Sebastian Alvarez
Forum Replies Created
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[Douglas Spotted Eagle] “The SD5 and 9 weren’t shipping at that time IIRC”
Not trying to get into a childish argument, but the SD5 was being sold in Nov ’07. As I said, that’s when I bought it from a Circuit City store, and it was on their website as well, that’s how I learned about it. In fact, check one post you made in this same thread in Nov ’07 in which you say “I own an SD1 and and SD5, and have reviewed them both.”. The SD9, if I remember this right, was released around mid 2008.
[Douglas Spotted Eagle] “…it’s kind of annoying, given the insults tossed about.
Is there a less-than-novella explanation in my post? Yes. Does that mean I don’t know my subject? hardly.”I don’t see any insults, although I don’t agree with the tone of the poster who wrote that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I know you are an accomplished musician and videographer, but even experienced professionals can get a few facts wrong sometimes, and it’s no big deal. I wouldn’t call that not knowing your subject, just that maybe you didn’t know a couple of things, but the world keeps turning nevertheless.
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[Douglas Spotted Eagle] “I’d like anyone to please identify any shipping, purchaseable AVCHD camcorder capable of recording 1920 x 1080 pixels in November of 2007.”
The Panasonic SD5. I think you mentioned in this thread that you have, or had one. The highest quality setting for it was 1920×1080 at 13 mbps, a low bitrate, but quite stunning images though, but still not as good as Canon’s. So I don’t know about the rest, but the Panasonic SD5, which I bought in Nov ’07 at the now defunct Circuit City, had the above mentioned resolution. I think it had 1440 too for a lower bitrate setting if I remember correctly.
[Douglas Spotted Eagle] “Further, at the time, broadcasters such as Dish and others were only shipping 1440 x 1080i or 720p in mpeg2 format.”
Time Warner Cable in my area, in mid 2007 was already broadcasting 1920×1080 MPEG2, and they do to this day, adding new HD channels with lower picture quality every few months or so. Analog SD cable on tube TV sets looks way better than many cable HD channels.
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Cory, while DSE may have had some facts wrong over a year ago when he posted (“The format used in the consumer AVCHD camcorders is 1440 x 1080 with a PAR of 1.333, just like HDV, just like what the satellite and cable networks broadcast. “), what you take for granted in your post (“however, he was right about broadcast and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD being 1440×1080. The pixel aspect is simply 1.33:1 (rectangle) instead of 1:1 (square). This creates the same image area as 1920×1080 1:1 pixels. Unfortunately when you burn to Blu-Ray you need to burn at 1440×1080 1.33:1”) is also wrong.
Time Warner Cable, at least in my area, and at least for the channels I captured material from, are 1920×1080. I wish they were 1440×1080 at the same bitrate they actually broadcast, they would look a bit better. To my eyes, current cable HD broadcasting is appalling, it varies from channel to channel, the best in my area being the local CBS station, but out of the four main networks, some HD channels such as Sci-Fi and USA look like trash, to the point where there doesn’t need to be a lot of movement for the screen to turn into a horrible mosaic of pixels. But unfortunately, they are 1920×1080 in MPEG2, which I can simply confirm by transferring a show from my DVR to my computer and opening the file in any NLE or even those small programs that only show you the codec and video dimensions. When the footage is 1440×1080, such as HDV, it shows it as such. I don’t know what’s the story with satellite, I know from forums that many channels come in MPEG4 but I’m not sure if they are 1440 or 1920. Having had Directv for over a year with just their SD service when I wasn’t able to get cable, and remembering what a colossal piece of crap it was, I’m not very tempted to switch to them, even if I’m not satisfied with cable.
As for Blu-ray, I don’t know where you get from that when you burn for blu-ray you have to encode to 1440×1080. You can if you want to, but nothing prevents you from doing so at 1920×1080. In fact, if you import an AVI file with your edit into DVD Architect 5 and set it to encode to 1920×1080 at 20 MBPS AVC, it will do so, taking forever, but it will do it. And if you encode to 1920×1080 MPEG2 from Vegas, up to 40 Mbps you can also use that perfectly, but only for real Blu-Ray media, not BD5 or BD9. For the latter the best result would be AVC at 20 Mbps, encoding directly from DVDA 5, or if it’s mostly quiet footage you can output from Vegas at 1440 at 15 Mbps. This setting also works really well if you have lower quality footage such as some old family videos captured from VHS that you want to put onto a BD5 or BD9, the Vegas AVC encoder somehow cleans the picture a little bit. I don’t know the internals of it, I just know the result is pretty neat.
