editing suite suggestion for broadcast video

[Stephen Mann]

I usually avoid these discussions because asking for opinions about Editing Software is like asking about religion.

If the people who designed the early NLE’s had created the first word processor, the PC would beep at us when we reached the 80th character and we’d all be pressing the Carriage Return button at the end of each line! Sometimes emulating the real world is the worse design choice you could make.

(I don’t recall where I stole that quote, but it is very apropos).

Sometimes a paradigm shift is good. In the case of Sony Vegas, away from the film world.

Now you know which religion is my editor. (Or is it the other way around?)

MPEG2 is a lousy format for editing regardless which editing platform you use because it’s already compressed. (You don’t say what the source media is).
I don’t know if the metadata remains intact as I’ve never looked at it.
That said, my local PEG station edits from DVD’s all the time (which are MPEG2). (And they are still in a 4:3 SD world).

Interesting aside – they use Avid for editing and had a DVD of a project that needed the head and tail trimmed to time and some graphics added. The Avid editor got started and I took a copy of the DVD to my studio. I imported the DVD media into Vegas, did the edits, burned a new DVD and drove back to the station. The Avid guy had just started editing – after transcoding the DVD files into a format that the Avid system uses.

If it helps your decision, just download the demo from SonyCreativeSoftware.com and try it. It’s fully functioning and works for 30-days. And you won’t find a better group of users to ask questions than on the COW.

If you do download the demo and try testing for the metadata, please let us know what you find out.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[John Rofrano]

[Stephen Mann] “I usually avoid these discussions because asking for opinions about Editing Software is like asking about religion.”

Actually I thought he asked a very direct question. What Jay wants to know is: “[can Vegas] keep…Without changing all data sitting on lines 20-22 for sd and 9 for hd.”

I know Vegas will capture closed caption data from SDI and that it can import closed caption data from .scc files. It supports CEA608 captions and CEA708 containers containing CEA608 captions. What I’m not sure of is if it will recognize captioning in a DVD MPEG2 file. I want to say yes because the help file says:

“Vegas Pro reads embedded Line 21 captions when you import a media file with a frame size of 720×486 pixels (or taller) and a frame rate of 29.97 fps.”

and when I render DVD MPEG2 with closed captioning I can import it back into Vegas and the captions are in the file. I would download the trial of Vegas Pro 10c and see if it recognizes the captions in your MPEG2 file. In just might do what you want.

[Stephen Mann] “If the people who designed the early NLE’s had created the first word processor, the PC would beep at us when we reached the 80th character and we’d all be pressing the Carriage Return button at the end of each line! Sometimes emulating the real world is the worse design choice you could make.

(I don’t recall where I stole that quote, but it is very apropos).”

You stole it from me and I justed used that the other day in a conversation I was having. It’s one of my favorite analogies for why “emulating the past is never a pathway to the future”. (you can quote me on that too) lol. 😉

~jr

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