[Al Bergstein]

Well the lack of a video card standard seems to be lacking, which is what I was pointing out. It seems that the nature of this threaded discussion has flattened out some of my points, being that my power supply works just fine thanks, and can drive my 1GB RAM based extra video card, but that the video card brought different problems while curing others (like the BSOD).

So you guys are saying that if I have a VGA monitor I’ll be able to drive HDMI 1080p just fine with my ancient VGA display adapter? Come on, something’s missing in the translation.

Hey I think we’ve beaten this horse dead.There’s a bunch of assumptions being made about what I said, and perhaps that’s my fault. Bottom line, I’m not the only one making this ‘mistake’ about consumer vs. workstation situations, and the supposed build lists I see here aren’t that radically different from mine that I would have assumed that mine wouldn’t work.

Anyway, best of luck to you all. No hard feelings. If Apple sucks that bad, I’ll just sell the Mac I end up getting and come back again…

No hard feelings! It’s just software! It’s the movie that counts!

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

John, in looking at your specs, about the only thing that sticks out to me as a major difference is your power supply.

I don’t understand what you mean by saying it doesn’t use my video card, it’s driving video output in a variety of formats that are clearly labeled just underneath the window.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

In addition to all the excellent ideas, I would also invest in the extra drives. Hard drives, no matter how new, die, usually unexpectedly, and a second drive (both USB/Firewire) might be a great investment. I have a TimeMachine USB drive for my Macs, and a Firewire external for my Windows and Mac (Partitioned) Protools sound files and Windows based video files. I also have a second 500 GB USB drive for separating live video and audio, rendering etc, off the main OS drive. Your OS requires a lot of swap space and that’s disk activity that is competing with your video rendering etc. It’s worth getting those files off the main drive. Is there a FAQ already here for ideal drive configuration with Vegas?

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

Rob, I appreciate the thoughts, but the bottom line is, “where is the ‘reference platform’ for Sony Video Vegas on high def or even SD? The fact is that we who use (or want to use) their software have to guess at what works. Check out the ‘system requirements’ for it at https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/sysreq . There is no mention of a video card in that list! And that’s exactly the problem I’ve been facing. What works? What doesn’t? I solved the BSOD problem, but now my playback window stutters badly, and my resolution is crap in that window, no matter what setting I choose, and that’s with a state of the art 1GB RAM video card…sheesh! Why? Who knows?

That doesn’t happen to anywhere near the same degree on the Mac, where you have folks clearly stating the boundaries (that’s what I found with Protools). If you use anything else, you are not supported. Period. So that makes the choice clear. If you want to use that product, you set it up in a manner that the vendor can and will support

I don’t want to have to transcode every clip of AVCHD that I use on a Mac, but if that is the only price I pay for getting things to work, I’m willing to do that. Obviously others aren’t, that’s ok.

While it may sound like I am slamming V.V. let me be clear. It seems like a great piece of software. It was easy to pickup and start making movies with, I did extensive testing of different things with it, and *liked* what I saw. I would not be running out spending thousands more if I could *do what I want to do and stop messing around with the hardware*.

Sony, give us the reference platform, tell us which cards work and which don’t. You can clearly state that for SV stuff, you can get by with a simple machine, but that if you want something that works, buy one of these cards, a machine with a power supply at least 600 Watts, and if you use Windows 7, this much RAM, etc. You’ll sell more software.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

John, just for FAQ on this, what Mac model and setup are you doing this all on? I’m curious because I assume I have to go buy a MacPro (which I’m considering doing) to make the huge file sizes render in something under a year. I’m currently running a Mac Book Pro Intel 2.4 GHz core 2 duo. I’m under the impression I have to have a Mac Pro to handle AVCHD with any decent speed. Thoughts?

Thanks again for your doing this, I’ve just finished evaluating Vegas Video Pro 9.0c and had some real problems, more with Windows & graphics cards than Vegas, and assume I’ll end up on the Mac Pro with FCP after all this.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

Huh. I’m a bit confused. I understand what you are saying about the timecode issue, and hope that it’s not a correct assessment. But the Kona card is a capture card. Are you saying that you need to output the AVCHD through the camera out to the capture card, instead of simply taking the file structure off the card and into a Mac filestructure???? That seems odd.

So what I do understand you to be saying, is that my timecode based video from my HMC-150 will not maintain TC sync in Prores??? Would I (or you) be better off simply paying to go to Adobe instead????

Looking forward to the answer as well!

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

I have found a MacPro fully configured on Craigslist and chatted with the guy, agreed to buy it Sunday. But it’s not going to happen today. Today, since I was driving by my local PC store, I stopped in and bought, for $89, an MSI N9400GT Graphics Card (since they allow me to return this stuff occassionally). This card has 1GB DDR2 RAM on it, is built on the NVIDIA chipset, and seems to have cured the problem (!). The driver no longer bluescreens while copying a 5 GB folder structure.

