[Norman Black]

[Dave Osbun] “Even though you put together a really nice workstation, and a quite powerful video card, I feel that this AMD-chipped video card is your bottleneck here. This card is excellent at gaming, but it’s going to act differently when using it for video editing. If you can return it for a Sony approved video card like the nVidia Quadro 4000 (or cheaper 2000, if it’s on Sony’s list).”

What can you offer to back that up? The AMD GCN 7950 and 7970 cards are some of the fastest GPU compute cards out there. Faster in OpenCL benchmarks than the cards you quoted.

On another note. GPU, AMD or Nvidia, has nothing to do with simple playback of a clip on the timeline without effects and such added.

[Norman Black]

[John Rofrano] “Actually the files need to be stitched back together because the camera must break them up into sections that fit on the FAT32 file system.”

I figured one would just put the clips up against each other on your Vegas timeline. If the clips are not going to be edited then yes they will need to be stitched.

Copy will not work as the MP4 file headers will conflict.

GoPro Studio is really about just conversion to Cineform with simple end trims and color/contrast type edits.

[Norman Black]

Don’t know what ru_util.exe is or what it is supposed to do.
Device explorer is for navigating the storage of specific cameras. See the help for that list of cameras.

The GoPro simply writes ordinary files or an standard formatted SD card. Nothing special needed. Copy the files from the SD card to your PC. Use File|Open, or import media into the Vegas project of your choice.

[Norman Black]

“best” is a vague term.

If you are going to reuse/edit something you render then you should probably use a high quality intermediate format. The Internet 1080p format you mention is a lower bitrate final delivery format.

Possible choices are
HDCAM SR Lite
XAVC Intra

These will be pretty big files but will preserve the source quality to it’s fullest for your subsequent edit and renders.

If your camera outputs AVC then AVC is fine but just make sure the bitrate is the same as your camera. Same for MPEG-2 (e.g. XDCAM). Just make sure the bitrate is the same as your camera. Files like these will be smaller than the above suggestions.

[Norman Black]

Youtube re-encodes you uploaded videos to their own video settings. Their settings are pretty low bitrate.

With the online video services really all you want is to upload something that is better quality than their resulting re-encode.

Here is the Youtube upload support page.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

One thing to complicate things is the quality of the encoder. Youtube and other online services typically use the x264 encoder which is the best out there in terms of low bitrate quality. Vegas has Sony AVC and Mainconcept AVC. Neither one is as good as x264 so you will likely want to pad the youtube reccomended upload bitrates a little to compensate for the lower quality encoder.

[Norman Black]

I believe youtube converts everything to a max of 30p.

Here is the youtube support page.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

[Norman Black]

Define “handle”.

I have edited 1080p60 30Mbps AVC GoPro files. You need a speedy CPU to edit such files. The real question is your PC fast enough. If not you can proxy.

[Norman Black]

In Vegas Pro, MC AVC does not have 50 or 60 listed in the frame rate drop down. You have to enter the value directly. I no longer have MS installed so I cannot test directly if it lets you enter a value.

As for bitrate. Cameras really do not compress the video stream hardly at all in terms of temporal inter-frame compression. They do not have the time or the compute power to do so. Therefore assuming your source material is suitable and the AVC encoder does a decent job then you can have much lower bitrates at the same/similar quality as the camera source AVC.

[Norman Black]

The UYVY codec should implemented/installed in Windows by default. At least my analysis of the registry shows the FOURCC, UYVY, is implemented by a Microsoft DLL on my system. UYVY is what “Sony YUV” outputs.

My setup is Vegas 12.

UYVY is standard known YUV format, and is simply a YUV format with color subsampling of 4:2:2. In other words, there is some compression being done, IF you source file(s) were 4:4:4. Most cameras are 4:2:2 at best.

[Norman Black]

Vegas has two AVC encoders. Mainconcept AVC and Sony AVC. Sony AVC does have a relatively low upper limit on average bitrate. Who knows why this is. Mainconcept AVC allows very, very high bitrates to be used.