such a format. Avid, FCP, Premier can (up to a point) do this type of thing but I don’t think Vegas can. I think if you outline your reasons for using both you may get a more useful answer.

Ben

—
Ben Edwards – Freelance Filmmaker
https://www.funkytwig.com

[John Rofrano]

[John Kirkilis] “* Which format should I use to render out these intermediate files so that both FCPX and VP11 can log, edit, and render most easily?”

I would use Avid DNxHD which is a QuickTime format. It’s free, and both Vegas and FCP can use it (I assume FCPX can too but with all of the horror stories about missing pro features in FCPX, it’s good to test this out first). Avid DNxHD also does not suffer from gamma shift problems that other QuickTime codecs have when moving between Windows and OS X.

[John Kirkilis] “* Is VP the best tool to perform this first phase, or is there a dedicated utility that performs these simple cuts.”

I really can’t say because I only use Vegas Pro so everything seems quick and simple to me. 😉 You can easily open the media in the Vegas trimmer, mark your in and out points and create subclips. Then drop the subclips onto the timeline one at a time and render them out (or do that as you make them). It should go pretty fast.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com