[David Shirey]

Yeah what John said. While I’ve never had 10 hours of XDCAM EX footage in one timeline, I have had about 6 and Vegas 9 had no problem with it. Now I’m on Vegas 10 and it seems okay with Canon 1080p mov’s, so I don’t even bother with Neoscene anymore, although I haven’t needed to put more than 30 minutes of that kind of footage in yet.

[David Shirey]

Are you saying you tested rendering a low res Flipvid camera file in movie maker, compared to rendering HD m2ts files in Sony Vegas? You are comparing very low quality apples to very CPU-intensive oranges.

At least so you’re comparing apples to apples, take that flipvid file and put it in Vegas to render out the same thing you did in movie maker. See how long that takes.

[David Shirey]

First to answer Tim’s questions, yes we do have 5.0.2 and the project file is like 30mb.

[Tim Kolb] “I use XDcam EX files (which are not MXF…they’re MPEG4 wrappers, only disc-based XDcam is MXF), and I never have four audio tracks come in…

That’s an odd bit of behavior.

How are you importing the clips into your project?”

We’re using Sony’s XDCAM Browser and exporting the footage to “MXF for NLEs” which is what I’d always use in Vegas. I think one of the editors decided to go with that over just dragging the BPAV folders in because then you don’t have to have all those thousands of little files and folder structures, and if you switch between pc and mac you can easily replace them with mov files of the same number.

[David Shirey]

Just to follow up with this issue, we submitted two sequences to AME today. One was a 2hr 45min to be compressed to h264 blu-ray, the other about an hour to mpeg2 for DVD. The first job sat there doing nothing for about 10 minutes then a yellow progress bar popped up and it started rendering. Took about 3hr 10min (a big step up from our old computers) then went right into rendering the second. So I hope the issue is fixed.

The only change the editor on that pc mentioned is that he disabled Avast antivirus and Zone Alarm firewall. Maybe that did the trick?

[David Shirey]

Everyone is giving you good advice but if you’re in a position where you know for certain that no other editor will ever need the raw files or the project is on a very strict budget, here’s my advice. Take the BPAV folders and back them up onto one hard drive. Then use the Sony XDCAM Browser, or whatever you use, to put the mov files on a second hard drive. That way if the first drive got destroyed, you’d still have everything you need to edit in FCP, or if the second got destroyed you’d have the original files and could easily remake the mov’s.

Personally we’ve been using EX-1’s since the month they came out (early 2008 I think?) and our workflow has always been back up the BPAV folders onto two drives, then when we’re ready to edit, import the footage onto the internal drive of whichever system is editing it. So far I’ve used nothing but Western Digital drives and never encountered a problem with the 20+ drives we’ve used, knock on wood.

[David Shirey]

Nice work, looks just like the system I built a couple months ago except with more ram, which I’ve been meaning to get. My only mistake was thinking “Oh I’ll just get onboard video because Vegas doesn’t make use of any GPU acceleration” Then a few weeks later they released the details of Vegas 10 and what do you know, GPU acceleration! Oh well, it’s still significantly faster than the e8400 core2duo I was coming from, and now another guy in our office uses that system for doing a lot of standard def and web content videos, so it all worked out.

[David Shirey]

Thanks for the concerns and yeah I have posted on the Premiere forum of this site and people are trying to help out. I know the audio conform changes audio to 32 bit floating-point, I just don’t see what benefit it is to me as the end user. Vegas doesn’t do it and Vegas works great, so what do I gain from going through this process?

Even with the conversion, you’re right in that it only happens one time and so what if it eats up disk space which is plentiful. Our main problem is that every time you open a project that may have 400 video clips, it takes about 10 minutes to open because it’s trying to load 2,000 files. You see the EX-1 MXF XDCAM files we use have one video and 4 audio tracks, even though 2 of those audio tracks aren’t used. In Vegas it would just never show those unused tracks, but Premiere shows then and makes conform audio files for each track, so one MXF file suddenly becomes 5 files the program needs to load. Coming from the infinite customization of Vegas, I just don’t like being told “That’s what the program does and you can’t change it to suit your needs” We are so spoiled!

