Try and use the PS3 to create a title and overlay that onto your video. You can't? That's strange! :)

The PS3 is a player. Vegas is an editor... 2 different things. While it is true that Vegas could be a wee bit more cutting-edge in the playback department, it is designed to be an editor. It does not use your video card at all (well... nearly anyway) Vegas operates almost entirely on cpu and memory. Set you preview up in PREVIEW mode and you get a better response. Bare in mind though.... there aren't too many editors that can play back avchd at any kind of smooth rate..... especially when you start adding effects, transitions...etc.

As for your computer... you need to find a hardware accelerated player like PowerDVD or nero showtime

When rendering, does the preview setting matter?

From the responses I've received so far, it sounds like I can't possibly render HD video on a computer with Vegas 8 as smooth as what I see on the PS3. If that's the case, I'm very disappointed. In fact, when I upgraded to a new HD camcorder, I had thought it was broken from my experiences with Vegas. Then I tried the SD disk in the PS3 connected to my new Samsung plasma TV, and then it was like, wow!!!, this camcorder is awesome!!!

Now, I'm on to the next logical step of trying to edit the video in Vegas 8 while preserving the sharpness and smoothness.

Is there a recommended resolution I should shoot in? I think I have the camcorder set to the "Easy" setting. My video clips say they are at 1920x1080, 16:9, system bitrate 18.00 Mbps, H.264, video bitrate 16.0 Mbps, frame rate 29.97 fps. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I have more than the minimum required system as per the SONY website. Do they have an optimum system described elsewhere?

Not being able to preview at the highest quality and frame rate has no relation to the final render. Your renders will be just fine.

John gave you the short answer. Maybe you should try a few test renders and play the output elsewhere.

Here are some things to consider:

--Vegas probably plays your AVCHD media better in the trimmer than from the timeline. This is because (for whatever reason) Vegas is doing much more work when it plays from the timeline than from the trimmer. This is true even when there's only one clip and only one track on the timeline.
--AVCHD is very CPU intensive to edit, no matter what NLE you use. It's just about the worst choice for editing but if you get a really, really, really fast system you should have a decent experience. Think Corei7, 8 GB ram. Disk speed is not a high priority for AVCHD and the graphics card just needs to support a couple of high resolution screens. Not a problem for an average modern card.
--Vegas doesn't really stress perfection in its timeline playback. One of the tradeoffs is that you can adjust filters while you are playing video from the timeline. Other NLEs just stop playing. I know this is small consolation if the most important thing for you is flawless playback at full/good or better.

Rob Mack

>> it sounds like I can't possibly render HD video on a computer
>> with Vegas 8 as smooth as what I see on the PS3

Depending on your video, what you do with it etc, when you render, the rendering time is going to be somewhere from faster than real time (video runs too fast) to many times slower than real time. Rendering is a process that creates new video, and it will only extremely rarely run at the same speed as the video when played.

Why do you care? What matters is what the video looks like AFTER it has been rendered, and the way it looks DURING render has no bearing on that. If you, for example, use an amount of correction with Magic Bullet on your video it will take hours and hours to rend, even on a very high-end computer. For those of us who can remember all the way back to the last century, say 1999 or so, rendering would easily be an overnight thing.

This is BTW, not Vegas specific. All video editing software will have similar behavior.

To clarify, I'm not concerned about how long it takes to render, I it takes a long time to render. But when it is finally done I notice when I play it back as a WMV via the HD in my PS3 it is a bit jerkier than the original. Why? The PS3 is just a $400 unit, my new $2000 state of the art computer should be able to produce and play back smooth video IMO. Does anyone know what is in the PS3 that makes it work so smoothly?

"Does anyone know what is in the PS3 that makes it work so smoothly?"

The Cell processor.... VERY powerful

But more to the point, the PS3 was built to do one thing.... play. It's easy to design a machine to do one thing as compared to a machine that needs to be highly universal.... like a computer and its software

I would suggest though that if your video is jerky on playback then your render settings were wrong somewhere

The Cell processor in the PS3 is an 8-core CPU, designed totally for decoding and playing.

I wish I had a few of them in parallel in my workstation.

I don't know much about hardware, but if Sony can get the game/computer PS3 to play smooth HD video on the cheap, you would think this type of power would be readily available in a computer. I guess it's back to the waiting game......

The PS3 has significantly more playback horsepower than a PC.

But when it is finally done I notice when I play it back as a WMV via the HD in my PS3 it is a bit jerkier than the original. Why?

Are you sure the Vegas project settings are correct - i.e. do they match the source material (which is presumably 60Hz interlaced AVCHD) ?

I wonder if the conversion to WMV9 is also de-interlacing the video to generate a progressive output - this will degrade the quality and produce less-smooth video. Try rendering out to AVCHD of MPEG-2 with the same settings as the source files (field order, interlacing, size, frame rate etc).

Your PC should easily be able to playback AVCHD smoothly (outside of Vegas) provided the player can make use of the hardware decoding on the video card (DXVA), and the refresh rate of the PC monitor is a multiple of the movie frame rate e.g. 60Hz. Try the MPC-HC player [url=http://www.xvidvideo.ru/content/category/1/1/2/] (latest versions) or [url=http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/] (home page).

Tony

>> if Sony can get the game/computer PS3 to play smooth HD
>> video on the cheap, you would think this type of power would
>> be readily available in a computer

It more or less is, with varying degrees of success. You need a new graphics card and a media player (or decoder) written specifically to take advantage of said graphics card. If you already have a newish graphics card, then you just need the player.

As others have said, the Cell CPU is AMAZINGLY powerful. When people ran Folding@Home on the PS3 it seriously outperformed the PCs out there. Folding maths is similar to encoding and decoding. Your GPU is similar to the Cell in many ways, and handles this a lot better than your regular CPU. So, you need GPU assisted playback. Check the website of the GPU guys.

Hi JV1

I also have a Canon HF10 camcorder similar to yours and experience jerky playback. It's amazing the amount of responses to this thread which mention about preview performance but I don't think that's your issue is it? The issue is the rendered output playing on the PS3 is jerky?

I wonder what output settings standard blu ray movies are that we watch as they always appear smooth too.

JV1

JV1: "When rendering, does the preview setting matter?" Answer: No.

What are your project settings? Look in File-Properties. Apply these settings:
* Full resolution rendering quality: Best
* Motion blur type: Gaussian
* Deinterlace method: Blend fields or Interpolate fields

Maybe this will help.

Jøran Toresen