[Steve Shelton]

Thank you JR for your great advice and tips – it’s sorted out loads of things for me. Having purchased a product I do feel somewhat let down by Sony in that I appear to have to purchase a codec (that used to be part of the package) to make a later version work to its full potential, a free download on their site would seem more appropriate. I think the best thing (and cheaper!) is to upgrade to v12; are you saying the results in that can be as lossless as using the cineform codec? Will old v10 projects upgrade OK to it?
Thank you again
Steve

[Steve Shelton]

Following on from that I’ve now downloaded the CineForm however it doesn’t seem to want to accept my mp4 renders (sub mixes) created using Vegas (assume a codec thing) so it would appear to be of no use to me …unless it’s to do with the codec you mentioned but I won’t know how to correct that. Maybe you can explain what I need to do if anything?

I read on some blogs elsewhere of people having similar problems with cineform and one of them recommended ‘eyeframe converter’ and with a bit of a playing about I found it will accept avi renders of my sub mixes and using a format of ‘MJPEG HD – Proxy quarter size’ creates a *.mov file 1920×1080 25fps 86Mbps weighing in at just 2.2Gb (compared to about 21Gb of the avi with same stats).
This *.mov is playing OK, on first test run at least, in my vegas timeline and the quality-wise is pretty reasonable although notice less tones of dark/black in the *.mov file compared to the avi I created it from (i.e. a black coat is one very dark black as opposed to shades of dark greys to blacks …could post examples if interested) however the definition is noticably better than the 0.5Gb 1920×1080 50fps 20Mbps mp4 I produced from vegas (which has horizontal banding of pixels in stills) although the mp4 handled the blacks truer to the original.
In your experience is using the 1920×1080 25fps 86Mbps mov files as my mastered sub mixes to load into my vegas master project an OK thing or are there pitfalls with mov files or all this chain of conversions and am I better trying to get the cineform to work ..but I don’t know how!

Sorry to pester but I’m getting worn out and confused by all these files types, codecs and what will work with what etc and you guys have a much better understanding of it than me and maybe what I post here might help others thinking of the same thing.
Many thanks
Steve

[Steve Shelton]

Thank you Norman – so have you already done the sort of thing I’m trying to do? If so I’d be interested to know the process that best worked for you i.e. what programme you did your sub-mixes on, what format you rendered them to to used again within vegas.
I have a 4Gb 32 bit win7 PC. Is vegas going to trip over loads if I load in 7 or 8 AVI files of about 5 mins each …that’ll add up to a lot of Gbs! …or should it work, if a bit slow?

[Steve Shelton]

JR – Thank you very much for having a look at this and commenting, really appreciated, led to a few more questions though:

You could also change the MainConcept MPEG2 HDV template to MPEG-2 and 1920×1080, profile High
my HDV settings only seem to allow 1440 x 1080 as a max, although as it stands with my vegas version it might be my best option. I did try rendering my ‘sub-mixes’ as custom HQ mp4s 1920×1080 20Mbps. The results were great, played ok in media player & in vegas preview window but as soon as placed in the timeline I was getting random quirky pixelations every few seconds (don’t know what the technical term is!). I read on another post of yours JR saying that Vegas doesn’t like its own mp4s …which is frustrating! Do later versions of vegas cope with their mp4s any better?

I would use CineForm but you would have to buy that codec
Please excuse me for being a bit behind the curve here! Are you saying start from stratch again and create my sub-mixes from the start on cineform or use cineform to do a conversion on a vegas created sub mix that vegas can work with in a master project? I’m downloading the free ‘studio’ version, is that good enough for what I need?
XDCAM EX
Is this the format Cineform will output in? Is this what I need to but the codec for?