[Peter Holt]

“You should be using View | Windows | Device Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+7) or View | Windows | XDCAM Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+5) to import from your camera cards (depending on your camera).”

Neither of those do anything with my camera, which is the FDR-1000V action cam. I tried it USB connected (the only way) and Pro 13 doesn’t see it.

Looking at the controls in the two forms which pop up for ctrl+alt+5/7 I think I see how this is supposed to work. The camera should appear as a media device, like the old 1394 (Firewire) camcorders (which used DV tapes) used to appear. With a Play and Stop etc control. They could be controlled from the PC. Then you start playback and the data streams to the PC. How the video is stored within the device is not relevant then.

But action cams don’t do this. The USB interface merely presents a block device which presents a Windows compatible file system which then appears within Windows as a logical drive (with a drive letter etc). You can browse that, and you can see a load of 4GB files (or as I mentioned earlier one huge file, if the camera is set to X-AVC). But there is no point in getting Vegas to read such a device directly; there is nothing gained over copying the media from the cam to the PC and then importing it to Vegas.

Maybe I am missing something but I see no feature within Vegas whereby media could be imported from a logical drive containing 4GB files (each of which is a fully standalone mp4 video) and have Vegas combine these into a single event with no splits. If there is, I am all ears because that would be very useful. The splits break a lot of stuff in Vegas – they break the velocity profile and they break the track compression method.

I also have a Canon Legria G40 (not a cheap camcorder) which has a USB port and Vegas doesn’t see that either. That also presents a logical drive to the computer, containing .mts files.

The other thing is that having the camera connected to the computer in order for this data import method to work is very inflexible. Often, I am travelling and I need to empty the camera’s SD card to something else, so I can do more recording.

Am I missing something?

[Peter Holt]

I have unchecked Loop in media properties and now the velocity profile generates one speeded up section followed by the remainder being a frozen frame. Is that as it should be?

I did ask on some other forum about joining up the breaks between events on the timeline and there is apparently no way in Vegas.

Or maybe I mis-understand. Are you saying Vegas offers a means of joining up 4GB video file chunks on the SD card, as it imports them? That would be pretty clever.

Regarding the 4GB chunks, they are recorded that way by the camera onto the card. The camera for some reason writes 4GB chunks if set to AVC mode (25mbits/sec) or a single huge file if set to XAVC mode (50mbits/sec). The former mode gives me 10hrs with a 128GB card and I need that. The latter mode gives me 5hrs which is usable to me in some cases but more to the point I cannot get the large-file data out of the camera over WIFI (have to remove it from the waterproof housing, etc).

Also note that 4GB chunks are not produced by a big file being split during file copy, due to file system limitations. Each 4GB chunk is a standalone and valid mp4 file. The SD card is formatted to EXFAT so there is no 4GB file size limit. The same camera can write a 100GB file to the same card.

[Peter Holt]

For the GTXxxx (Nvidia) that just says

Requires a CUDA-enabled graphics card and driver 270.xx or later.
GeForce GPUs: GeForce GTX 4xx Series or higher (or GeForce GT 2xx Series or higher with driver 297.03 later).
Quadro GPUs: Quadro 600 or higher (or Quadro FX 1700 or higher with driver 297.03 or later).

which I strongly suspect is nonsense because mine “does” CUDA and is almost brand new but it still doesn’t work.

[Peter Holt]

I have just bought the Canon G40, having previously used the G10.

This video may be of interest
https://vimeo.com/181007085

The quality is great, the stabilisation is awesome, everything works really well, and it does 1080P 50FPS 28mbits/sec in AVC (a.k.a. H264) which is as good as one can practically use and still host it online somewhere. In fact one struggles hosting that; Vimeo downsamples to 5mbits/sec. Only the most modern fast PC can play the full-bitrate video smoothly so this will do me for a number of years I am sure.

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[Peter Holt]

I used HDVsplit under winXP, years ago, to transfer a load of DV tapes in a Sony camcorder which then went on Ebay. It worked great, though obviously a slow process due to the real time playback.

There are easy hacks on the web to disable auto download of win10 (and the prompts for it, etc) and everybody should do this. If you are on win7-64 then you have everything ever needed for any video editing job and win10 gives you nothing of consequence and gives you a load of headaches.

[Peter Holt]

Yes your reply makes complete sense. It is something to do with RDP, or VLC on the same machine, grabbing some video resources.

Pro 13 does not even start over RDP. It says “unable to start”. MSP 11 and 12 do fine and run fine, however.

