NO avchd camera import + dreadful performance in 9

ushere wrote on 5/27/2009, 6:02 PM
there's NO avchd camera import on the file menu in 9. it's there in 8.

am i missing something?

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ok, imported avchd from sr10 via 8 (no problem), but:

playback in 9 is dreadful - takes 2>3 secs to run up to full frame rate (auto preview), and then it has the occasional stutter!

in 8 it's instant and smooth as silk!

this is on my new i7 xp pro, sp3, 32 bit (6gb ram - in anticipation of win 7). clean install

since i bought 9 thinking it would be better when working with avchd i have to say i deeply regret doing so at the moment.

leslie

==============================================

a little rant while i wait for a render....

i've followed the various threads re 9 on the board here, and as i wrote, i bought 9 now more for the discount than anything else. however, i did expect to get some 'major' improvements from it, such as the ability to handle avchd better than 8, etc.,

what i seem to have gotten is a new gui, a few bells and whistles, the ability to handle large graphics (though there seems to be some hic-ups with that from reading here), and the ability to handle red. (hands up those using red - i bet you're a small minority).

what i'm trying to understand is how could the poor avchd performance (lack of import tool), the chroma pick tool, and the other sundry OBVIOUS problems get past the supposed beta testers?

i mean, do any of theses beta testers live in the real world? i'm not complaining about any new bugs that might surface, but for goodness sake - the performance with avchd is appalling......

Comments

srode wrote on 5/27/2009, 6:51 PM
It's much faster rendering AVCHD
Sebaz wrote on 5/27/2009, 6:53 PM
It always pays to put the brakes on no matter how excited we might be about a new version of a software we really like, or pretty much everything. Any new major version of any software usually has bugs that need to be worked out, but in the case of Vegas 9, it's just way too much.

My concept of Sony as a software company was between mediocre and barely ok, after the release of 9 it's between mediocre and terrible, I guess 3 on a scale from one to ten. When you not only don't fix previous bugs, but also ruin something that used to work fine -if not excellent, but fine- in the previous version (AVCHD playback), then what else is left to say?
ushere wrote on 5/27/2009, 6:59 PM
agreed sebaz.....

srode, i'm not doubting that's the case - but i'm not willing to have to put up with such crappy performance to get to a render stage ;-)

once i have it sorted out in 8c, i'll try a render in 9 though.....

thanks
ECB wrote on 5/27/2009, 7:10 PM
To import AVCHD go to View >Device Explorer. Do a search in V9 Help for Device Explorer.

E B
farss wrote on 5/27/2009, 7:20 PM
Mate,
all I can say is we needed to replace our aging fleet of HC7s. We bought a comparable Sony AVCHD camera (CX12 I think). We tried it in FCP which most of our clients use naturally. Performance in Vegas was already know.

Do I need to say more to explain why we're ordering a number of HC9s?

Not that the above helps you much. If and when I ever have to deal with AVCHD I'll transcode it to either CIneform or XDCAM 422 for a pleasant editing experience. If I need to convert a lot of clips I'll use Peachrock's Multirenderer and run it overnight. Much better to get the grief over and done with.

Bob.
blink3times wrote on 5/27/2009, 8:19 PM
"there's NO avchd camera import on the file menu in 9. "

I would imagine they got rid of it because it's redundant and unnecessary. Import your MTS files directly to your HDD then open Vegas and import. I fail to see why anything more complicated is required???
warriorking wrote on 5/27/2009, 8:22 PM
Doing a recent project from Memorial day weekeng choir concert using three Canon AVCHD Camcorders, 2 HG10's, one HG21, setup a multicamera layout, no problems at all with Vegas 9, all three camcorder files are running fine in the review window, there is a slight delay when ever I switch between the three , nothing drastic..Rendering project as we speak......
farss wrote on 5/27/2009, 9:01 PM
"I fail to see why anything more complicated is required??? "

Obviously SCS thought otherwise..
Not that I've tried it however the new device explorer will not only offload the clips, it'll also join split clips.

Bob.
ushere wrote on 5/27/2009, 9:16 PM
ok....

device explorer is an obvious improvement over avchd camera import - i have learnt my lesson..... not that i thought not having cam import was a 'bug', just that i was 'missing something'....

as for playback, i'm very happy for those NOT experiencing problems (i find myself on the other side of the fence on this - 8c was great for me), but there's certainly enough people mentioning it to warrant questions being raised....

i also notice than m2t's require a couple of seconds to come up to speed in 9 - whereas in 8 they playback instantly......

i eagerly await 9a.

leslie

bob, i'm going to trans the avchd to mfx and call it quits ;-)
Rosebud wrote on 5/27/2009, 10:45 PM
from ushere > what i'm trying to understand is how could the poor avchd performance (lack of import tool), the chroma pick tool, and the other sundry OBVIOUS problems get past the supposed beta testers?

I agree and in my point of view, the only way to ovoid this is to have a public beta version.
if I recall correctly, Vegas4 had a public beta and it was one of the most robust version.
ushere wrote on 5/27/2009, 11:28 PM
okay, now my 'customised' tool icons disappear without warning! i can get them back by closing and re-opening vegas.

i mean, REALLY, this is getting to be too much.

i have 8c on this new (clean install vegas only) box and it's behaving immaculately.

am getting to be rather grumpy....
blink3times wrote on 5/28/2009, 3:52 AM
"Obviously SCS thought otherwise..

