m2ts files for Sony Vegas 7

[Dave Haynie]

What program from 2011? You said you can’t use Vegas 10 (released in 2010, in fact), but were struggling to get Vegas 7 to work. That’s the premise of your post, here… if you’re actually using Vegas 10 now, maybe you have a different set of problems. Maybe not.

I can attest that I have editing 100’s of hours of AVCHD and other AVC encapsulations in Vegas 9 and Vegas 10, and they’re perfectly usable programs. On a good desktop PC (or very good laptop), you probably won’t run into speed limitations on basic editing of 1080/24p, 1080/60i, or 720/60p video. Some new camcorders do shoot 1080/60p.. you should expect that to be difficult to edit directly on any PC in any program that doesn’t use proxy editing.

If the program (either Vegas 10 or Vegas 7) is crashing on your video, it absolutely could be a bug in the program or the camcorder’s output. Yeah, you’d rather hope that Sony tested on Sony, I can’t answer for that. What I can absolutely verify is that some manufacturers have released corrupted bitsreams in the past. My second AVC camcorder, back when I was still playing around with the format, was a Sanyo Xacti FH-1. This was a tiny, cheap, AVC camcorder that was oddly the first in the country to do 1080/60p for consumers. They didn’t use AVCHD (AVC in a Blu-ray-style disc structure and MPEG-2 transport stream wrapper), they used the MPEG-4 wrapper instead. And buggered it up with negative time codes. Which crashed Vegas 9, every time.

And that’s not a big in Vegas. It’s nice if you NLE doesn’t crash on errors, better still if it indicated where the bug is in the file, but IMHO, only if that doesn’t slow down normal operation. When there is a big in the format, the behavior of any NLE is random — no good way to predict it.

The way I worked around this was originally Cineform. But at one point, I was editing two or more soccer games a week, and didn’t really have much editing to do… so the time to convert to Cineform was annoying, not to mention the dramatic size of 2.5-4 hours of Cineform every week. I knew, from the time code error message (from another tool) that the error was in the MPEG-4 wrapper, so I re-multiplexed the video. And that worked just dandy… Vegas then took the MPEG-4 without a care.

You could try that. It’s not likely to help much in Vegas 7, but for Vegas 9 or 10, it does work around some camcorder bugs. Download the free program YAMB (https://yamb.unite-video.com), install, and try converting a .m2ts file to a .mp4 file… should probably work ok. If that makes your AVC files hold together in Vegas, you have very likely just confirmed a bug in the camera’s bitstream creation software. Re-muxing doesn’t change your video at all, it just strips to an AVC elemental stream, then puts it back together in a different A/V multiplex.

Once I determined this was the problem with the Sanyo, I just used YAMB to import (copy) from the SDHC card… no much different than a straight copy.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Looked up your camera… it does 1080/50p. That is an advanced format, and pretty gnarly to decode. To put reference on it, I have an AMD 1090T system, that’s a 6-core CPU at 3.2GHz. I can play back 1080/60p on some players, but even at 60-70% of all six CPU cores, the VLC player can’t keep up. You can’t even come close to decoding that, in realtime, on a 2-core system, not even on many 4-core systems, using only the CPU.

The other possible weirdness here: Sony’s officially supporting the new AVCHD 2.0 format with this new camcorder. My Panasonic TM700 did this video type and bitrate well over a year ago, but it didn’t formalize the AVCHD 2.0 specs. I’m not sure what, if anything, actually changed in the AVCHD 2.0 bitstream, but it’s at least technically possible that Vegas is choking on it. I have not seen any indication that Sony’s addressed AVCHD 2.0 per se in Vegas 10, and Vegas 9 was EOLed before the spec was released. Using the YAMB conversion I suggested will also fix that possibility. VLC can also do non-destructive media container conversion for you.

-Dave

[Simon Andersson]

The program from 2011 (which was actually now that i search closer, is from 2010) is, as I said before, Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10, and that REALLY should be able to edit AVCHD.

When you open up Vegas Movie Studio, you get to set your preferences, and one of the options, is AVCHD. I also set it to “25p/50p PAL” which is what I use.

As I’ve stated before, The editing works perfectly, without any lag or other trouble, for about 10 minutes, but then the program crashes and I can’t use it with AVCHD for more than 10 seconds unless I restart my computer.

There must be something corrupt somewhere, either in the video-file or in the program. It might also be because of that AVCHD 2.0 thing that you were talking about.

That’s what I think is wierd. A relatively new program, from the same company as the camera, with the option to edit those kind of videos, only to crash with no reason after 10 minutes. If there is one program that should be able to handle the videos, it’s that.

The same thing happens when I use Sony Vegas 9.

[Simon Andersson]

I think I figured out a way.

As long as I don’t edit the videos in Vegas Movie Studio Platinum, the program doesn’t crash, which means that I can render the unedited file without it crashing.

So I just place the video in the program and then without doing any editing, I save it as a .MOV-file with AVID’s dnxHD-codec (which is almost the same exact quality as the AVCHD file, but instead of taking up your processors it makes the file bigger so it’s a lot easier to edit), and when it’s rendered I just place the .MOV-file in Vegas without any trouble with the same quality. The only downsides are that I’m unable to use my camera’s 5.1 channel surround because the codec doesn’t support that (which isn’t a big deal), and also that the files can get pretty big, so, of course, it will take up a lot of disc-space. But oh well, it’s worth it.

Thanks a lot you guys for all of your help. I wan’t to render quite a lot of videos before I am completely sure that it works, but so far it looks good.

Thanks again!