Transcoding 7D Video for Vegas 9.0 PC

[Jonathan Ziegler]

Hi there, I always think of transcoding as up-rezzing. I’m not necessarily improving my footage, but I’m getting the advantages of a more versatile format. The 7D basically shoots using h.264 in an MPEG 4 wrapper, BUT this is not a good editing or rendering format whereas Apple’s ProRes is. Also, because it’s MPEG, it’s lossy. You want out of a lossy format during editing. The people I know who use Vegas prefer to transcode to AVI (lossless) – you can use MPEG Streamclip for this (https://www.squared5.com/). I use it on my Mac for a quick convert to ProRes.

Forgot one thing: ProRes uses a 422 color space while the files from the 7D are 420. This basically means you are getting some extra color potential in a broader format. It doesn’t add color, but it broadens your range in the edit.

I’m going through a bunch of 7D footage from this weekend right now – a zombie short comedy we’ve been working on. I’m always so completely in love with the footage from the 7D. It’s just so darn pretty! 😉

Jonathan Ziegler
https://www.electrictiger.com/
520-360-8293

[Joseph Wu]

Which codec should i use in streamclip?

[Lance Bachelder]

If you’re editing the 7D footage right from the camera in Vegas and you’re happy with the performance then there is really no need to transcode. You’ll be doing that anyway when you complete your show and render to a finished product.

If you’d like to transcode to a great codec for editing I would recommend buying Neoscene from Cineform. Neoscene will properly transcode your 7D footage into the best available codec I’ve seen for cutting on the PC. Works in Vegas and Premiere Pro equally well and is far better than ProRES or any other compressed codec. They also have a OSX version of Neoscene that works well.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California

[Neil Abeynayake]

Joseph,

You do NOT have to transcode 7D captures to edit using Sony Vegas app. Just make sure that you have installed the latest Apple QuickTime codec installed in your PC. Most desired (or popular) Windows editing programs will take whatever given to them (i.e. if you have installed the proper codec) and compile an edit without much of a hassle.

You may already know this. If you do not have a dedicated editing card such as Grass Valley (or Canopus) Storm, HD Spark, Edius, Matrox, Avid etc., etc, you have to software render all effects, graphics and titles etc. Often it is frustrating to watch the video stream stuttering while in timeline playback mode.

And if you do not own or have access to an above mentioned dedicated editing hardware, here is a tip many tend to neglect.

If possible, move alternate clips to two separate hard drives in your computer. This helps when you playback the entire timeline and things will go much smoother.

“Always remember that you’re unique. Just like everyone else”.

Confucius

[Lance Bachelder]

Joseph you do not need to use an external transcoder if you are cutting with Vegas. Like I said earlier and Neil wrote- you can use the the raw Quicktimes out of the Canon in Vegas. Vegas however is not real Quicktime friendly – you’re never going to get consistent true realtime playback, even off a fast RAID array.

If you must convert there is a easy way to batch clips in Vegas to a Sony friendly codec. If you place each raw clip on a single timeline end to end in Vegas, double-clicking them and adding a REGION around each clip as you add them (just press R key) you can then use the Batch function in the scripting menu to encode the regions into any folder using any codec you desire (or have loaded on your system). I would suggest XDCAM 35 or 50 Mbps at full quality flavors as they run in native real-time in Vegas with no issues. Sounds confusing at first but it’s very easy and allows you to encode a bunch of selects at once.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California

[Norman Pogson]

I use Cineform Neoscene for all my Canon 7D clips and edit in Sony Vegas, the file gets converted to a 4.2.2 .avi

If you buy from Videoguys NY you get it for $90 instead of $130

Why are you not using the full resolution of the camera for video? I shoot 1080p all the time and treat the footage as an archival original, then my output is adjusted as necessary.

My Canon 7D Blog

[Joseph Wu]

This is exactly what I’m doing now. I have couple WD blacks on my PC, and I split off the files accordingly.

The performance I can bear with as my PC is a Corei7 with 12 gigs of ram running 64BIT.

The reason I asked the above question is, for some reason I got the idea from other posts, saying transcoding will give better real-time editing performance and improve quality (Prores 422), but if thats not the case on Windows based system, then i guess i should be fine.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[Lance Bachelder]

Thanks for mentioning the Videoguys tip – that’s where I bought Neoscene for my Mac. Arey ou using V9 on Windows 7? 64 bit version?

Lance Bachelder
Southern California

[Norman Pogson]

Hi Lance,

I’m on vista with Neoscene 64bit with vegas 8, I actually found a fault on Neoscene, which when they worked out what was causing it(their tech service is excellent), they created a new addition on version 8.

The problem was if you turned the sound off on the 7D, Neo wouldn’t process the file, so they did write a new version which isn’t affected by turning the sound off.

My Canon 7D Blog

[Lance Bachelder]

Thanks!

Lance Bachelder
Southern California