[Brett Underberg-davis]

You should barely notice a difference, at least in the general way editing is done, especially once you are no longer starting from old project files — but I’ve never had a serious problem with old project files, besides finding the original elements when those projects were ported over to a new machine.

The main differences are no longer being limited on numbers of tracks, and access to many more powerful tools for color grading and other things that you can choose to learn by doing, or invest in classes and tutorials that may open up new areas for you. I think that depends on temperament (and available time) how useful you’ll find instructional and tutorial resources.

You’re mostly just losing a lot of the potentially annoying limitations that exist in the consumer versions, and getting some greater flex when it comes to rendering choices and the other features the Pro package has that consumer versions do not.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

He could also shoot in HD, but capture in SD, until such time as he can upgrade the machine to handle HD editing. I did that for almost a year, when media and machines to handle HD were outside my budget, and at a time when there were very few demands at all for HD output. That is if that camera will allow it. Even now I pretty much expect my next big project to be downrendered from 1080-60i HDV to DVD as has been everything I’ve done that’s not streaming 720p.

My Canon XLH1 did allow for either HD or SD capture from HDV source tapes, though it took some reading of the manuals to make the transition to HD capture once I did have a QuadCore machine and enough RAM to make rendering something other than 7+ hours of constant prayer.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I’ve also noticed that previews of HDV (I assume the same will be true of AVCHD) clips in, say, an explorer window are much laggier than the same clip imported into a project and previewed from the timeline. For HDV (on a year-old QuadCore system) there is significant loss of framerate and/or sharpness in preview either way. But it can get a little scary looking when previewed directly from an m2ts file captured from camera (Canon XLH1) to the hard drive.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Allen,

I use similar setting in Pro 8.0c (the 32-bit version). Are you having success rendering with these settings in 9.0? And if so, are you using the 32-bit build or the 64-bit build?

I ask only because I’m wondering (now that the upgrade is on order and should arrive in the next day or two) whether I should hold off on installing it, now that I’m reading scattered reports of rendering failures. I really want to check out the 64-bit version in particular, but I’m concerned about mucking up my workflow for a few weeks (or longer) this early after the release.

At the same time I don’t want to take a few scattered reports for more than they might be, as there are always a few failed installs, device conflicts and who knows what all else to contend with in any new upgrade.

Thanks for your kind attention.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

What format is the source and what format are you rendering to? Does the project appear correct in preview on Vegas now, or is it showing similar to the second screencap?

There are multiple places where aspect ratio can get messed up along the way, starting with the specs in the project properties (leftmost icon in the preview window) and chaining down through your choice of rendering format and resolution. If the target is a DVD, your project has to in effect create the letterboxing and deliver it (preferably) to an NTSC (or PAL) Widescreen format. Depending on your source video, though, you may want to use a set of project properties that is not an exact match to that final rendering format.

This is just one example, as it’s unclear what you’re ultimate goal is with this project, and you’ve said nothing about the source format.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I look forward to the pros responses on this but — take this with a grain of salt — I don’t think MPEG-TS (.m2ts) is really ideal as a format for playback. It’s designed more as a transitional format for editing and transfer between devices, such as between an HD cam and your editing station.

I was fairly active on the YouTube help forums when they first rolled out their 720p version of HD and this same double-speed playback showed up a lot when people uploaded essentially raw m2ts files, especially those shot at 60i or 50i (or were they progressive scans?) from newer AVCHD cameras.

I don’t know if that has any relevance to your situation here, but I do know it happened a lot, at least at first, though I think they eventually resolved the transcoding problems. But in their case the transcoding was to a format with a much, much more realistic bitrate, aimed at replay on the vast majority of even “high end” computers that generally do not have the pricey hardware decoder chipsets on board that make a BluRay player able to handle 20 or 40MBps bitrates on the fly.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

If you’re talking about DVD rendering, and since you bring up DVD Architect I have to assume that’s the case, you are locked into rendering to a DVD-compatible format, and that’s what the templates give you. I won’t embarrass myself by speculating about how things may work if you are working on a Blu-Ray disc, though, as I have yet to justify the expense and probably even my quad core machine is inadequate to render that level of detail in less than painful amounts of time.

I do find, however, that with a Canon XL H1, shooting in any of the available HDV 1080i formats, that I get best results by defining my project in full HDV quality before essentially downconverting to the 720×480 anamorphic format that DVD imposes on you. I would expect you would get similarly better results setting your project to match the specs shot by your camera, and rendering to find a close match on the DVD side. Most likely, you’d want to preserve the frame rate, but only a comparison of several candidate rendering approaches will determine conclusively what looks best to you.

There might be some disagreement on this (and I’d like to hear contrasting points of view) — but I know that the DVD I recently created for our local marching band was certainly appreciated, though anything would be after looking at band footage shot by 1-chip, SD cameras with blurry, mickey mouse lenses.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Thanks Rob, I hadn’t realized that.

I mostly avoid using it because I usually need more than three layout options for a crawl like this, if it’s at all complicated. Plus ones that don’t apply any change to the format globally over all like items. Much as that can be useful, it needs to be optional or more tweakable to be of much real use.

Then again, maybe I’ve never dug into it deeply enough?

Maybe these controls DO exist?

[Brett Underberg-davis]

It will speed up considerably the more memory and cores you can bring to the process. I’ve burned fully prepped single-layer DVDs with 90 mins or so of video out of Architect in as little as 6-10 mins on my Quad Core 2.6GHz, 4GB RAM system.

But rendering time is also highly variable. It just took me 1.5 hours to render a 2.5 min credit sequence, mostly because I was using a pretty stupid approach to do it.

But to keep it simple, more cores, more RAM or the ability to put together a render farm (I wish I had the chops to do that myself, and the hardware available to grow such a farm) all will do wonders for your rendering time when everything else is an apples to apples comparison.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I’m generally pretty happy with the results when I have to convert NTSC 29.97 or HDV 1080, 60i source to 24fps in Vegas… you may have to play around with things to find the best approach for your needs though, since there are hundreds if not thousands of possible ways to do it, from defining your project as 24fps and imposing that by brute force on your 29.97 source files or getting much more controlled and obsessive about it.

Bottom line, it can be done pretty much with as much control or as much speed and slop as you decide you need and have time for.

I’m speaking as a user of Pro 8.0c, fwiw. You might find more limitations in earlier versions or the more consumer-oriented sets that limit some features and support fewer codecs and so on.