HDV capture and M2T playback

[Ajay Sharma]

I have AMD 64, 3000 With 1 Gig RAM , 2 X 300 Gig serial ATA drives
Sony Vegas 6d with Sony’s HDR-HC1 and it captures and plays back HDV smooth, your computer configuration seems to be a lot faster than mine.
have you tried defragmenting the drive( where the Video is stored )???
has to be your computer, I would also check Vegas preferences—video— playback options and trying switching from best to Auto and see if it makes any difference.

[Jerry Waters]

Do yourself a favor and go to CineForm and download their trial version of HD Connect. It captures and converts to avi – in either one or two steps, depending on your computer, and these files are designed to be editable. They act like DV files in Vegas – pretty much real time. Also, the program will scene detect when it goes through the conversion phase. Vegas won’t do that and requires proxies. The nature of m2t is that it is not an editable format as is. You can get away with one simple cut but that is about it.

JerryW

[Doug Graham]

Thanks for the tip, Jerry. I did two things: First, I added a couple of drivers to my system that improved its performance considerably. Second, I took your advice and tried the Cineform utility.

I’m still not sure that there isn’t something wrong with my system, despite the improvements. When using Cineform, I got the following results:

– With the software set to either “convert on the fly” or “save the M2T and convert on the fly”, about 3 to 6 minutes of material would be captured, then the software would stop the camcorder while the conversion process caught up.

– Capturing the M2T only, the software successfully captured about 33 minutes of a 58 minute tape, and then garbled the video and audio data of the remainder. (Since Cineform doesn’t have a video display, this didn’t become obvious until after the fact).

– Conversion of the M2T to intermediate format took a little longer than real time, about 1 hr 15 min. for a 58 minute clip.

I’m just starting to play around with HDV…is this sort of behavior normal? System is AMD 4800+ dual core, ASUS A8N-SLI premium, 2 GB RAM, 1TB RAID 0 in 4 SATA drives.

Regards,
Doug Graham

[Bruceo2]

[Doug Graham] “I’m just starting to play around with HDV…is this sort of behavior normal? System is AMD 4800+ dual core, ASUS A8N-SLI premium, 2 GB RAM, 1TB RAID 0 in 4 SATA drives.”

Yes, welcome to the world of HDV sucks! I love it, but it sucks.

[Doug Graham] “With the software set to either “convert on the fly” or “save the M2T and convert on the fly”, about 3 to 6 minutes of material would be captured, then the software would stop the camcorder while the conversion process caught up.”

If your system specs are as you say they are then it is mot likely you have some process running that causes cineform to blip and stop. I know for a fact if there is any usb bus activity (except if you are capturing to USB external) cineform will stop the capture. Cineform has improved greatly and is what I find to be the best option right now with Vegas, but it is still a PITA capture app. Buggy as hell. Often you will find your captures audio will go out of synch for no apparent reason and if you recapture the same tape the audio will still go out of synch. Doesn’t happen as often as it used to but still too often. I have found the best thing to do is do a msconfig and do a selective startup with load startup items unchecked.

[Doug Graham] “Conversion of the M2T to intermediate format took a little longer than real time, about 1 hr 15 min. for a 58 minute clip.”

That is exactly right. When I capture I set my timer for 1:15. Don’t even bother with other workflow methods they all suck. Cineform is still a PITA , but it is the best right now and they have consistently improved it, so I am hoping it will eventually work as advertised without bugs.