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Sony Vegas performance with AVCHD
Hi,
I’m a beginner at video editing. So far, I’ve tried two programs – Premiere CS3 (for DV material) and FCP (for AVCHD material from my new camcorder).
While my Macbook Pro 2.6GHz w/2GB RAM has worked with DV material pretty smoothly, the HD material is a whole different story.
For starters, the aged (late-2007) Macbook Pro struggles to even play the 15mbps .mts files. FCP’s workflow is to convert AVCHD files to Apple ProRes but this presents a new set of performance problems:
1) the ProRes files’ bitrate is too much for the notebook hard drive,
2) the ProRes files take up too much storage,
3) even when I use ProRes files from a fast external HDD, FCP is still “struggling” at times.I know a workstation would be a much better fit, but my “workflow” for the next few months would include a lot of travelling and editing on-the-go (a “travel video-blog”), so I really appreciate the mobility.
… and then, I’ve heard Sony Vegas can handle AVCHD natively (no transcoding). Also, I’ve heard Vegas being warmly recommended for its other merits. Would Vegas + a new notebook (not necessarily Apple) with H.264-accelerated graphics work for video editing on-the-go?
Thanks for your input 🙂
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2 Replies
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You don’t need the accelerated graphics. But the MacBook Pro with Bootcamp works GREAT with Vegas. I’m using one daily.
Vegas will play back AVCHD files at full speed with no issues. Full resolution is dependent on the system. My old MBP plays files at Good/Full without issue. I often edit straight off the card.Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASSTCertified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor -
Apple is, strangely, a bit behind on several aspects of the HD process. I’m not sure why — they control the OS (including any GPU acceleration APIs), they were an early adopter of AVC, etc. I guess they’re all working hard to get Blu-Ray support in there.. something we got two years ago in Vegas.
I get fullscreen, full quality playback with Vegas Pro 9 on AVCHD and similar AVC files on my desktop. It’s a Q9550 CPU, so Quad Core Intel Core2 at 2.83MHz. Multi-core does improve the performance of Vegas… not on everything, but in general. It also doesn’t hurt to have lots of memory and 64-bit, too (64-bit offers FPU advantages, more registers).
You don’t need a GPU.. Vegas isn’t using to accelerate things. That’s kind of sad, in a way. I can play back a 1080/60p file at full frame rate under Windows 7, just using Microsoft’s CODEC, and only take about 12% of CPU… this because it’s using DXVA 2.0 acceleration. Other programs are starting to use GPU acceleration for video rendering, also an issue. Hopefully, Vegas moves in this direction — that would ensure my upgrade on Day One. Not that they have all THAT much to worry about.
The thing is, yeah, AVCHD editing, particularly at normal 1080/60i, 30p, or 24p resolutions works. But it’s rare you’re just going to drop in a single track and do a few cuts. Add two cameras, and now you have color correction, cross fades, etc. at the minimum. Before you know it, what used to be acceptable is now too slow, and I’m rendering out to Cineform or something.
That’s going to happen anyway, once you get complex enough… in any NLE. I had a project last summer with two sets of about 20 layers, including animations, greenscreen, and other crazy bits. It was a three-something minute music video, and took about three hours to fully render. The reason it was two separate projects was that, with all that work, Vegas still gets slow. If tapping into the 118 processors on my GPU in addition to the four in the CPU could help, that would be very amazing.
Yeah, it’s different kinds of processing. But for some aspects of video rendering, the GPU is simply better at it.
-Dave
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