[Dave Haynie]

If you can borrow a Digital8 camera, you can use it to bring Hi8 into your PC as DV, directly. Assuming, of course, you still have Firewire around.

Assuming no damage (tapes of this type are often old enough to be losing it a bit), you can get within shouting distance of DV, probably better than many consumer DV camcorders… VHS-C or plain Video8 typically held up the consumer low-end in those days.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Standin’ here, cooking my dinner over my combination fire pit and microwave oven, talking on my combination telegraph and cellphone, I can’t offhand think of such a beast. Not to mention that, while there are DVD recorders, I have not encountered a Blu-ray recorder other than the PC type, or the original non-standard, MPEG-2 only STBs from 9 years ago, Japan-only.

But seriously… no, there’s no Blu-ray/VHS Combo. Nearly every Blu-ray player will also play DVD and CD, though it’s not a required thing (they’re all different specifications). Most Blu-ray players will also play AVCHD DVDs from camcorders (and the same format on memory card, if they have a memory card reader).

I actually still have a semi-professional JVC SVHS deck, and another fairly good Panasonic SVHS deck, so along with a digitizer of some kind, I can bring VHS into my PC pretty easily (last time this was needed, I used my old Sony Digital8 camcorder, which did analog to DV encoding). If you need a consumer-quality VHS deck, there’s one at every yard sale, going rate around $10. And they do still exist in stores.

Yeah, sure, it’s a little more work to convert via PC. On the other hand, some of the evils of VHS can be solved with readily available image processing tools, before going to disc. And there’s really not much point in recording VHS to Blu-ray anyway… if you convert regular VHS to 352×480 MPEG-2, you’re doing it a kindness, and you can fit crazy amounts on a DVD.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

One thing I put in all of my PCs: a SATA drive rack:
https://www.amazon.com/Connectland-CL-HD-MROF-5-25-Inch-Mobile-3-5-Inch/dp/B0028Y4DAO/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1328262179&sr=8-6

It’s very easy, using one of these, to devote a 1-2GB HDD for each major project (even if some assets may be on other drives temporarily for faster rendering). Slap a label on the drive and, when you’re done, there’s the whole project archive for as long as you need it (easy to make a clone, too, if you’re not happy with one backup drive… I always have the finished materials on my 8TB RAID as well, no need to keep all that old stuff at one’s fingertips).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Nigel O'Neill] “So, since Vegas 8, we have lost native Cineform support (version 9) “

Vegas 9 didn’t bundle Cineform, but oddly enough, “native” Cineform support was added in Vegas 10. Which is ironically why Cineform has barely worked right since Vegas 9. Bundling saves you $100, that’s pretty much all it does. The native support was something very different.. they’re using a private Cineform API, some special mode of communications between Vegas and Cineform, to render video. Sony’s never really explained WHAT they’re doing with this that makes it superior in any way to plain old VfW rendering. In fact, after buying Vegas 10 and upgrading to Cineform 5.x, it was nearly six months before I could read Cineform files in Vegas 10. Vegas 9, using the plain old VfW interface, still worked just dandy with Cineform, even the new version.

So, “native” support seems highly overrated.

As for the GPU, I’m seeing a pretty reasonable acceleration in regular editing (Vegas 11 of course, along with some other components), along with the boost you get with specifically accelerated CODECs (AVC or MPEG-2). If you have the very latest Intel CPUs, you may see less of an improvement here. I evaluated both nVidia and AMD/ATi GPUs, and found the Radeon HD 6970 to be the faster for about $300 spent. Also adds support for that third monitor I’ve been considering…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Rendering doesn’t require a fast drive at all, unless you do lost of RAW output. The typical finished video output is 25Mb/s (AVC,HDV) to 150Mb/s (Cineform, DNxHD)… that’s a walk in the park for any old USB 2.0 drive, USB stick, etc.

The big hangup on writes will be disc thrashing… any time a drive seeks, it’s losing speed. So it is very smart to use a separate drive for output. Even the C: drive.. by the time you’re rendering on a well tuned system, the C: drive is just sitting there, not doing any work anymore (your code is all loaded, you have enough RAM to not need virtual memory, etc).

