Vegas cant edit HDV 720p?

[Ecoholic]

try unpluging all your usb devices…also try holding down shift as you boot into vegas from windows…

[Chris Young]

Using Connect HD with Vegas or Vegas on its own is like chalk and cheese. With the specs on the box you have you should be able to convert on the fly as you digitize with the Connnect capture utility. On slower boxes it’s best to capture the m2t files and then convert after they are in. Once you have the Connect files on the timeline it’s much more like editing with native DV files, way faster. I’ve found the quality to be very good. When finished render back to whatever you want for output.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Joe Ferralli]

I just tried the Connect HD trial and everything works flawlessly. I still can’t figure out why the m2t files lag so badly. Thanks for the replies.
joe

[Richard Bartlett]

They lag badly as the long GOP (temporal compression) frames are farmed/piped out for calculation by the codec and then drawn back through this software conduit onto your display or rendered file as if they were natively uncompressed RGBA 8bit sources. This approach uses something approaching or is actually a windows
based resource to achieve this – not sure which of these statements is the most accurate.

I’ve found HDV sources (720p .TRP / .M2T) that I’ve downloaded from early JVC HDV camcorders to play reasonably well on Vegas4 onwards. Scrubbing has been poor, cross hairs on the timecode you want has been delayed, but I’ve found them sufferable. My DI format has been PICVideo MJPEG because I am a cheap-skate and already own a license for it (~$20) that then allows scrubbing and fairly humble or modest CPU/RAM/HardDisk-I/O performance. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to substitute the .M2T files at the end of the work (in proxy fashion) for the final render, if you feel you don’t want the extra generation loss.

It seems that Vegas7 is going to be hand tuned to decode/preview on the fly, perhaps using the same codec but with different optimized interfacing to it. Anyway, the project render times maybe no better, but scrubbing and NLE fluidity is said to be enhanced to the same level you have elsewhere (e.g. Mac FCP).

Whether Vegas7 will be native for MPEG-2 like 6 is for DV and uncompressed – and by that I mean, whether like FCP it has the approach of passing through HDV untouched unless you tough it – who can say?

One day an NLE will allow a macroblock as the smallest unit to assess as to whether it can pass untouched, if it is effectively (within a tolerance %) untouched. It seems an utter shame do have generation loss in digital formats when you have no intention of applying such recompression processing. I suppose it makes the programmers life easier to decomp/recomp everything and a decomp is a given when you want a preview, but my values still stand. Digital editing shouldn’t cause a generation loss unless you are adding something that simply has to apply a recomp.

SmartGOP handling was a copyrighted technology by way of patents held by Pinnacle (now Avid) – however unless the wording of their copyright was different to the DC2000/DC2000DV implementation – it was regarded as little more than a marketing spin and was poor in it’s execution. However, it is possible that some thought has been given to these patents when we have been made to wait to be able to edit anything much more than I-frame-only formats. I’m sure the algorithm in the patent could be avoided by coming at the problem from a different angle. There are numerous ways to skin cats.

All this will come out in the wash when Vegas7 arrives.