Preview with Canon HF100

[John Rofrano]

This is probably being caused by the fact that the AVCHD that your Canon records is far more compressed than the HDV that your Sony recorded and is causing your PC to work a whole lot harder to decode it. Most modern PC’s can’t keep up with AVCHD playback at full frame rates. It’s just the nature of AVC compression. Try doing a RAM preview (Shift+B), and if it plays back smoothly then your CPU can’t keep up. If it still skips frames then something else might be causing it. I know that some cameras AVCHD play back smoother in Vegas than others. Apparently, all AVCHD is not created equal.

~jr

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

[Sebastian Alvarez]

HDV is a lot easier on CPUs than AVCHD. To edit the latter you need at least a quad core, which you have, but also lots of RAM (4 GB would be a good start). If you have a system that will allow you to run 64 bit Vista I definitely recommend that, so you can run Vegas 8.1, which is free if you own 8.0. So if you already own Vista 32 bit, you can go to this address to order the 64 bit DVD from Microsoft:

https://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/1033/ordermedia/default.mspx

They charge about $11 for the shipping and handling. Note that you will need to backup and then wipeout your entire main hard drive to install the 64 bit version, you cannot run the installer on top of the 32 bit version.

Whether you go for the 64 bit version or not, one thing I can recommend you is to arrange your Vegas layout to where you make the monitor window 960×540 (half of 1920×1080), then set the quality to Good (Half). Then set the RAM preview to the allowed maximum, and also switch the shortcuts for RAM preview and “Show Master”, since you will use RAM preview much more than the master track. So assign the B key to RAM preview and Shift+B to Show Master Track, that way you can select several seconds of RAM preview at a time, and then play back that selection in real time. This will save you a lot of time in editing.

I do recommend you strongly to use the 64 bit version, because Vegas 8.0c is a piece of junk. It’s full of bugs, and sometimes even after doing the RAM preview it will still not play smoothly and you have to re-render to RAM again. Besides, many times you will render your final edit and it will crash. The 64 bit version has a lot of bugs too, but at least it’s more stable.

[Terry Fein]

Thanks for the replies. I did find that if I dialed back the preview quality enough, I was able to play without skipping any frames. I had Vista on my machine (an HP), but I hated it so much that I installed XP. I did order more RAM this morning. Currently, it has only 3 gb of RAM.

Maybe I should post on a different topic, but would like to know for the Canon (or I suppose, any AVCHD camcorder) what the best settings are for rendering for: (i) computer playback; (ii) Blu-Ray; and (iii) online HD, such as Vimeo and YouTube HD. Thanks.