I agree with John and others. The comparison of a Mac Pro to a consumer desktop is that they both are a tower design and have Quad cores. Obviously, if I wanted a real comparison, it’s between a workstation grade machine with 700W Power supply and dedicated video capture card. Funny thing, if I would have priced that to begin with, I would have probably never jumped onto Vegas.

I’ll continue to keep this desktop, if this really does cure today’s problem, but probably won’t buy Sony’s product.

My purpose in all this is/was to send Sony a message. I’m very seriously looking at these products, have the money to spend on either platform to do the business level functionality I need, and if they can’t clearly specific what a person wanting to do pro level work needs to do the job, they ought to expect customers, or prospects, to be upset. Sure the product *ran* on my Quad processor, and it ran pleasantly fast. At least I’ve done my bit to use the trial effectively. Time to try out Aldus’ product while I wait to get to town to meet the Mac guy.

You all have a great New Year’s celebration. Thanks for listening and the feedback.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

Well, I’ve had less problems with Apple, traditionally. However, some thoughts in thinking this through with all your help:

– HP Pavilion – Now I see that it has only a 300 Watt Power supply, so it will not work with any additional addon dedicated video cards from NVidia, for example. So any people looking to buy a machine for doing video work ought to be told that the power supplies are critical to getting into high end cards. While I have expansion slots, I can’t expand! Apple builds their desktop MacPros with the right power supplies, out of the box.

– Shared video memory: I would bet that this is where the problem is coming in. I was not really aware of shared video memory on this machine. Again, since the BSOD happens when I transfer a large (5GB) file from my SD card to the USB drive, (extremely reproduceable), I assume that the copy process is somehow stepping on video memory that Nvidia is supposedly “sharing”. So this is another gotcha. No one doing AVCHD should probably be using a shared memory video card. For a small price I can go out and buy one that has onboard video memory, and perhaps my problem will be solved. But I can buy a macpro and not have to worry.

-Oddly, transferring the video files to my local hard drive works! And transferring from the local drive to the external USB, works! So this again points to something in the way that NVIDIA uses shared video memory and the USB memory management… hmmm.

Anyway, I’m certainly too old and grey to be a ‘fanboy’ of Apple. I just want to produce video without constantly hassling this stuff!

Best of the new year to you all…It will be a few days before my Macpro comes in, and I’m not going to part with this HP just yet, as I sold my Dell laptop this morning to a friend. So you may see me asking questions around here about video cards.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks to all for not making me feel like some kind of traitor here. Overall the Vegas Video experience has been great, but the kind of constant crashing that seems to plague me on a daily basis is just too much. I just want to edit video and produce movies!

Perhaps Vegas needs to put out more stringent guidelines about acceptable video cards, since NVidia seems to be the root cause. This is not so odd, as ProTools does the same thing, and believe me, you need to follow the Protools guidelines! Another reason I went to the Mac was because of the problems I had getting Protools to work on Windows. It just worked on the Mac. I think we all would appreciate that kind of guidance.

My latest episodes were caused by simply copying my AVCHD files from the reader in the machine to my external 500GB USB drive. I can reproduce it at will. The BSOD calls out the NVidia driver as the problem. I upgraded it to the ‘latest’ November driver and boom, it still happens.

I understand that I will probably still have problems with the Mac. I’ve been around enough of all computer worlds to know that there is no perfect situation out there. But I have to say, I originally bought my Macbook Pro because I was trying to simply do home movie making and audio production on an XP machine in 2006, and there were so many problems, even simple ones like properly controlling the video intake from a High 8 camera due to firewire jitters. I bought the Mac in frustration and iMovie did the intake and camera control out of the box with no problems. I don’t have that problem these days with Sony, the intake of my latest family Christmas event on that old camera worked just fine.

So I’ll probably keep the HP around, since desktops are cheap, maybe upgrade the video card to something that supports Vegas in a real production way, but I’m going to go get a Mac and try out FCP and Adobe on it. Hopefully the transcoding won’t make my new HD look too bad. The quality is just amazing.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Al Bergstein]

Hmmm, as someone who has about used up my 30 day trial, and has been putting a lot of time in to make sure that Vegas is the way to go, I’m more than a little worried about this. I am planning to purchase Video Vegas next week, for use rendering out AVCHD from my Panasonic HMC150, I may have to reconsider whether or not to go this route. So far I’ve not encountered this, but instead of laying out $600 next week, maybe I’ll just bite the bullet and go buy a MacPro and live with FCP and Prores… I don’t want to get dozens of hours into my next project and find that I should have used a different NLE for my specific video camera format….

Or is this ONLY related to studio and not to Vegas Video Pro? One of the guys here said he hasn’t encountered it yet. I do intend to do 720p rather than interlaced, so maybe this isn’t an issue, yet.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit