[Eric Frazer]

I’m posting on this very old thread because there are a great many people on this thread that are terribly ill informed and feel free to give very bad info.

First: I work at Microsoft, in the video editing internals department. I know what I’m talking about. I worked directly with the Sony Vegas team. Again, I know what I’m talking about.

Sony Video Vegas used to be Sonic Foundry’s Vegas. The whole team got bought out by another company. The people writing the video file importer and exporters ended up not supporting them any longer. Vegas Studio is using an abortion of an effort to get video into and out of the computer. There is very little support left internally at the company to revise their importer code. As it evidenced by the fact that .MOV files are extremely troublesome in Vegas, some 10 years later, with no easy fix in site. Quicktime has even been discontinued, and still Sony Vegas can’t get a different block of importer code getting the files into Vegas. Folks, it’s not going to change.

To summarize what you need to do, here you go:
1. Buy a professional video editing software package. Vegas Studio, while fast & fun & easy, ain’t it.
2. Buy a software video editing package that still has support and developers that stand behind it. (Vegas ain’t it)
3. Convert your videos to some other format, using any number of free or low-cost converters. Yes, you’ll have to live with the fact you’ll incur a “generation loss” on the video. Too bad, but this is the way it goes.

be aware, there is a different between using Vegas’ 32 and 64 bit editions when it comes to decoders and encoders you’ve installed on your system. Both VFW and DirectShow, two formats that provide encoding and decoding for video programs, have both 32 and 64 bit plugins and they’re both different from each other. You could install a 32 bit decompression coded that won’t do you any good in 64 bit Vegas.

The trouble is, I haven’t figured out exactly how Vegas imports files, through what internal mechanism and what Windows APIs (internal) they use, if any. There’s a bunch of stuff behind .MOV files, .MP4 files, etc, that a lot of people don’t understand…

First off, MOV and MP4 and AVI are all “container formats”, more technically, they’re all “sort of” RIFF formats, they all contain chunk identifiers and chunk offsets, and basically store stuff inside in chunks. Any one of these container formats can contain ANY type of compressed video and audio chunks. A MOV file could contain video compressed to one of several compression formats: IV1, MP4, WMV, MP2, m2V, uncompressed, DIVX, etc. Likewise, an AVI file could contain the same thing. An MP4 could contain them too, but it’s unlikely. Also, MP4, MOV, and AVI files can contain various flavors of audio: AAC, MP3, WAV, etc.

Further making this a bit complicated is that even for MP4 or H264 video compression formats (which could be contained by .MOV, .MP4, or. AVI, or even within a .WMV file!) there are different flavors!

Now, if Sony keys off .MOV and only uses a quicktime reader when it sees .MOV then you’ll NEED to install Quicktime, even though it’s unsupported. Plus, whatever quicktime runtime you download (32 bit vs 64 bit), that will enable import in one version of Vegas or another (32 bit vs 64 bit), unless of course the 64 bit version of quicktime installs the 32 bit version as well, which come to think of it, is likely.

If Sony first tries apple-specific Quicktime to import .MOV files, then falls back to “whatever else” is on the system, then it will probably try to load a DirectShow or VFW plugin to try and decode the file. This will boil down to whatever you have installed on your system, and if you’re configured it right. Some people try ffshow-tryouts (32 or 64 bit flavors), and there are some other codec packs out there as well. probably a lot of them are virus-ridden too.

There are ways to move the compressed data from a .MOV to a .MP4 file and to an .AVI file without recompressing. When you do this, it will undoubtedly go through a different import path in Vegas, which has a lot of permutations to it. I’m trying to figure that out now. I refused to install an unsupported runtime (Quicktime) on my system until it becomes absolutely necessary. I used to be a big fan of Sony Vegas, but now that a lot of video imports as black or not at all, and it’s not getting fixed, I’m going to start looking around for a video editing package whose company stands behind it and does more than simply maintain it.

Sony (Sonic Foundry) – if you know who is writing this, (Eric), you know how to get in touch with me… 🙂