Sony Vegas 6 / HD Video Editing issue
by Seth Gram
on
Sep 4, 2008 at 1:01:37 pm
Hi, i'm making this post for a friend of mine who uses Sony Vegas 6 for HD Video editing. He's having some issues with the software on his PC, when he goes to edit the HD Video, the playback is slightly choppy. Of course choppiness while editing is not the easiest thing in the world to deal with. So i'm posting here, to see if anyone else has experienced an issue like this one. He's running a Gateway PC, that has a Pentium 4 3.0ghz, with about 1.25gb of RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1600 video card, which i just updated the video driver on. These specs are seemingly way over the system requirements as far as HDV is concerned, so we're both quite puzzled as to why he's having these issues. Hopefully someone can assist us and help to shed a little light on this situation.
Re: Sony Vegas 6 / HD Video Editing issue by John Rofrano on Sep 6, 2008 at 4:51:45 pm
Vegas 6 is not as optimized to play back HDV like Vegas 7 and Vegas Pro 8 is. This could be the reason for the choppy playback. I know when I went from Vegas 6 to Vegas 7 the performance boost for HDV was significant. Now with Vegas Pro 8 it's even better. Vegas 6 came with the CineForm codec so that you could render your HDV MPEG-2 as CineForm intermediaries which playback a little smoother. You might want to try that.
Also those specs are not way over the system requirements. The memory requirement is 1GB so 1.25 is slightly over. Most people doing HDV work have 2GB as a minimum. I work with 4GB. Also a P4 single core is old by today's standards. Most newer computers come with QuadCores these days so a DualCore is kind of minimum for HDV even though the Sony site doesn't say it. But I believe the main reason you are having problems is because Vegas 6 just as isn't optimized for native HDV playback like Vegas 7 or even Vegas Pro 8.
We (VASST) have a Vegas script plug-in called GearShift for people like your friend. It will automatically render the HDV to DV Widescreen proxies or CineForm intermediaries for editing and then swap them back to HDV for final render. It was specifically designed for people with older computers like your friend and may be just what he needs.