Input assets can definitely slow up a render… if you’re not hitting 95%-100% CPU (or very high rates of GPU and CPU together), you probably have some kind of input holdup. You’re only ever rendering one output file at a time (well, two in a few rare cases), but you can have dozens of input files in a single project. RAID 0 or 1 here can help, but spreading out your assets across multiple drives can help just as much. Per byte transferred, RAID is faster, but per seek, RAID is actually slower. It’s a useful tool, but no panacea.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

The main issue with AVC (including AVCHD) in current versions of Vegas (10 or 11) is simply the fact that AVC is complex to decode. So you need a fast PC to be happy with it. Which you do have.

You shouldn’t have a problem editing Canon 60D video, either. Canon’s doing AVC at 44Mb/s in a Quicktime wrapper, standard GH2 video is about 24Mb/s in an AVCHD standard MPEG-2 TS wrapper. But that’s only part of the story. Canon only uses I (independent) and P (predictive) frames, so it’s actually a bit easier for your PC to decode, though harder on the hard drive. You need Quicktime installed, I think, to read these fikes in Vegas. Regular AVCHD video uses I, P, and B (bidirectional) frames; B frames add to the coding efficiency, but also the cost of decode.

There are even better hacks to the GH2, including one that cranks the bitrate way up, and records in I-Frame only AVC. This is called AVC-Intra in the industry, and usually offered only by pro-market AVCCAM and similar camcorders. Much like DNxHD, this is even easier to decode onthe PC, more strain on your HDD, and generally higher quality. Santa brought me an Olympus E-PM1 to replace my dead Panasonic pocket camera. But moving into the m43 market (as an alternative and backup to my Canon HDSLRs), I have been looking a bit more at the GH2. My camcorders are Pannys already…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You have to save to a format that supports alpha channel. In theory, this may include some pro formats like Cineform or DNxHD, probably with the option to compresd the alpha, or leave it uncompressed… lossy compression on alpha is obviously a questionable thing.

But the common format is just uncompressed AVI. And when brought back in to Vegas, you need to change the clip properties to set the alpha compositing mode.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[andy abulafia] “Ah but If I tab over to SYSTEM – i get FORMAT as a choice.
And I can chose Video Elementary, MP4 or MPEG2 – M2TS.

The ONLY one I get the option for audio is M2TS which is as you mention above “MPEG2 is an option though not a particularly good one””

Remember what I said about the file format vs. the video format. The SYSTEM page is determining the file format. Blu-ray formats default to elementary, which is just video — you can’t store anything else in such a file. So that’s why no audio options are given.

MP4 and M2TS are two different file formats defined by the Motion Picture Experts Group. M2TS (MPEG-2 Transport Stream) came out at the same time as the MPEG-2 video format, but when I was speaking of MPEG-2 not being a great option, that was MPEG-2: The Video Format, not the file container. An MPEG-2 transport stream can contain all sorts of different things. It’s the standard stream/file format used for DVB and ATSC television transmissions, and on-disc for both AVCHD and Blu-ray disc formats. While any audio format can be used, typical system put either MPEG Layer 2 audio or SMPTE AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital) audio in the M2TS wrapper. AVCHD requires only AVC and AC-3 to be used.

The MP4 file format derives from Quicktime, but it’s an independent industry standard. It’s more flexibly structured than MPEG-2 TS, but that doesn’t matter much for simply video use. MP4 is more likely to be supported in small media devices like iPods and mobile phones (though many support both wrapper types), and it’s very supported as an online format. The typical video format in MP4 files these days is AVC (aka, MPEG-4 Part 10), though the simple MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG-4 Part 2) is also legal. And AAC audio is commonly used.

For playing on a media player like a Sony PS3 (since that’s the one I own), both formats work fine. This is probably true of many. Any Blu-ray playing media player is going to understand the AVCHD/Blu-ray file formats, if it allows playing simple files (most do) as well as full AVCHD/Blu-ray formats (which includes all sorts of extra data).

