HDV playback

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patssle

Well-known member
I'm trying out Vegas right now with HDV. I'm not liking it. It can't playback 2x 1080i HDV streams in real time at full resolution. This is on a HP xw8200 dual (not dual core) Zeon 3.4 ghz with 2.5 Gb of RAM. What gives?
 
HDV is a beast to work with, try capturing your footage with cineform and you will have much better results.
 
patssle said:
I'm trying out Vegas right now with HDV. I'm not liking it. It can't playback 2x 1080i HDV streams in real time at full resolution. This is on a HP xw8200 dual (not dual core) Zeon 3.4 ghz with 2.5 Gb of RAM. What gives?
Click to expand...

I think you are asking way too much of Vegas or any other NLE for that matter. Your computer is not that fast for one and why playback 1080i in full resolution? What kind of monitor are you using that will give you the screen real estate to accomplish such a feet anyway?

My experience with Cineform playback is actually that's it a little slower than raw .m2t HDV files on the timeline in Vegas 7.

Jon
 
why playback 1080i in full resolution
Click to expand...

Because when I edit, I want to see the full picture. I would think any editor would want that?

I was hoping to to view it on a DVI LCD monitor from my graphics card. But that little window you do get on 1 monitor is ridicously small.
 
I was also expecting a dual 3.2 ghz Zeon computer to handle it. When just 2.8 ghz in a minimum requirement.

I guess I'm just use to real time playback. Any computer can handle real time SD. HDV has been out for a while now. I've been editing uncompressed HD on VelocityHD which can handle 2 streams and graphics realtime. Just would think realtime HDV would of been available by now.
 
I think you might be getting resolutions mixed up. In order to playback your HDV captured video in full resolution, you'd need a monitor capable of playing back 1920 X 1080 pixels. There are very few monitors that can handle this resolution. You can get some 24" displays that will show 1920 X 1200 pixels and they typically start in the $700 range. Is your monitor this big? If not, you'll be downsizing your preview regardless. Don't view this as a bad thing at all. I preview all my HDV1080i material at 960 X 540 on a 19" monitor that runs @ 1280 X 1024 (typical resolution) and the preview window takes up what appears to be about 65% or so of the entire window.

In the preview window in Vegas you can set the playback size at the top in the preview button. Just setup it up as "Preview -> Half" and go from there. The window shouldn't be too small and if it is, lower the resolution of your LCD flat panel and the image will get larger.

Does that make sense?

You are right to see that editing and manipulating HD is a completely different animal than SD despite the HDV data rate of 25Mpbs. I truly believe Vegas is probably the one of the best (if not THE best) on the market today for playback performance.

Jon
 
I personally don't care if the HDV video playbacks in 100% size or in 320x180 window (the default window size on Vegas). What I want is to be smooth when it playbacks. And it isn't, even on 320x180 (3 Ghz P4-HyperThreaded here). I had other NLEs and they didn't have a problem playing back smoothly an HDV video. Vegas was the only one that had the problem of the 4 I tried.
 
Unless you actually USE dynamic RAM preview (which is a temporary prerender), there's no reason to devote much memory to it.
 
my system specs are p4 3.2 ghz HT, 2gig of ram, and a ATI 300x 128mb vid card. i edit HDV on vegas 7. my preview screen is set to 480x270 and my vid playback runs smooth. it also runs pretty good at 960x540. vegas 6 sucked at playing .mt2 files which made converting em to an intermediate a must. vegas 7 handles .mt2 a lot better. one other thing to consider(if you haven't already) is ram. 1 gig of ram is not enough to edit HDV .mt2 files and have a smooth preview no matter what editing software your running. rendering will also take twice as long. 2 gigs of ram is IMO the minimum amount of ram you need to handle editing HDV .mt2 files without converting em to an intermediate.
 
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