vegas crash editing h264 files

[John Rofrano]

> John, does Sony MXF use intraframe compression? How do you feel about using it for editing?

Actually, no it uses interframe but it edits easily in Vegas and is also a good format to use for editing. Likewise HDV uses interframe and edits easily as well. I believe this is because the compression is much less in these formats because the bit-rate is much higher.

You just want to stay away from high compression / low bit-rate interframe formats.

~jr

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

[Brad Baxter]

Thanks Rodger, yes it seams you must pre-convert them,iv’e checked what other editors are using for conversion and mpeg streamclip by squared 5 is a (fast and free) good choice. Boy you would think since sony has h264 writing capabilitys it would read them as well. Thanks for the email back. brad

[Brad Baxter]

since converting files with neoscene or mpeg streamclip is the ony solution for editing h264 files in vegas, anybody have a preference or knows what the best file format to convert to would be? Also do you lose quality by doing so? sure is a ton of info for fcp users but not for vegas.

[Jean-pierre Taran]

[The very nature of H.264 is that it is highly compressed and uses interframe compression with a GOP of 15 frames. That means that when you park the timeline cursor on a frame, you have a 1 in 15 chance of hitting a full frame. The other 14 out of 15 are delta and predictive frames containing only partial information about the image. So not only does Vegas have to uncompress the current frame (which is highly compressed), it has to uncompress several frames before it to re-assemble the image from the deltas. This takes a lot of processing power]

Thank you John, this comment of yours was fundamental. It gave me the idea of placing blank images and pictures at regular intervals, typically every 1-3 min. That does solve the render problem for me with PAL format (1440×1080 only, though, but not 1920×1080). The trick allows the software to recover from accumulated errors and to resume the compilation from a clean base. That was using version Vegas 8.c on a dual core machine clocked at 2.7 GHz with 3 GB of RAM.

The drawback is that you break the stream of scenes, but with cross-dissolve and occasionally adding subtitles, nobody notices. I guess that will help a lot of people.

Then yesterday I made the leap over to Win7 X64 and discovered that Sony just released a downloadable version 8.1 that does render the 1440 H264 videos properly on X64 machines. That’s even better.