Why does Sony Vegas compatability suck so bad?

[Bill Mash]

I used this trick once, ahhhh the fond memory.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

[Al Bergstein]

Cameron, John is right. You seem to be confusing the recording formats to the CODECs to play these formats and with the ability to edit them. AVCHD, HDV and XDCAM are not consumer playback codecs. I needed to spend time reading up on these various *formats* and what they are meant to do a while back and I think you should too. It’s all there on Wikipedia.

I use both FCP and Vegas due to my needs. Perhaps Cameron, you would be better off picking the camera to match the requirements of your editor. If you love FCP then go buy a camera that shoots MOV only, (JVC also does this on their mid range HM700UXT cameras for example). It’s why a good friend of mine chose JVC. I chose the lower cost but very useable Panasonic HMC150 shooting in AVCHD.

If you like Vegas then create a workflow around it. That’s what I do. It has been handling my AVCHD content, which is not great for editing, just fine, and sometimes when it’s important I transcode. When I edit with FCP, I *always* have to transcode. I have also had to buy numerous multiterrabyte hard drives for this stupid reason. Neoscene gives you a great and easy way to transcode in Vegas, in batch, and I do it often. It’s much easier and faster than transcoding in FCP. But there are reasons for doing it that way in FCP, especially if you are working in teams or in a production studio on a big ticket production where you are tracking a vast amount of data.

There are problems with all editors. I hate doing something simple like a simple cross dissolve in FCP. It’s brain dead simple with Vegas. *it saves me a lot of time and agravation as I am not a patient person(G)*

So look at your choices and your needs. If you want to do really complex graphics oriented work, it seems like the mobs are going to Adobe. If you need to work in teams with editors that are anywhere and everywhere, it seems that FCP has the largest installed base. If you just want to get things done fast and easy, shoot documentaries, and other “simple” stuff on lower cost computers and cameras from a vast array of manufacturors, then it seems like Vegas is the choice. But don’t go choose the wrong format and then blame the editor.

Good luck and good shooting!

Alf

[Davd Keator]

VLC: the open source player simply put the k-lite codec pack into it’s library. Mostly hacked codecs..free so who cares…

My question is why would you buy QuickTime pro? I’ve always just downloaded the free one with I-tunes….my crapy phone likes it too.
Does qtpro support more cores, higher quality???
I’ve noticed media coder makes mov’s faster way faster than Vegas does…
Thanx

[John Rofrano]

[Davd Keator] “VLC: the open source player simply put the k-lite codec pack into it’s library. Mostly hacked codecs..free so who cares…”

Putting the K-Lite codec-pak on your editing computer is a good way to make everything stop working. It has been documented that K-Lite messes up the codecs in Vegas. Don’t use it!

[Davd Keator] “My question is why would you buy QuickTime pro?”

Quicktime Pro allows me to render h.264 MOV files and Vegas Pro does not. Quicktime Pro also allows me to trim MOV files and save them without re-rendering and Vegas cannot. Quicktime Pro also allows me to save any movie that I can display in the Quicktime player while the free version will play it but not save it (yes I know in some cases you can copy the file out of your browser’s cache but just using file | save is so much easier).

~jr

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

[Davd Keator]

RJ,

Yea, I discovered K-lite codec destruction years ago… VLC codecs are internal and does not affect Vegas or any other system in the computer…

I just use: Free QT download, FFDshow, AC3 filter. This allows me to view and edit everything I have run into from my crazy clients..

I’m still confused on QT-Pro…

Am I not rendering h.264 mov with in Vegas? I have the option to render mov’s

That would make sence since, Adobe media encoder renders faster and looks a hair beter…

[John Rofrano]

[Davd Keator] “Am I not rendering h.264 mov with in Vegas? I have the option to render mov’s”

Nope. h.264 is not one of the codecs listed under Quicktime MOV. You would need to use Sony AVC or MainConcept AVC to render h.264 in Vegas but those are not Quicktime formats. You need to use Quicktime Pro to render h.264 MOV files.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

Consumer cameras, usually webcams (Flip clones) and digital still cameras are pretty much the only camcorders using Quicktime.

This is a historical thing. Yeah, some do use the Quicktime wrapper for MPEG-4 AVC, which is kind of silly given the better supported formats for this (AVC in an MPEG-2 Transport Stream wrapper, as AVCHD and AVCCAM use, AVC in an actual MPEG-4 wrapper, maybe even AVC in an MTS wrapper at some point).

The original use of Quicktime was for Motion JPEG, which was the video format of choice for digital still cameras until recently. There was never a single standard for MJPEG under Video for Windows… one device’s MJPEG support might set things slightly different than another’s. Quicktime, on the other hand, established two cross device standards for MJPEG pretty early in its life. Digital still cameras already had JPEG engines, so this was a natural goal. It’s only been in the last year or so that digital still cameras have adopted AVC or “AVC Lite” as Panasonic calls theirs (720/30p only, lower complexity profile lower complexity audio than you’ll find on a real AVC camcorder). It probably made sense for some companies to keep the Quicktime wrapper, just because they already knew all of the support questions.

It’s only fairly recently, as well, that you could expect any video editor to accept a wide variety of video formats for native editing, and Vegas was one of the first to do this. But some formats are not well designed. DivX and Xvid are stuffing what’s essentially MPEG-4 Part 2 (also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile… a less aggressive CODEC than AVC) into an AVI wrapper, where it really doesn’t belong. That’s fine for playback on consumer gear (DivX is optimized for support of consumer devices: PMPs, “feature” DVD players, etc), but a pretty bad idea as an editing format.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The MP4 file wrapper was based on Quicktime, that’s why this works. Sometimes.

However, unless the NLE you’re using is using the Quicktime media framework to process MP4 files, there’s a pretty good chance this fails for anything but AVC video. There’s certainly no expectation that a normal MP4 file would contain MJPEG, Sorensen, or other old Apple-world CODECs.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

VLC supports a crazy number of formats specifically because that’s its whole purpose. It contains many of the video CODECs itself, which is fine for an open source player tool (poorly optimized, but flexible), but not something a professional tool really should do, particularly for formats the manufacturer isn’t directly interested in supporting. That’s what media frameworks like Video for Windows, Quicktime, and DirectShow are for. Video professionals know this, and know how to deal with the rare incompatible format they encounter (as many have mentioned, DivX/XviD are among the least likely formats any Vegas user would need to edit). In a professional environment, you want the latest CODEC for anything special (Dirac, DNxHD, Cineform, things like that) and you don’t want to have to wait for an application revision to get it.

And even VLC is tapping quite a few of the open source community’s video tools to get all of these CODECs. It uses ffMPEG for quite a bit of this stuff. That’s also not a professional level tool, which is why Sony isn’t including it with Vegas. If you have a video file from a camcorder that Vegas can’t edit (assuming you’ve installed any support CODECs provided by the camera manufacturer), you MAY have a legit gripe with Sony. But the need to edit the #1 video format used for video piracy (not to suggest that’s the ONLY use for DivX…), no, that’s not even on the list of intended Vegas features. If this was important to you, one would THINK you would have researched this before plunking down $500.

And if you have a format that plays in VLC, you can at the least get VLC to transcode it for you… that’s built-in on VLC.

-Dave