I have GPU acceleration globally disabled under Settings, and I render with “CPU only” because Pro 13 crashes if I enable any of the GPU modes. Again, MSP11 and 12 worked OK out of the box although I never saw any evidence (in terms of rendering speeds) that they used the GPU.

It’s not a big deal. One just has to remember to not click on an mp4 etc while rendering 🙂

[Peter Holt]

I don’t think that is the issue, because I can reproduce it without using RDP.

[Peter Holt]

If that’s the reason, it’s IMHO not right, because the file has not been modified. It has been re-written. The original file should be deleted by the program and a fresh one opened. Also, whatever the rationale behind this, the new size should be represented correctly.

[Peter Holt]

Picking up an old thread…

I am using MSP12 and Pro 13, win7-64 and have bought the $99 NewblueFX kit which has the Lens Correction FX.

The camera is a Sony FDR-1000V which when set with stabilisation=on has an angle of view of 120 degrees (170 otherwise – too wide and even more distorted). The waterproof housing reduces the angle by a few more degrees.

In short, NBFX does work but is not a mathematically correct correction; at best a rough approximation.

It does improve the situation but it is clear that the correction equation is not suited to this camera, or maybe any other camera.

I posted a summary with screenshots in this aviation forum
https://www.euroga.org/forums/website/6070-movie-lens-correction-software-for-windows-xp-or-any-other-os/post/115053#115053
(I hope the external link is acceptable but it took me a while to generate this)
and as you can see you can correct very well IF you also crop, and I don’t mean just cropping the voids which are inevitably introduced when a barrel distorted image is corrected. You have to crop quite a bit more, to remove the heavily distorted bits in the corners.

Why NBFX doesn’t offer profiles for common action cams (there aren’t so many) I have no idea. They charge good money for their plug-ins.

I did email them and they said that incomplete correction is to be expected, basically.

The required crop has the effect of reducing the camera angle, obviously, which is sometimes OK but you are wasting material. You are also wasting pixels because if you start at say 1080P then by the time you are done you are replicating pixels; more so nearer the edges of the image so it ends up blurred. I have found that rendering to 768P is better. For a 1080P output one would need to record in 4K and while the current cameras (including this one) do 4K they are really severely limited in various ways.

[Peter Holt]

This speed is not unusual in my limited experience, over about 5 years of using various Vegas versions.

With MSP12 I have just done a 50hr render with 80GB source data (from a Sony FDR-1000V) in 1080P 50FPS 25mbits/sec, total elapsed footage 5:15hrs. Rendering using AVC, to same output format (or as close as I can find – I don’t think there is a lossless path) as the input.

The plug-in chain I used is
– Sony brightness and contrast
– Sony colour correction
– NewBlueFX Lens Correction
– Sony Timecode
– track motion (1.6 degrees of rotation and a slight zoom) on the video track

The main reason for this render was to imprint the timecode into the corner
https://peter-ftp.co.uk/screenshots/2016-08-06_080255.jpg
because at the next stage the rendered mp4 (45GB) will be imported and loads of stuff cut out, etc. It is a flying movie of which 95%+ is rubbish 🙂

So the rendering speed is about 1/10 of real time. i7-970 3GHz, win7-64, 24GB RAM GTX750 2GB Kalm video (GPU acceleration disabled everywhere; it makes little difference with MSP12 but actually stops Pro 13 working unless disabled globally in Preferences).

I am doing the same render now in Pro13 and it looks like it will be 1.5x faster, which is interesting.

But nothing I have tried produces a massive difference. Even with no FX I get a 1/5 of real time with 1080P, or 1/3 of real time rendering the 1080P to 768P (always 25mbits/sec).

One Apple fanboy I know claims he is getting faster than real time with Final Cut Pro, but while he never told me exactly how he achieves it, and there is no FCP for windoze anyway, he is using GPU acceleration and because Apple control the hardware in a Mac tightly, the app developers can develop for that. Whereas Vegas appears to have a long history of some GPUs working (mainly old ones) and most not, or if they work they keep crashing, not necessarily right away, or the render is corrupted. Apparently Vegas uses different code (a different algorithm entirely) when rendering GPU compared to when rendering non-GPU and there are many reports of the GPU version producing worse quality. So I don’t bother. With MSP11 and MSP12 I saw a speedup of max 5% which is nothing.

So if anybody knows a better way I am “all ears” especially if there is a lossless path from the Sony AVC format to an mp4 in the same format. Handbrake can do it – obviously provided one is not doing colour correction, rotation etc, and just say adding subtitles like the timecode in the corner. A lossless path should be many times faster.

It’s interesting that one can invoke Handbrake from within Vegas. Is there any writeup on how to do it?