John Rofrano
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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DVD Architect Pro is not available without purchasing Vegas Pro 8.0 so I don’t understand how you cannot have Vegas and yet have a copy of DVD Architect Pro?
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Try increasing the bit rate and see if it lessens the effect. You might also try a crossfade transition so that the cut the the title to the video isn’t so abrupt.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I would use Vegas to create the menu. You can import the background as an image and then use Track Motion to position the three looping videos. Render the whole thing out to MPEG2 and drop it in DVD Architect as the menu background.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> There is the \\AVCHD\\BDMV\\STREAM path that has *.MTS files. I can copy these over manually. Are these files all I need?
As John said, the files under the BDMV stream folder are the ones you want. Those are the original AVCHD files that were recorded by the camera.
> Am I missing anything from not being able to Import AVCHD Camcorder?
I don’t think so. The import option is primarily to save you the trouble of knowing where to look. There should be no difference in the imported files.
It is possible that if the hard drive is formatted as FAT32 that some of the files have been split into shorter lengths because of the 2GB FAT32 file size limit and import would stitch them back together on your PC but I’m not sure if your camera has that problem.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Yes, “when it can” is more accurate since you need to have a task that can be distributed across multiple threads or processes in order to take advantage of multiple cores. Not all tasks can be.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Vegas 6 is not as optimized to play back HDV like Vegas 7 and Vegas Pro 8 is. This could be the reason for the choppy playback. I know when I went from Vegas 6 to Vegas 7 the performance boost for HDV was significant. Now with Vegas Pro 8 it’s even better. Vegas 6 came with the CineForm codec so that you could render your HDV MPEG-2 as CineForm intermediaries which playback a little smoother. You might want to try that.
Also those specs are not way over the system requirements. The memory requirement is 1GB so 1.25 is slightly over. Most people doing HDV work have 2GB as a minimum. I work with 4GB. Also a P4 single core is old by today’s standards. Most newer computers come with QuadCores these days so a DualCore is kind of minimum for HDV even though the Sony site doesn’t say it. But I believe the main reason you are having problems is because Vegas 6 just as isn’t optimized for native HDV playback like Vegas 7 or even Vegas Pro 8.
We (VASST) have a Vegas script plug-in called GearShift for people like your friend. It will automatically render the HDV to DV Widescreen proxies or CineForm intermediaries for editing and then swap them back to HDV for final render. It was specifically designed for people with older computers like your friend and may be just what he needs.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I’m not familiar with the Sony HDR-SR11 but I do know that it records AVCHD onto a hard drive or memory stick. Does your computer recognize the camera when you connect it? I assume it should just show up as a USB hard drive? Can’t you just drag and drop the files from the camera onto your hard drive and then edit them in Vegas Movie Studio from your computer hard drive? Like I said, I’m not familiar with this camera so maybe this is not possible or desirable.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Usually when you get audio with no video it’s becasue your computer doesn’t have the Video codec needed to display the video. A codec is a Compressor/Decompressor and is the software that compresses your video while recording and decompresses it to display again. What you need to do is figure out what codec you need and install it.
Google for a free utility called GSpot and install it. Open the AVI file with GSpot and it will tell you what codec the file needs. Then google for the codec and install that.
WARNING: I would strongly advise against installing a “codec pack”! These are where people group a bunch of codecs together so that you have every codec imaginable. This is only a good idea on a media server where you just want everything to play. For a video editor, it may actually replace some codecs that you already have with inferior ones and give you worse video quality or replace them with decompressors only and disable your ability to write files in that format. Some of these codec packs contain viruses and Trojans that take over your computer. Just stay away from them. You’ve been warned.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
If this is what I think it is, this is normal. MPEG4 uses interframe compression and macroblocking. Interframe compression means that one or more earlier or later frames in the sequence are used to compress the current frame. This makes the quality of the current frame dependent on how much it has changed from the previous frame.
Macroblocking means that compression is performed on square-shaped groups of neighboring pixels. When a block of pixels doesn’t change much, the video looks very smooth, but when there is a drastic change like going from a title frame to a movie frame, all of the pixels change and the blocks may become noticeable which causes the picture to look a bit fuzzy or like it’s breaking up.
The last part to this equation is bit-rate. Given all the bits in the world, the codec can hide the macroblocks by regenerating the whole frame using all of the bits it needs. The problem is that people use MPEG4 because they want to use a low bit-rate. When the change in the image exceeds the number of bits that you have to represent it, something has to give and picture quality falls apart while all of the macroblocks are updated over the course of a few frames.
This would explain why the images gets a bit fuzzy for a few seconds and them smooths out when you add the opening title but does not without it. Hope that’s understandable.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Yes, your camera shoots HDV MPEG-2 and Blu-ray discs use HDV MPEG-2 so a good strategy would be to keep your footage in the native format it was shot at for minimum loss of quality. Vegas Pro 8.0 will smart render MPEG-2 so where you don’t make any changes it will simply copy the input frames to the output file without any loss or recompression.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com