Vegas

G-Man

G-Man

Well-known member
Hello all,

I'm considering using Vegas for editing-it seems to be the most affordable editing program out there. Anyways, I have an hvx and plan to shoot 24p footage and I was wondering how Vegas handles 24p and variable frame rates, as well as color correction.

Sorry if this was covered in a previous thread.

Thanks.
 
Depends, What kind of hardware do you have (your machine specs).

Im at the moment very disappointed that Vegas doesnt run well on my 3.4 ghz dual core with 2 gb ram and nearly a terabyte of HD space. Stutters and sputters for even a 3 minute project. Ive never even yet tried loading a 60 minute or so onto the timeline. But it used to be very stable on my other system. One thing is its not a program that crashes as often as premiere etc. But on my new workstation that i assembled it isnt able to handle things like i expected. Imagine it spewing and stutering when preview is set to a low end mode too. That too on 2 or 3 minute duration projects. Like most programs it works well for some and doesnt for some. My idea would be. Get a decent machine first. Most of the requirements are the same for all NLEs. Then get a trial version. Give it a shot and see if it suits well on that machine. It might work like a dream or vice versa. Then take a call.
 
G-Man said:
Hello all,

I'm considering using Vegas for editing-it seems to be the most affordable editing program out there. Anyways, I have an hvx and plan to shoot 24p footage and I was wondering how Vegas handles 24p and variable frame rates, as well as color correction.

Sorry if this was covered in a previous thread.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

In order to use Vegas with the HVX, you'll ned an external program like Raylight in order to work with the HVX video files. Vegas by itself doesn't support them.

But, if you do use Raylight, you'll be able to use the clips, including variable frame rates, and have full advantage of the 4:2:2 color space for color correction (and CCing in 4:2:2 is a thing of beauty).
 
plainman007 said:
Depends, What kind of hardware do you have (your machine specs).

Im at the moment very disappointed that Vegas doesnt run well on my 3.4 ghz dual core with 2 gb ram and nearly a terabyte of HD space. Stutters and sputters for even a 3 minute project. Ive never even yet tried loading a 60 minute or so onto the timeline. But it used to be very stable on my other system. One thing is its not a program that crashes as often as premiere etc. But on my new workstation that i assembled it isnt able to handle things like i expected. Imagine it spewing and stutering when preview is set to a low end mode too. That too on 2 or 3 minute duration projects. Like most programs it works well for some and doesnt for some. My idea would be. Get a decent machine first. Most of the requirements are the same for all NLEs. Then get a trial version. Give it a shot and see if it suits well on that machine. It might work like a dream or vice versa. Then take a call.
Click to expand...

What kind of footage are you trying to edit?

BTW, the length of the clip or project has no effect on playback performance.
 
.vob files. The best thing is these used to work fine on the timeline on my earlier lowend machine. I dont know if its a codec thing or something. All earlier dvds used to be ripped using the same ripper and the vobs would just load easily onto the vegas timeline and run like a dream literally. Now on this new machine i dont know what but the vobs ar running well when clicked on and they run in INTERVIDEO WINDVD player. Everything is perfect. Then i load the same vob onto the vegas timeline and it becomes 1 min in duration. But the size is still about 800 mb or so. IT plays 1 min then stutters or stops. When i scrub thru the timeline. I can at times see small portions of the missing elements playing randomly. Like as if they were embedded and hidden within this shrunken clip. Then ive tried dropping some windows media 720p hd files. The same ones you get on the WMV Showcase on Microsofts site, the CORAL REEF ADVENTURE, TERMINATOR, etc. Load these on the timeline and theres extreme stuttering and even application freezing. And these clips are just 3 mins or lesser.
 
G-man:

Vegas is an excellent program for HDV or the HVX's DVCPRO HD format if you use Cineform or Raylight to convert the files to AVI's. The main difference is that HDV is more temporal and MXF (DVCPRO HD) is more spacial in its demand. That is HDV in it's M2T file format is more time consuming to edit since you reprocess a 15 frame GOP with each edit or CC. But you are only dealing with a 25mb data stream. The HVX MXF DVCPRO HD is a 100mb data stream and just storing the files take considerably more disk storage. Less of course if you shoot in 720p mode.

However, that said once the two formats are converted to intermediate AVI's by either program the editing is much more friendly. Vegas does not now (and most likely never will) support native Panasonic MXF files without one of the above programs.

You will need horsepower to edit HDV or Panny MXF files or their intermediates. The Vegas software is very capable and for the money the price performance ratio is amazing.

I have a Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66 Ghz processor running with 2mb of DDR2 800 ram and an ATI 1950 XTX video card with 512mb of ram and 2X250mb of disk space internal with a Raid 0 config. External I am running 1Tb of Raid 0 storage for the clips. I own a Canon XH-A1 but edit a lot of HXV footage for a fellow DP.

I am running Cineform with Vegas at the current time.

As to the response above about mixed performance. Basically a VOB file is just a basic MPEG-2 system stream -- meaning that it is a file that contains multiplexed MPEG-2 video stream, audio streams (normally AC3 and DTS formats) and subtitle streams.

These are not prefered editing formats and in fact since they combine encoded sound and sub-title info they can and will interfere with the Vegas editing codecs, especially with long duration clips. This is not a good comparison for evaluating the performance of Vegas.

BTW I also use Premiere Pro 2.0 on some projects since I collaborate with others and I need to edit in their format. I like certain features of PPro 2.0 but actually Vegas is very powerful and simplifies many common editing tasks.

As mentioned above download the trial for Vegas and also grab the Cineform trial and give it a whirl

Hope this helps.

S Cannon





 
Last edited:
Thanks

Thanks

Thanks for the responses guys. I'll have to take Vegas into more serious consideration as an nle system.
 
Keep in mind that with the current version of Raylight, there is no conversion necessary -- you can simply drop the MXFs onto the timeline. Beats the snot out of Cineform in every conceiveable respect.
 
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