Good point.... but has anybody actually gotten Device Explorer to work? Mine just says "failed to initiate"
farss wrote on 5/28/2009, 5:09 AM
Dear oh dear.
You've got quite a problem then if your device explorer is failing to initialize. Try right clicking the left pane and then browse to the right device. That got mine initialized quite nicely.

All joking aside there does seem to be a bit of a problem with it if it finds something that looks like it might be a suitable device. It can then spit the dummy if the device isn't actually something like a SxS card reader and you cannot proceed. I think Megabit (Piotr) has already reported this as a bug. If you can track down the errant device and disconnect it you should be able to get it to work.

Bob.

blink3times wrote on 5/28/2009, 5:11 AM
Well... I did get it to work, but quite interesting.... According to DEVEXP.log it was looking for a BDMV folder on my L drive (which is the first drive on my secondary sata controller). I put a dummy folder there with a dummy 0000.MTS file in the stream folder... and Device Explorer now sees the camera (which shows up as M drive).

Don't think I'll be using it though. If you drag the MTS clips DIRECTLY from the cam to your HDD then the time/date is preserved and shows up in windows explorer (which I need for other things).

Device Explorer on the other hand destroys the original time/date info for windows explorer which ends up showing the import time instead.

I did noticed that Device explorer Presents the time/dtae on each clip as it renames the clips on import.... but the time/date is not in any real usable format.
newhope wrote on 5/28/2009, 7:28 AM
Ugly, to say the least.

None of this is convincing me that upgrading to Vegas 9 is a viable option for AVCHD editing.
dibbkd wrote on 5/28/2009, 7:43 AM
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones, V9 edits my AVCHD files just fine, but then again so did V8.
Ian Schwartz wrote on 5/28/2009, 9:59 AM
I seem to have the opposite problem from everybody else with Vegas 9. I can import and edit fine, but I just can't render to AVCHD. I get out of memory errors on a 7 minute project. Then again these same projects crash 8c, so I guess this is a bit of an improvement :-).
blink3times wrote on 5/28/2009, 12:38 PM
"I get out of memory errors on a 7 minute project. "

Are you in 8 bit or 32 bit mode? "Out of memory" usually comes when you're operating in 32 bit mode.
Sebaz wrote on 5/28/2009, 2:25 PM
I seem to have the opposite problem from everybody else with Vegas 9. I can import and edit fine, but I just can't render to AVCHD. I get out of memory errors on a 7 minute project. Then again these same projects crash 8c, so I guess this is a bit of an improvement :-).

I can see your computer specs in your profile, but since they don't allow to specify the exact amount of RAM if it's over 1 GB, how much RAM do you have, and do you run Vista 32 or 64 bit?

You can try setting the paging file to a fixed size of 8 GB in Vista, and see if the error still happens after you reboot.
MTuggy wrote on 5/28/2009, 8:57 PM
Go with a 12 GB page file split 6 GB on two drives- fixed my crashing issues.

Mike
Tomsde wrote on 5/29/2009, 12:38 PM
I have the problem with the AVCHD Vixia HF10 video files taking a few seconds to come up to speed when playback begins; it will do it consistently in any preview mode. I noticed that when I drag clips to the timeline it doesn't do the "building peaks" thing anymore--but I really didn't mind that because once it was done, in Vegas 8 Pro the clips played fine.

I just think it's very odd that Vegas Movie Studio Plat Pro 9 didn't have this problem at all with AVCHD at all; even before I upgraded my PC recently it didn't--but the flagship Pro version does it.

Like every other computer issue there appears to be people that don't have the problem. Unless it has something to do with the i7 Processor, I can't think of what could be causing it.
hazydave wrote on 6/4/2009, 8:32 AM
There should be NO surprise that AVCHD native editing is slow... I think the word was out long before the hardware, and even with some evolution in coding within Vegas, I'm not expecting to see the same kind of speedup over time as we had with MPEG-2... at least not without some new hardware.

With that said, I've had zero problems actually editing AVCHD video. I wasn't looking for Vegas to have some magic knowledge of my AVCHD devices.. I just open the discs and drag the .m2ts files onto an HDD for editing... that was kind of the point of going tapeless (eg, no "capture" phase).

The real problem I'm having with with intermediate files. I don't know if Vegas 9 included a CineForm update, but CineForm rejects 1920x1080 as a supported resolution (1440x1080 works just dandy). For a very short project (two minutes), I initially tried Sony's YUV losseless CODEC, but it crashed Vegas.. never used it before, so I don't know if that's normal, but I doubt it. The latest HuffYUV works to an extent, but if you render HuffYUV to HuffYUV, Vegas 9 gets clever and smart-renders things that haven't changed, which totally screws up that segment of video -- it's not smart-rendering right.

I suppose these are two different issues.. I the short film, I'm building up animated bits over animated bits, and eventually bounce to a new base to keep things fast. The AVCHD slow-down was the first layer of that "bounce".. no problems with the speed of YUV, CineForm, or even MPEG-2 these days. I'm curious if anyone else is working in 1920x1080 (or beyond) and what form(s) they're using for editing... I guess "RAW from a RAID" is always a possibility, but it's also overkill for some projects.
blink3times wrote on 6/4/2009, 9:57 AM
What cineform are you using? Neo Scene?
Ian Schwartz wrote on 6/8/2009, 6:24 AM
I'm running Vista 32 w/4 GB of RAM, though I understand that Vista 32 doesn't recognize anything over 3 GB.
But all of my rendering problems went away when I stopped using the Sony AVC codec and switched to the MainConcept! It was like day and night. No more memory errors, relatively swift rendering sessions.