720 50P & Vegas 8 stuttering AAAARGHHH!!!

[Evro]

Last Sunday I made the mistake of shooting over 50GB of footage from an event in 720 50P :crybaby: now I'm trying to edit a 5 minute highlight of the day's events and the footage is stuttering all over the place regardless of whether I'm just playing it back on the time line or rendering it out - SONY this is VERY annoying!!!! :(

I've tried Batch Rendering as VideoMaker suggested a few days ago but the stuttering still ends up in the final render. I'm now wondering how long it will take to transcode 54GB of AVCHD footage to anything other than DVCProHD format because I can't seem to read MXF files in Vegas.

Man this is so frustrating :(


I'm registering the problem with SCS and hopefully they'll get an update out sooner than later!

[floz23]

Hey! you might want to take a look at the thread I just posted in this same sub-forum.

Anyway, I noticed a problem with the way vegas handles 720p 30p (NTSC of course) and instead reports the clip as 720 60p!

Did you really shoot that clip in 50P? or actually 25P and vegas is reporting 50P? I would set my project to 25P and right click on the offending video and select "Disable resample".

good luck!

-Adam

PS- as for editing panasonic MXF, you can't! Thank you sony!!! (kidding)
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/hurwicz_michael/vegas8_raylight.php

[Evro]

Nope, I definitely shot it in 50P and I knew that every one here was having issues with it, I just forgot to switch my camera back to 25P.

I will try these extra things you mention.
Thanks :)

[Evro]

I tried disabling "resample" and it worked for the most part but some clips still exhibited the stutter. I just read the Vegas Pro 8.1 release notes and it doesn't get any clearer than this quote from it:

"1920x1080 AVCHD files created by Panasonic camcorders are not currently supported."

But then in their Knowledge Base I read this:

" Vegas Pro 8.0 and Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition 9.0 have added support for most consumer AVCHD camcorders, including 1920x1080 formats from Sony, Panasonic and Canon."

I'm wondering if any Panasonic flavours other than DV will ever be supported by Vegas?? I think it's time to start learning Edius...

[kurtmo]

I now transcode and use Raylight to get past the Vegas AVCHD issues for now. It's $$$, but then the MXF files are drag and drop and it is cheaper than Edius.

[pharpsied]

...but the Raylight is easier than anything else beside gearshift which has the tendency to clam up under certain conditions. Actually, I prefer the Raylight method to Gearshift. I have used it on a couple of shorts, a music video, a news spot, and am currently using it on my SXSW Submission peice and a couple of other things also. Additionally, slow motion is easy and beautiful. I touted the Gearshift method earlier, but the 200 dollars I spent on Raylight has been the best accessory investment I've made concerning this particular camera and Sony Vegas (which I love, but was becoming increasingly frustrated with).

[Evro]

Well I've now found out that I can't transcode the footage because when I copied everything across I went through and renamed all of the original files to my own scene/shot descriptions (as per usual)and the transcoding software only reads the original file structure - I don't have a copy of the original files or file structure.

This is just great!! Now I have several hours of footage that I can't transcode and can't edit till Vegas decides to natively support Panasonic AVCHD!! Now how do I explain that to the client??? If anyone knows how to transcode renamed MTS files on their own to some other format please let me know.

I'm now wondering if I should have actually bought the EX1 instead....

[kurtmo]

Here's a solution that should work. Use the camera to create a few clips. Copy the hole directory to your PC. Now move the files in the stream file someplace else and copy your clips into the stream file, but change their names to match the files you moved.

You should be able to transcode after that.

Repeat the steps for each clip. The transcoded files end up named uniquely. Try using the raylight demo to see how it works after that.

[Evro]

Thanks kurtmo, I'll try that :)

I also spoke with a colleague who runs Edius 5 and he seems to think we could do a batch conversion of these MTS files by importing the clips into the Edius Bin area and then batch convert them to AVI files via the Edius HQ On-Line format which, I should then be able to open up in Vegas as regular AVI files.

[Justyn]

It's the joy of being on the bleeding edge.. we had it on the mac side, but now FCP is working perfectly. Prior to that I was using the intensity card..

[Evro]

All good news from here :) we simply converted the raw MTS files into Edius HQ AVI files! It was simple, painless and fast but best of all my customised file names remained intact :D

For my way of doing things, the AVCHD -> DVCPROHD -> RayLight route is way too time consuming compared to the Edius batch convert method so I might have to buy a cheap entry level version of Edius (if one exists) to do my transcoding until Sony Vegas get's their sh*t together ;) For the record, I've yet to receive a response from them regarding my query to SCS last week :(

[Kit_L]

Justyn,

I cut in FCP 6.0.5; what is your workflow for this camera, please?

I have a quad-core Intel Mac; lots of Ram; fast internal drives, etc.

Finally, do you know if FCP supports 720p50? For my work, I would prefer to use this frame rate, if supported.

cheers, kl

[Thomas Lew]

And thus the importance of test footage before you shoot the real thing!!!!

Glad to see it all worked out.