What’s you’re going to find is that most Blu-ray authoring program, like DVD Architect, want to see an elemental stream (eg, an .avc file as produced by Vegas). There’s a long history of this in such tools, largely because standards like DVD and Blu-ray build up from other pieces. When DVD came out, no one had support for building AC-3 multichannel audio into an MPEG file, since these came out of different standards bodies. So authoring tools pretty much like to keep their assets separate. When you select MPEG-2 TS output, you won’t be able to select Blu-ray AVC anymore.. but that doesn’t really matter. The AVC settings themselves, at least for a 16Mb/s video, are going to be the same whether you’re rendering to Blu-ray or rendering to AVCHD.

So if you’re after a single file that’ll play on some media players and still allow you to make Blu-ray (or AVCHD DVD) discs in the future, this is a decent choice, if the quality is high enough for you. You can drop one of these AVCHD m2ts files into a DVD Architect video project and no AVC re-rendering is needed. Of course, you’re limited to 16Mb/s (which is probably due to the restriction of AVCHD to not go over 18Mb/s on disc, since Blu-ray players only guarantee 2x DVD playback speed… you should be able to set higher bitrate for AVC on Blu-ray or flash memory).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If your main goal is to deliver a disc that’s very compatible with Blu-ray players, your choices are actual Blu-ray, or AVCHD format on a DVD. MPEG-2 is an option, though not a particularly good one, on Blu-ray; AVC is a better choice for Blu-ray in most cases, and the only option for AVCHD.

Blu-ray players do not universally support AVCHD, or even BD-R… yeah, they didn’t fix the problems from the DVD days. But AVCHD is very well supported, simply because it’s also a camcorder format. The disadvantage, technically, is that your AVC encoding must be at 18Mb/s or less for an AVCHD disc (it can go higher if you’re making AVCHD-compatible video for use on other media).

You can’t make a fully AVCHD compliant DVD using the Vegas/DVD Architect tools. The on-disc format is ever-so-slightly different than Blu-ray. DVDA will make a DVD-sized Blu-ray if you want, but that’s less compatible than a true AVCHD disc, even though they’re essentially the same thing.

There’s a freeware utility called multiAVCHD that can generate a compliant AVCHD disc layout. That’s what I would use to create the most compatible high-definition DVD that can be created. The MPEG2-TS streams for AVCHD or Blu-ray are editable in the same way that MPEG2-TS streams from most modern camcorders are editable (eg, works fine if you have a fast PC).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

It’s all about the standards.

“AVC” means Advanced Video Coding… this is also known as H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10. That’s just the video standard, without many bounds on it.

When you select an AVC render, you have a bunch of control over things, but also, some concern about compatibility. Video doesn’t just live by itself on a computer or most media players, it needs to be put in a “file wrapper” and probably multiplexed with audio. Classic computer versions of such wrappers are the Windows AVI file formats or Apple’s quicktime format. For AVC, the typical file wrappers are derived from the MPEG set of standards. These include the MPEG-2 Transport Stream (.ts, .m2t, and .m2ts files) and the MPEG-4 file wrapper (.mp4). You can select a number of these when you do an AVC render. Or you can simply render a “raw” AVC elemental stream, which doesn’t allow any audio to be multiplexed.

AVCHD is a standard that includes AVC, but other things as well. It was originally a simplified version of the Blu-ray standard, to enable DVD and BD-based camcorders, and today it’s of course the most popular camcorder format for consumers (there are a few pro versions as well, such as Panasonic’s AVCCAM). AVCHD specifies AVC bitrates (up to 18Mb/s for video on DVD/BD, up to 24Mb/s for flash-card based video, and up to 28Mb/s for 1080/60p video under the AVCHD 2.0 spec). It also specified MPEG-2 Transport Stream as the only file wrapper, and AC-3 audio as the only audio format. And the Blu-ray derived directory structure, things like that.

So your choice for rendering depends on what it’s for. Vegas has templates for “generic” AVC oriented toward various things (online, devices, Blu-ray, etc), as well as standards-compliant AVCHD options.

-Dave