[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, you’re still safe in may ways with ProTools. I’m sure some big studios smarted from the loss of AppleShare and the server stuff, but there are replacements. You never need as much horsepower for audio, and ProTools is Windows or Mac, so it’s up to the individual or studio to decide to switch or not.

I have plenty of audio friends who are ProTools based, and it seems to work very well. One of the big wins seems to be a higher level of attention to reliability (at least according to a few of them), a lesson Sony might learn someday. It’s not the end of the world in a mixing session, but for recording, you can’t have software crash. I used to run Vegas for recording, but it crapped out on me once, without any obvious notification. I also own Sonar, but it actually just crashes when I try to set up my 16-channel interface. So I’m doing field recording on Reaper. Nowhere near the features, but it’s bullet-proof.

I still wonder if Apple’s direction is fixed, or the loss of Jobs will once again embrace the pro market. One one hand, it’s a tiny part of an increasingly small part of Apple’s business. On the other hand, it’s a flagship market that may drive users and developers, and even help keep the Mac from turning into a big fat iPad.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

As always, you can install Vegas 11 without any effect on Vegas 10. I haven’t had trouble with Vegas 11 after the recent updates, but many have. The one risk with Vegas 11 is that, in usual Sony fashion, the project file format isn’t backward compatible. So if you do hit a bug in Vegas 11, there’s no easy backward route to Vegas 10.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I use Pluraleyes all the time, with 1-3 cameras and usually a secondard recorder or two. I sync everything up with PluralEyes, no problems. I usually have one field recorder as the “master”, having the whole event recorded, so it’s quite easy for Pluraleyes to find where everything else goes in relation to that master track.

Having additional tracks on the timeline does not slow Vegas down by any measurable amount, at least not until you do something with them (eg, compositing them, adding FX, etc). Unless you’re used to looking at your whole video project via RAM preview, which you just might given your huge buffer.

How much memory do you actually have in your system? Keep in mind that when you specify RAM preview, Vegas is allocating that memory whether you use it or not, and you can very easily starve your PC of resources needed for other things. Have you tried cutting that way, way back?

If you really like working in tiny chunks, you can create a master project, sync everything, then break it up into sub-projects. When you’re done with the individual edits, drop those sub-projects into a new project and use them just as clips, to create the final edit.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Most of the problems with DV or HDV capture are based on latency, not throughput. Given that you have DV25 captures that are flawless, your PC is certainly capable of capturing HDV (same bitrate) just as well.

So it’s probably the capture program. I assume you’ve been using Vegas Studio. I was never happy with Vegas Pro’s built-in capture. So, back in the HDV days (some years ago), I used a program called HDVSplit for capture. See here: https://strony.aster.pl/paviko/hdvsplit.htm

The other issue could be your OS… there are sometimes conflicts on 64-bit systems with 32-bit drivers, or software not tuned to properly use a 64-bit driver. Or lazy driver or CODEC ports (though the latter probably not an issue in this case). Anyway, worth a try.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Interesting… particularly since some Mac-based audio editors, most recently Bias Peak, have died out in the last year or two. Though with Apple moving away from the Pro market, I wonder about the timing.

And there’s still a change that the new guy, Tim Cook, might reverse that pretty clear direction set by Mr. Jobs. There are those rumors of a real Mac Pro update… it’ll be three years old soon. But given that Mac sales (even counting the Mac Pro I got for my daughter, going into the Broadcasting program at Montclair University in two weeks) were only about 15% of Apple’s business, it’s easy to see the Pro market falling off the edge. Not that they don’t have the cash to keep it going, if they want it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Vegas 10 comes bundled with essentially the same DVD Architect as Vegas 11… don’t recall if there was a “dot” version increment, but they’re basically the same. I have done dozens of Blu-ray projects in Vegas 10.

Keep in mind that Blu-ray doesn’t support 1080/60p. Your choice of 1080/60i, 1080/30p encoded as 1080/60i, or 720/60p.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[John Davidson] “. Hopefully when I chat with the official photographer she’ll also stay clear.”

Good luck.

