[Red-rob Rothkopf]

Excaliber will do the trick too 🙂

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

“The R9 270 is also good.”

This one?

https://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Version-PCI-Express-Graphics-11220-00-20G/dp/B00I0D81OG

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

I’d love if someone were to post a quality comparison using Vegas2Handbreak vs. the H.264 “Internet 720” template native to Vegas. I’ve been using the latter for a while and I thought the quality was pretty darned good.. maybe I’ve just not had a decent comparsion? 🙂

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

We shoot our dance recitals with 3-5 cameras. When we were shooting to tape, it was real easy to just keep the master tapes in labelled boxes since we had a no-reuse policy anyway.

Today with shooting going to SD, our workflow is:
LOADING….

• Copy media to editing drive
• Copy media to BACKUP (short-term) drive
• Reformat media

POST-EDIT….

• When rendering for DVD, first render to a compressed, but high quality HD format
• Drop the HD render onto the timeline and re-render to DVD format from that (quicker than using source footage since no effects are applied — yes, it’s 2nd generation render, but the quality seems to hold up OK
• Author and deliver the DVD
• Save a copy of the DVD for future copies
• After customer acceptance, delete source media from PROJECT DRIVE.
• Source media on BACKUP (short-term) DRIVE is deleted on a rotational basis as space is needed.

I keep the HD render indefinitely, along with the hardcopy DVD.

Disc space is relatively inexpensive these days — heck, with 4 TB portable drives being just $150, you probably could keep source media for 5-10 dance schools on one drive (depending on your shooting format). So if that cost to you is $15/school for piece of mind, I’d say just keep the source footage on a hard drive! For me, it’s cheap enough to keep the HD render around, and if an artist ever “becomes big” or wants us to do something with that footage, we have it in a higher quality format that DVD supports.

As the hired professional, I personally feel irresponsible retaining only DVD quality when I know we shot in much higher quality; the only reason we’re still delivering that format is because our clients *currently* still want that (despite the hype) 🙂

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

It looks like Videologix Proteus II is a dedicated graphic overlay piece of hardware which might work for you too… I really know nothing about it other than what I just read online.

I used to use a dedicated device like that for SD video to overlay graphics and it worked well, and the camera op could fade or cut the graphic up and down.

A switch solution will absolutely work — I use BMD ATEM hardware and it’s worked out very well for us. 🙂

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

It does seem that that Teredek products are most-used, reliable and flexible — they also come with a high price tag.

Depending on your budget/needs there may be other options.

We’ve used the Aries Wireless Pro for two years — it has worked *very well*… most of the time. In two venues, however, there must have been a frequency conflict because either it wouldn’t connect or more often we were getting intermittent drop-outs which made it unreliable for the live switch. The transmitter is powered by USB power, so any portable USB charger/power unit can power it, along with a mobile GoPro (unless there is A/C power nearby in which case that works too).

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

I own and use 10 daily.
I purchased 12 and never used it.
I purchase 14 with the 3rd party bundle because I wanted more elaborate titling options and the 3d Boris offering.

What I like….

• Theoretically, more robust titling options
• Theoretically, better performance
• Mercalli stabilization — works, but I’m not sure the results are actually better than the older Vegas stabilization, and it seems slower to analyze.
• Filters & Transitions — I love some of the new filters/fx… very useful. Some/many of these may have already been in Vegas 13, but I don’t know which.

What I dislike….

• The robust titling options.. hard to figure out how to effectively use, and crashes
• Performance.. playback seems choppy, and there are significant problems with file handling of .M2T files that were captured from HDV *using Vegas*. Vegas 14 also does not support as many NVIDIA cards, which means no CUDA support and slower rendering on some workstations and notebooks (e.g. one of mine)
• No support from PluralEyes (yet)
• Icons… they got rid of lots of the color.. have no idea why.. don’t particularly care for the look. Would have been nice to give us the option of having more or less color I suppose
• .AC3 sometimes requires re-rendering in DVDA… using the same templates as in earlier Vegas versions, .AC3 audio files are sometimes needing to be recompressed when brought into the newer DVDA; I’m using the older DVDA as a result.. other than a few new templates, I’m not sure what has progressed in DVDA7.. still seems 32-bit to me and much slower on re-rendering than in Vegas (I never re-render video in DVDA if I can avoid it)

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

7 years later and several versions of Vegas, and there’s still no way to copy/paste media fx, or multi-select the media and apply effects (or a plug-in chain via Filter Packages) to multiple media.

This shortfalling seems really silly and intuitive; different cameras have different properties. When adding mixed media to a project, the editor often needs to apply correction (saturation, color grading, sharpness) to all media from a particular camera. Although this *can* be done at the event level, it really is a media-level correction.

Would love Magix to add this… or one of the 3rd party developers…. 😉

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

> Which specific hardware or software created the source files?

The file was created using Vegas 10’s built-in “Capture HD Video” function, to load HDV footage from my Canon XHA1s.

[Red-rob Rothkopf]

Ha! Good point!

Well, since eliminating the single .M2T file reduced my load time from 21 minutes to 2 minutes, it does seem that the .M2T handling seems to be the culprit and probably easy enough to track down. With others reporting the same problem this should be doable.

Supporting the notion that this is a file I/O issue — I just created a new project in Vegas14, and in the in-Vegas EXPLORER window navigated to the folder where I have two .M2T files. It’s been sitting on that dialog now for several minutes with task manager showing constant disk activity (I’m guessing it is reading the files from start to end). After 11 minutes, the screen flashed and I got control back. Noteworthy is that the explorer window does NOT have auto-preview play enabled.