Vegas & importing/working with Canon 5D/mov files?

[Norm Sanders]

Anyone have any issues with Vegas either choking on 5D footage, or having it not want to show the video, yet will play/preview the audio?

I've got a project that has a TON of RED footage in it, that's not having any issues what so ever, yet I'm having a dickens of a time with the 5D footage, which are MOV files ... both in the same project.

Vegas 9.c, 64 bit.

[PerroneFord]

Red files are essentially the same format as cineform. Vegas is going to handle that well. The 5D files are the same format as AVCHD but need to be decoded faster. Stop putting native files on the timeline from these super compressed cameras. We've been saying it for two years now.

[Chris Light]

one of these days i'm gonna change my signature to "For God's sake, and the sake of all things related to the import/transcoding/editing/makingbreakfast for/cuddling with video, listen to Perrone Ford." anyone who thinks i'm kidding needs to use the search tab more.
...and i don't mean that towards the original poster, but instead as a general rule.

[PerroneFord]

I'm not saying anything different than other experienced users here. Apparently, everyone thinks they are immune to this issue. And there is a mad rush to be able to edit it on the timeline, like that's some holy grail. I can edit uncompressed on the timeline too, but you don't see a flood of people trying to do that...

[Chris Light]

i know this, Perrone. I just can't say it like you. that was my point.

[Norm Sanders]

Soo .... would you suggest that I take the clips I know I want, and render those individually out to AVI files, so that Vegas will quit giving me the crap it's giving?? Only problem with that, is going with the Sony YUV codec (1080P, compressed,etc.) it's giving me a file size that's nearly 30 times larger ... going from roughly 500MB (mov) to 14GB (AVI).

Also, the WEIRDEST thing is that when I open up an earlier .veg file that's 2 days older (therefore LOTS of edits since), it'll at least view/play the original .mov files that are on the timeline ... but when I open the 2nd version of the .veg file (v2.0), it WON'T play/view them, and only is giving me audio from the timeline OR preview when clicking on the file in the project/media bin. So it's so completely hit & miss, I have no idea how to trouble shoot, other than render each clip to a different format.

[Andy Olson]

Hey Norm,

The h.264 Quicktime movies that the Canon 5dmkii writes to are very slow to decode and most NLE's cannot play them back in real time save for a couple that use hardware acceleration with specific graphic cards, like Edius and the upcoming Adobe Cs5.

Other routes to take are transcoding to a format that Vegas 9 can handle (Mpegstreamclip, Neoscene), use proxy editing or you can use a software like DVFilm Epic I that lets you instantly start editing while it generates real time Epic files in the background.

You can make the Realtime Epic files full, half or quarter resolution depending on what you machine can handle and then after you finish editing, instantly switch back to the original 5dmkii files to export.

You can try a demo here. It currently only support Vegas 9/32bit.

Hope this helps,
Andy Olson

[Norm Sanders]

Thanks, Andy. Unfortunately, I'm running 64bit Vegas. Let me know when Epic is up to speed for the 64bit, and would look forward to trying it out.

[William_Robinette]

Mpeg Streamclip + DNxHD from AVID. Both free.

You can batch convert all your .mov files and just replace your (after you have moved and saved them of course) master files and point Vegas to them. It should be like 5 clicks and they will all import into your current edit.

They are larger then the native files but not YUV in size and they playback fine.

[Andy Olson]

You can use the veg projects interchangeably between Vegas 9/64 and 9/32 and have both installed, but I understand not wanting to return to Vegas 9/32bit.

We'll keep everyone posted on when the 64bit Epic is available.

Best,
Andy