Of course, if you have an AVCHD camera such as the Canon HFs or Panasonic SD5 o 9, and you want your footage to look the best it can, and you just want to do straight cuts and perhaps a fade in or out here and there, the best choice is to leave Vegas to the side and use the lame software that comes with the camera, either Pixela Imagemixer, or HD Writer, which are the worst pain in the ass to use, but they offer smart-rendering for AVCHD, which Vegas to this day doesn’t, and that’s going to give you the best picture quality of all, and without even having to spend money on BD media.
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I didn’t have any problems installing Quicktime. I think it’s 32 bit, but I didn’t have any problems, but to be honest, I barely use it at all. What kind of problems are you having with it?
My Vista 64 bit is Home Premium, although now I’m running the public beta of Windows 7.
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HDV is a lot easier on CPUs than AVCHD. To edit the latter you need at least a quad core, which you have, but also lots of RAM (4 GB would be a good start). If you have a system that will allow you to run 64 bit Vista I definitely recommend that, so you can run Vegas 8.1, which is free if you own 8.0. So if you already own Vista 32 bit, you can go to this address to order the 64 bit DVD from Microsoft:
https://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/1033/ordermedia/default.mspx
They charge about $11 for the shipping and handling. Note that you will need to backup and then wipeout your entire main hard drive to install the 64 bit version, you cannot run the installer on top of the 32 bit version.
Whether you go for the 64 bit version or not, one thing I can recommend you is to arrange your Vegas layout to where you make the monitor window 960×540 (half of 1920×1080), then set the quality to Good (Half). Then set the RAM preview to the allowed maximum, and also switch the shortcuts for RAM preview and “Show Master”, since you will use RAM preview much more than the master track. So assign the B key to RAM preview and Shift+B to Show Master Track, that way you can select several seconds of RAM preview at a time, and then play back that selection in real time. This will save you a lot of time in editing.
I do recommend you strongly to use the 64 bit version, because Vegas 8.0c is a piece of junk. It’s full of bugs, and sometimes even after doing the RAM preview it will still not play smoothly and you have to re-render to RAM again. Besides, many times you will render your final edit and it will crash. The 64 bit version has a lot of bugs too, but at least it’s more stable.
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I just got a Zoom H2, which is a field recorder but can serve as a audio I/O USB interface for either Windows or Mac OS X, and it works great in Vegas. I don’t know about cheaper USB mics though.
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Thanks for the footage, it looks good except for the wide angle lens deformity, I was never a big fan of that.
You know, if you’re using a pirated version of Vegas, not only it’s the wrong thing to do, but it may also be the reason why it doesn’t work well for you. You might want to consider buying Platinum Pro 9, which has some enhancements on AVCHD editing, and probably accepts 1920×1080 files. At least you can check out the trial for a month and see how it works.
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I’m glad it worked, however if you still haven’t bought Vegas Pro 8 I think you should try Platinum 9 instead, since it’s much cheaper and unless you need some pro features like more than 4 video tracks and HD preview on a second monitor, Platinum 9 should be good for your needs, and if you search you can get it for around $100, although you may have to pay shipping to Hungary.
As for power, I recommend you upgrade to at least a quad core, because at least when it comes to Vegas and AVCHD, a Core 2 Duo doesn’t cut it. Even a quad core doesn’t totally cut it, but it’s far better.
Looking forward to that footage. Please post the link once you finish uploading it.
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That’s great, I appreciate it. I thought you were in either Germany or Denmark because of the .de in the filesharing website. I’m from Argentina but I live in North Carolina in the USA.
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Great, thanks. Any footage from your area should be good. Is that Denmark, or Germany? I’m not sure if the .de is Denmark or Deutschland. In either case, I would love to see what a typical neighborhood of those countries look like.
I’m not sure you would have more luck with Vegas Pro 8.0c if you already tried in 8.0a and it doesn’t recognize the footage. My first edits with AVCHD were from a Panasonic SD5 in Vegas Pro 8.0a, and I didn’t have any problems.
I do however, recommend you that if you want to do a cuts only edit, to learn to use HD Writer, because even though the software itself is a very lousy NLE, at least when you render your final edit it will do smart rendering, which means at worst only a few frames around cuts are re-rendered, but for most of the footage you keep the same pristine picture quality the camera gave you. In Vegas, smart-rendering for AVCHD doesn’t exist, so you always have to re-render all of your footage, which not only will take you a very long time, but also will not look as good as the original, unless maybe you render to MPEG2 at 40 MBps for a BD as the final medium. But if you want to edit your footage and keep it in its original form, HD Writer is the best way to go, and also will let you put that footage on cheap DVDs instead of expensive BDs.
That in Platinum you can only choose 1440 for the project could be the cause, but I’m not so sure. That means the project itself might not handle more than 1440, but the source footage should be read. Still, I think you should download the trial for Platinum 9 and see what happens.