Editing P2 1080 in Vegas 12

rhett

rhett

Active member
Hey guys, I've been working with the Raylight-Vegas workflow for a good five years now and have had no complaints, but the prospect of finally editing P2 MXF natively in Vegas 12 has me wanting to cut the fat. I'm able to just drag and drop clips the same, but my Vegas 12 software is interpreting the footage differently than it did with Raylight. Before, with Raylight, when I edited 1080 24PA HVX files, I could specify in Project Properties that the timeline be 23.976 FPS, but now Vegas 12 wants to interpret 24PA footage as 29.970. If I try to do 23.976 FPS in Vegas 12 it tries to resample and the playback is chunky and with flicker. The funny thing is that with Vegas 12 installed I can run Vegas 10 without Raylight and still play back the 1080 24PA files perfectly at 23.976, so it's not the codec or decompressor or whatever, but something within Vegas 12 itself.

Any ideas on tweaks I might do to get my 1080 24PA footage from my HVX200 playing back properly on my timeline in 23.976?
 
Hmmm... I really don't have an answer for you, but are you sure you've completely removed Raylight from your system?
 
Ken Hull said:
Hmmm... I really don't have an answer for you, but are you sure you've completely removed Raylight from your system?
Click to expand...

I did not remove Raylight from my desktop PC, but whenever I was accessing the MXF files they were not saying "Raylight" below them on the video preview screen as they used to. To make sure it wasn't a compatibility issue like that I've tried it on my laptop that never had Raylight and it is performing the same way.
 
Vegas does not currently remove pulldown from P2 footage.

I stressed to them the importance of it; they say it should be included in an update.
 
David Jimerson said:
Vegas does not currently remove pulldown from P2 footage.

I stressed to them the importance of it; they say it should be included in an update.
Click to expand...

Thanks, David. So is the workflow then to edit 29.970 (Lower field first? Blend fields? Or do I tell it everything is progressive if I shot 24PA?) and then just render out to 23.976? Excuse the ignorance, I guess I had it too easy with Raylight.
 
You never want to deinterlace progressive footage, so editing it as 60i, lower field first is what you want. Choose a 1080 60i timeline.

Don't render out to 23.976. It'll need to be 60i.

In reality, you could do anything you want with it, and it'll "work," but the image will take a hit, maybe a big one, if you do it any other way.
 
rhett said:
I did not remove Raylight from my desktop PC, but whenever I was accessing the MXF files they were not saying "Raylight" below them on the video preview screen as they used to. To make sure it wasn't a compatibility issue like that I've tried it on my laptop that never had Raylight and it is performing the same way.
Click to expand...

Raylight probably doesn't even detect Vegas 12.
 
David Jimerson said:
You never want to deinterlace progressive footage, so editing it as 60i, lower field first is what you want. Choose a 1080 60i timeline.

Don't render out to 23.976. It'll need to be 60i.

In reality, you could do anything you want with it, and it'll "work," but the image will take a hit, maybe a big one, if you do it any other way.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this, David, it makes sense to me, since 60i is just interlacing two sets of fields of the same progressive frame, but somehow I thought the output needed to be in the format it was destined for (in this case 24PA), but I guess, if I am understanding this right, the 23.976 FPS look will still be visible in the 60i stream by way of duplicate pulldown frames?


So, I edited my first full project on P2 today - and, well, it wasn't pretty. With Raylight, I'd just copy the full contents of the P2 card (preserving the file structure) from my camera/card to a hard drive on my PC. Then from there, I'd just add the video MXF files into the project and with Raylight Vegas would read them and all would be well. Now, when I try to drag and drop, the video files will show up, and occasionally the audio files attached will also be there (with both steams selectable from the same track), but more often than not the attached audio file will just appear blank for both streams. And then there are many times when even when there were visible levels there on the track, there would be no audio on playback. Is this happening for everyone else?

As I understand it, instead of copying P2 cards to your PC as could be done before with Raylight, Vegas 12 wants you to use Device Manager, where it then imports all the files directly from the camera into a specified import folder. I'd be okay to do it this way if it meant better results, but my hangup here is that it completely destroys the original file structure of the P2 card, instead taking EVERY SINGLE MXF FILE and inserting it into its own convoluted folder structure (VIDEO, AUDIO, CLIP folders, etc.) instead of just keeping it as it was. This means that, if you want to use footage from a previous shoot on a new project, you can't just go into that one VIDEO folder and drag everything into a new .VEG project, but instead you'd have to go file by file, folder by folder, through every single MXF just to get them into the project. And that's if you're just importing them manually - I don't even know how you'd do it using the Device Manager app without going crazy.

I also found that even when I went the Device Manager method there were still a number of audio drop out glitches that would happen. Sometimes I'd play back a track and the audio would be blank for the first five seconds, in others there'd be no audio at all, and at other times the audio would be there but 10-30 seconds out of sync. It would happen randomly every time I opened up the timeline, so it was never consistent. This has to be a bug, and I hope it gets fixed fast.

While I think Vegas' handling of P2 shows promise (not as memory intensive as Raylight seems to be) I still think they have a long way to go before it is even considered usable for professional application at this point. Unless I am just totally out to lunch on some form of this workflow, I'm probably going back to my Vegas 10 until some of these bugs are sorted out. I spent half my time doing my edit just trying to get audio to play back fully on my timeline - which was very embarrassing for me in front of my client.
 
rhett said:
As I understand it, instead of copying P2 cards to your PC as could be done before with Raylight, Vegas 12 wants you to use Device Manager, where it then imports all the files directly from the camera into a specified import folder. I'd be okay to do it this way if it meant better results, but my hangup here is that it completely destroys the original file structure of the P2 card, instead taking EVERY SINGLE MXF FILE and inserting it into its own convoluted folder structure (VIDEO, AUDIO, CLIP folders, etc.) instead of just keeping it as it was. This means that, if you want to use footage from a previous shoot on a new project, you can't just go into that one VIDEO folder and drag everything into a new .VEG project, but instead you'd have to go file by file, folder by folder, through every single MXF just to get them into the project. And that's if you're just importing them manually - I don't even know how you'd do it using the Device Manager app without going crazy.
Click to expand...

There's no reason to use the Device Manager -- you can copy cards exactly as you did before and drop the MXFs on the timeline. If I open earlier projects cut with Raylight, it finds the media with no problem (though there may be other problems owing to V12 and Raylight working differently).


While I think Vegas' handling of P2 shows promise (not as memory intensive as Raylight seems to be) I still think they have a long way to go before it is even considered usable for professional application at this point. Unless I am just totally out to lunch on some form of this workflow, I'm probably going back to my Vegas 10 until some of these bugs are sorted out. I spent half my time doing my edit just trying to get audio to play back fully on my timeline - which was very embarrassing for me in front of my client.
Click to expand...

There are certainly serious gaps at this point in time. But in my conversations with them, they've indicated a desire to become a seamless system. I've told them everything it needs to do to be a perfect P2 system, and they've been receptive to all of the ideas, so we'll see how far it goes into implementation. At this point, that's all I know . . .
 
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