GoPro 60p footage plays fine on computer but really slow in Vegas

[John Rofrano]

Set you project to match you footage and the playback should get a little smoother. Like this:

You will get much smoother playback if you shoot 30p instead. There is no reason to use 60p unless you are doing slow-motion work.

~jr

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http://www.vasst.com

[Rex Brown]

Isn’t there also a difference between preview via the Trimmer window and watching it on the Timeline?

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[Dave Haynie]

It’s really helpful to describe your system, when asking for technical help. There are multiple reasons things go slow, but usually, the answer is simple: your computer isn’t fast enough.

First of all.. don’t worry about the memory card. But you will definitely benefit if you copy all files to a hard drive; SD Cards just aren’t all that fast, by comparison. Your Class 4 card is just dandy for recording HD video, but it’s a slow read (I have several 32GB Class 4 cards, I know of what I speak). A good hard drive can be 10x faster, but also, a bit less of a burden on the CPU.

Next… playback in a video player can usually tap features of your system that Vegas doesn’t (at least not yet). If you’re reasonably up-to-date, it can use your video card’s GPU to accelerate the AVC/MPEG-4 video your GoPro is shooting. AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is the most complex video CODEC in common use these days — a CPU has to work pretty hard to decode it all by itself.

720/60p is often the preferred format for sports videography, nothing wrong with using that — it’s fully compliant with the prevailing ATSC and Blu-Ray standards, and YouTube will at least accept 60p uploads. Your PC will perform about the same on 720/60p, 1080/30p, and 1080/60i video (the GoPro doesn’t shoot the latter, but that’s the most common HD format). I use 720/60p when I shoot High School soccer in the fall; the GoPro is clearly designed for sports-related work.

So, there are a few things you can do. Set your project to 1280×720/60p (in Vegas Pro 10, there’s a template for this, “HD 720-60p”… not sure what support you get in Studio), which will keep Vegas from needed to do any on-the-fly format conversions. You can change the “Preview Quality” setting in the Video Preview window, to let you trade off speed for quality. But, bottom line, AVC is a complex format, and you need a pretty decent computer for editing this quickly. My 6-core AMD 3.2GHz system, with 8GB, is decent, but there are folks here with faster systems.

I’m not sure what options you have in Studio, but it’s also common practice to transcode AVC into an “intermediate” format for editing. This could be a format like Cineform (about $100) or Adobe DNxHD (free download), which trade off much larger files for much lower encoding complexity. Some people use higher quality MPEG-2, which isn’t quite as computationally simple as these, but much easier on your CPU than AVC. This does tend to be pretty complicated, so if you’re just starting out, plan to spend a little time learning the ropes — most people don’t learn this in a week. I’m still learning after 20 years at it…

-Dave