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  • VEGAS Pro

    Vegas Pro 8c rendering h264 footage (Kodak zi6)

    Posted by Bruce Miller on January 11, 2010 at 5:38 pm

    I have had a lot of grief attempting to edit/render h264 mov files shot with a Kodak Zi6 pocket camera in 720p 30fps.

    I changed the mov extension to mp4 which allowed the audio to be imported and am just barely able to edit without choking the PC.

    Problem: The h264 format appears to be too demanding for rendering with my 3 gig, quad core XP machine. I could not get any rendering format to work without freezing or program crashes.

    I also tried Vegas Pro 9 on a Win 7 machine, 3 gigs. Seems that memory is still the issue.

    Final solution was to down-convert the footage to Standard definition and the rendering proceeded.

    Question: Is there a recommended workflow for pre-converting this type of footage to a Vegas-friendly HD format? I looked at Cineform, but it is for mts files (AVHCD) only.

    How is it that a cell phone sized camera can handle this format, but a Quad core machine simply chokes?

    Thanks for any advice.
    Bruce M.

    Bruce Miller replied 16 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies

  • John Rofrano

    January 11, 2010 at 8:33 pm

    > Is there a recommended workflow for pre-converting this type of footage to a Vegas-friendly HD format? I looked at Cineform, but it is for mts files (AVHCD) only.

    You could use a tool like Avidemux to convert them to Lagarith or Huffyuv. You might even be able to do this with Quicktime Pro.

    > How is it that a cell phone sized camera can handle this format, but a Quad core machine simply chokes?

    Hardware based codecs will always be faster than software based codecs.

    ~jr

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

  • Bruce Miller

    January 12, 2010 at 4:08 pm

    Thanks John,

    I couldn’t get Avidemux to work with my h.264 files, but was able to use Super to create a full resolution .TS mpeg file for editing, then rendered down to a DVD format.

    This seems to be a reasonable workflow/output for using the Kodak camera with Vegas on my machine. I tried rendering a HD wmv file for PC playback, but it stuttered.

    If I wasn’t so enamored with the shirt-pocket size of the camera, I would advise people to use a different pocket camera format if they plan to edit it with Vegas. I think AVHCD might be a better choice.

    Thanks again,

    Bruce

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