I shot a wedding once that featured not one, not two, but THREE official photographers. Seems the Happy Couple had contracted a Pro, only to have their friends, also a professional husband and wife team, free up for the wedding as well. No matter where I pointed my cameras, a photographer would soon step up.

But I did arrange access to all of the stills, which did prove handy for fill-ins, so I managed to work around most of the intrusions. But from then on, I always ask to meet with THE ONE OFFICIAL pro, well in advance of the event.

[John Davidson] “I’m also bringing a squirt gun.”

A paintball gun full of pepper balls couldn’t have helped me that day….

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Jeff Schroeder] “This just in… FFMPEG supports now 10bit ProRes HQ de- & encoding (422)”

Wow! Kind of cool… FFMPEG does continue to be kind of amazing. In particular because once there’s support in FFMPEG, it propagates to pretty much every other FOSS video tool: VLC, the gstreamer system in Linux, etc.

Apple’s been pretty strategic with this… they make it easy and cheap for embedded video device folks to get ProRes support, which helped cement Apple as a first class video platform. And this allowed them effectively lock out any other OS from a full ProRes workflow (possible to read it on Windows, pretty much no options on Linux .. until this, of course).

I have not had the need to generate ProRes. But I’ll probably play around with this. I was “forced” to get a MacBook Pro for my daughter Kira, as she’s heading off to Montclair University’s Broadcasting, Television, and Digital Arts program in a couple of weeks. I had been up in their studio, and it’s all Final Cut Pro 7… I do kind of wonder how they’re dealing with that now — FCPX wouldn’t be a big drag for college students, but one of the big attractions of their program is that they get pros from NYC in for studio work, and you get a big discount on studio time if you hire students in your crew. So they have to maintain a pro-level interface to the outside world.

I definitely would have used this last year. Kira had a borrowed MacBook Pro (no idea on specs) from the High School for the last two years of her “Communications Academy” concentration. Last fall, I shot some video of a couple of trips to colleges, which she needed for a project. Since in theory, we had the same format (my Panasonic TM700 on the trip, the Panasonic SD9 I bought her for the High School program, both AVCHD), I schlepped files over to her Mac. It tried, but it could barely load them, much less edit. So I crunched them down to a lower resolution… same deal, no go. Finally, I did a little online research, and crunched them even more down to Apple’s iFrame format (that’s essentially qHD AVC-Intra)… that worked. Later, I found out that to get the video onto their Macs, rather than simply copy it over from the SD Card, they had been hooking her SD9, analog outs, to a Canon DV camcorder, then reading it all in as DV. Go figure!

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I always record at 96kHz/24-bit with my Zoom or my Tascam. There’s little reason not to… memory is cheap and plentiful. Sure, it’s not always necessary, but it doesn’t hurt.

And like many one-man production crews, I’m usually doing multiple things at once. If I’m shooting a video will all guns blazing, that means three camcorders (well, one is an HDSLR) and I’m running at least one field recorder, like the Zoom H4n, if not several, or the multi-track. I probably only need 16-bit, the end result is likely going to DVD + Blu-ray or online or CD or all of the above. But you can think of your 24-bit channel as a 16-bit channel with an extra 48dB of overhead, if you’re not really planning for a 24-bit output. If you can’t monitor audio the whole time, this can make a huge difference in the end result.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah… I pretty much do them, but usually by request (and for some reason, the last three were in California, despite my living in South Jersey) and a bit of prodding.

For video, which is usually what I do at weddings (though I did one stills gig last June), these days I would have three cameras going, at least one on a high tripod or boom.

As a videographer and photographer, it’s amazing how oblivious regular folks are to cameras. I’m in a music group up in Princeton; we meet every few months to play random music together. For one of these, last February, I decided to bring along a good camera, put it on a tall tripod, and not worry too much about it. It wasn’t a tiny setup. And yet, people walked by as if it were invisible. There was one dude standing in front of the camera for an entire set (they’re blocked in 10 and 15 minute chunks), completely unaware of the camera 2ft behind his balding head.

I think I’ll have to invent a sonar device for unmanned cameras, that detects people in the way and does annoying things until they more…

-Dave