Canon EOS 7D SLR & Vegas Pro?

[Al Bergstein]

I use it Ray, with no problems. I did find I needed to go to 10 to get it to work better. of course, transcoding to AVI with Neoscene makes it edit better, but with huge file sizes created. Your workflow will need to be put your raw footage on one drive, transcode to AVI, and put that on your work drive, do your work finish the project, and then delete the AVI files and relink everything later if you ever need to come back to it. Or just edit natively if you don’t need great color grading or green screen effects. You might find you don’t.

Alf

[Jim Greene]

Just be careful as Neoscene that worked for VP9 does not work for VP10. Not sure if the inverse is true also. Also, the trasncoded files from Neoscene will be .avi files, the native Canon files are .mov, so it isn’t that simple to switch between these files in the Vegas timeline. If you have hundreds of .mov files this would be very painful, so maybe FIRST rename the Neoscene files to .mov before placing them on the Vegas timeline. This way when you point Vegas to the new file directory it will find all the same names (in a different format) and will be happy. And you will be happy not to replace each one individually in Vegas 🙂

-Jim.

[Ray Sherman]

Hi,
Thanks for the replies. It appears editing with this camera would be sort of a pain. I’m going to re-evaluate purchasing this camera. The reason I was so set on this particular camera was due to it’s still (18 mega pixel) and video mode capabilities (Advanced movie mode with manual exposure control and selectable frame rates: 1920 x 1080 (Full HD): 30p (29.97) / 24p (23.976) / 25p, 1280 x 720 (HD): 60p (59.94) / 50p, 640 x 480 (SD): 60p (59.94) / 50p
This camera seemed to be the best of both worlds in a small package for under $2000.00.
I you or anyone else has any suggestions of something similar that would have a great workflow with Vegas Pro, please let me know. Thanks again for all your help. Ray

Ray Sherman

[Jim Greene]

I guess it all depends on what your expectations are. I love the image from this camera, it’s all we use (Canon 5D, 7D, T2i). Vegas Pro 10 will edit the files natively, without transcoding to Cineform. If you are expecting it to edit as smoothly as the old standard def .avi files, it won’t. But that’s a lot to ask. Same for almost any alternative camera as well, since most use AVCHD or h.264.

-Jim.

[Ray Sherman]

Thanks Jim,
I didn’t know what to expect since I never edited in this manner before. I’ve always worked with MPEG files due to only owning dv camcorders. I am after high quality HD for my video/still needs. It’s been very interesting running into the different curves when it comes to using other sources of equipment. Cineform’s Neo Scene may be the way for me to go, providing the quality will be there in the final output. I hate to spend the money on this camera if it’s a toss up. Thanks again for your help and input it’s been very much appreciated. Ray

Ray Sherman

[Dave Haynie]

Cineform on a modern computer is pretty equivalent in editability to the DV format (a motion JPEG variation, not MPEG) back when DV was a commonly used format. The MPEG-2 of HDV and certainly, the AVC used by practically every computer media camcorder these days, are much more complex to decode.

With that said, I’m quite happy (finally!) with the performance of Vegas 10 and my AMD 1090T (six cores, 3.2GHz) based system on basic AVC editing. If it’s just a track or two, I have no immediate urge to convert to Cineform.

Sometimes, there are other reasons. For example, if there’s a great deal of image preprocessing (color grading, noise reduction), I may render out to Cineform early on, just to streamline editing down the road. But only if there’s enough complexity to warrant that.

And sure, your Cineform output will be ever so slightly lower in quality than your AVC, but it’s a challenge to really notice. One reason is that they’re very different technologies, so the compression artifacts don’t “beat” against each other, as you may see rendering AVC out to MPEG-2 or some such (AVC and MPEG-2 are DCT based compression algorithms, Cineform uses integer reversible wavelets with non-linear quantization). You’ll also find that, since Cineform encodes 4:2:2 color via interpolation from 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 input media. So with complex edits, you can actually get a better result.

Cineform did a little weird in Vegas 10. Prior to Vegas 10, Cineform was just a plain old Video for Windows CODEC. They had various updates, all worked with Vegas 9.

When Vegas 10 shipped, it added support for some direct interface to Cineform. And killed the previous VfW support. Unfortunately, there were bugs between Vegas 10 and the latest Cineform… at least on my system, any render out would crash Vegas. Until 10d, at least… now it’s finally happy again. This is the absolute wrong way to develop software — I have no problem with a private API being used if there’s some advantage, but [a] make it optional, and [b] don’t take away the capability I had in Vegas 9 with older versions of Cineform.

-Dave