As for AME, I’m sure there’s just something wrong with our installations and I hope we’re able to work it out. Sorry for continuing to hijack the thread, but on a related note I did finally get the Vegas 10 upgrade last night and boy those 1080p h264 files are a whole lot easier to deal with.

[David Shirey]

[Vince Becquiot] “With that amount of footage, you will likely need to look into buying a RAID array. We routinely work with 500+ clips and loading takes about 20 seconds.

I’m curious then why Vegas is able to load it in 20 seconds and Premiere takes 10 minutes. Is Premiere only capable of loading files fast with a RAID array while other NLE’s have found away around this, or would it be something we have configured wrong that’s preventing it from loading all those files fast? I assume Adobe would not have released a program with this kind of performance issue, and that it’s more likely something is wrong with our particular installations here on multiple computers, although I don’t know what at this point.

If you are seeing conforming, this may be due to the fact that you are using an external drive. Is the drive letter staying the same?”

The drive letter is always mapped to the same letter, and in fact it also happens if we use an internal drive. Just to be clear, as far as I know it isn’t conforming the audio every time we open the project, just the first time the clips are imported. What it’s doing is opening the project and then taking forever to load 2,000 files, which I’m just assuming are all the conform audio files since the project is about 400 clips with 4 tracks of audio and 5 x 400 = 2000. Could this not be the cast and those other 1600 files are something else?

Thanks for the tip about the audio importing though. I guess Vegas just always detected there was no content on the extra 2 channels and didn’t bother importing them.

[David Shirey]

[Peter Nestor] “wow this is interesting! what brings an entire apple
group to switch to premiere cs5?
Well we had some personnel changes and basically were left with only one intel Mac that was actually capable of editing HD. Budget is tight and I’m a PC guy so I offered to just build really fast PC’s that could utilize CS5’s Mercury Engine with Nvidia’s new cards. The performance gain both in the real time previewing and rendering projects to h264 for bluray were too good to pass up. I’d have loved to get the whole crew on Vegas like me, but Premiere is a lot easier transition coming from FCP in terms of interface, and Vegas 10 really dropped the ball on the preview window not being GPU accelerated.

really? what problems and are they all sorry they switched?”

Where do I start? Premiere forces every audio track to render to “conform audio files” even if all the audio is already in the proper format for the timeline and your PC is perfectly capable of playing it in real-time. This is a worthless option that cannot be turned off and just eats up disk space. This causes a lot more files to have to load each time you open a project, which can take a very long time if you’re dealing with projects that have 400 video clips in them, such as a 2 hour wedding video.

Also the Adobe Media Encoder, while I really envy the idea of it and also Compressor for FCP, since us Vegas folks don’t really have anything similar, ours is pretty useless in the sense that it’ll render out the first project you send it then immediately hang and not continue on to the others. Obviously this problem is unique to our systems because Adobe would never release a program with a bug that obvious if it affected everyone. So we’ve been rendering out directly from Premiere just like I do with Vegas, and already it’s rendered a DVD + AC3 where despite the times matching up, the audio lags behind the video once you burn it to DVD in encore.

So, to answer your question, they are kind of sorry they switched, but buying everyone new $3,000 macs was never an option, so it’s certainly better than what they had. Me, I’m happy to be the lone Vegas editor even if I have to pay for the software myself. In the end it pays to be different.

[David Shirey]

As Dave Haynie suggested, you want to make sure Vegas is set to “Best” under the project settings. This would definitely account for why Vegas is rendering much quicker.

I’m in the same boat in the sense that I use Vegas but everyone else in my office has switched from FCP to Premiere, so I’m trying to learn Premiere too and we’re just having nothing but problems with it. At first I was really disappointed that Vegas 10 didn’t include some of the technical advances Adobe has made with CS5, but after actually using it I’m pretty happy with Vegas after all.