Couple of getting-started questions about HD editing, playback

[android25ua]

Hello folks,

I am new to the forum and to the video editing/recording world. This is a nice place to be!

So earlier this year I bought myself a Canon 60D to get into a little bit of photography with plans to do some video recording later down the road. It is only now though that I got to the latter and I've got a couple of questions.

Eversince I started filming, I set the video quality to max (1920x1080 @ 30FPS) and that. I have also installed Sony Vegas Pro 10.0c and started fiddling around with it. The issues I have been getting:

1) The .mov videos recorded with my Canon are very choppy/laggy in the Vegas pre-view window. I tried to record 30 second clips in all quality settings and it seems to lag less with lower quality videos (smaller resolution and higher frame rate). It barely lags at all at the lowest setting 640x480@60fps i believe. Now is this purely hardware related? My computer is not exactly top notch but I would be willing to upgrade at this point since I haven't bought any hardware parts in a long time. (AMD dual core X64 3600+, 2gigs of ram, GeForce 240GT) If the issue is purely hardware, what kind of rig is recommended for beginner video editing?

2) I tried rendering a couple of video bits just to see if it works without adding any filters, modifying anything or doing anything to the videos at all. I just cut bits out of my 30sec clips of different quality and pasted them all together and tried to render that. The file I am getting is just a black screen video. It runs but I can't see anything. The file is saved as .avi and all other settings are default as they were since I didn't change anything after installing vegas. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

[redwudz]

It sounds like you have several problems.

Not many editors can smoothly playback video as a preview. They were never designed as players. If the edited video has the same problem with a regular software/hardware player, then you may have a problem.

HD video takes a fair bit of processing power for playback. A good video card can help quite a bit. Most commonly with a slower PC and GPU, you will see jumpy video and lagging video compared to the sound track. You want to check your Task Manager and see how much CPU percent is being used. Most often over 50% CPU, you have a problem. With a decent video card, you can get that down to less than 10% and usually have no playback problems.

Black screen video could be a lot of things, most commonly overlay problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay A faster video card with hardware overlay can help.

Generally, for working with HD video, especially encoding, a quad core CPU running at 3Ghz is what I would recommend, along with a lot of hard drive space. I use a small 120GB boot drive and three large HDDs, presently 1500GBs. If you only have one HDD on your PC, that can be a bottleneck as the OS is constantly accessing it. RAM is cheap enough, so 4GB for a 32bit OS. I double that for a 64bit OS. I run W7 on most of my PCs at present.

Others here can probably give more advice.

BTW, your subject title is a bit too vague. A title that better reflects your subject is what we perfer per our rules. I will change it for you this time.

And welcome to our forums.

[edDV]

Eversince I started filming, I set the video quality to max (1920x1080 @ 30FPS) and that. I have also installed Sony Vegas Pro 10.0c and started fiddling around with it. The issues I have been getting:

1) The .mov videos recorded with my Canon are very choppy/laggy in the Vegas pre-view window. I tried to record 30 second clips in all quality settings and it seems to lag less with lower quality videos (smaller resolution and higher frame rate). It barely lags at all at the lowest setting 640x480@60fps i believe. Now is this purely hardware related? My computer is not exactly top notch but I would be willing to upgrade at this point since I haven't bought any hardware parts in a long time. (AMD dual core X64 3600+, 2gigs of ram, GeForce 240GT) If the issue is purely hardware, what kind of rig is recommended for beginner video editing?

Do your Vegas project settings match the source or other?

At 1920x1080 30p Vegas project setting, here is what is going on for 1920x1080 30p source. Canon 60D video is compressed to h.264. In order to play from the timeline, your CPU must first decode the h.264 to RGB. Your CPU isn't up to the task. In Vegas Pro 11, some GPU assist is applied to timeline preview but only with high end display cards (GTX 4xx or higher). See http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration

Your computer doesn't quality and your CPU is relatively weak. So, like me you can't directly edit 1080p h.264. Your options include.

1. Full decompression + add 3-4 disk RAID.
2. Use a digital intermediate such as Cineform Neoscene (your CPU does't meet minimum recommended).
3. Transcode to MPeg2. This will allow you to frame step to find edit points but it probably still won't play smooth.

If you use a project format other than the source format, the CPU must also resize the video during preview. That should bring things to a total hault.

[edDV]

2) I tried rendering a couple of video bits just to see if it works without adding any filters, modifying anything or doing anything to the videos at all. I just cut bits out of my 30sec clips of different quality and pasted them all together and tried to render that. The file I am getting is just a black screen video. It runs but I can't see anything. The file is saved as .avi and all other settings are default as they were since I didn't change anything after installing vegas. What am I doing wrong?

AVI? What exactly were your project and "Render as" settings?

My best guess is you are trying to convert to SD DV format?

For a 1920x1080 30p project, I suggest your first attempt should be the 1920x1080 MPeg2 Blu-Ray 25Mb/s template.

[Cornucopia]

So, for your full rez clips, you're using 1920x1080 @29.97p (or 24p), at 44Mbps. This is a CPU bottleneck, and almost a harddrive bottleneck as well.

No matter what, you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't already have a 2nd hard drive (preferrably 7200rpm or faster), or possibly even a RAID0 setup and put your video EXCLUSIVELY on that/those partition(s). Also, I agree about the RAM, and possibly the video card (you certainly want one that can make use of GPU accelleration).

Do a test:
Assuming you're starting with a LEAN application/process setup...

Take a copy of the lowest rez clip (640x480 @ 59.94) and open in a DV-based template session in Vegas. Put in the timeline and adjust the properties to account for the fact that your clip is square pixel based and DV is NOT. This should stretch the file to full screen.
Then, export using a DV-AVI template.
Make sure your exported clip resides on that 2nd HD we just told you to buy. Play that in WMP or similar player. If you still have problems, you've REALLY got problems. But you shouldn't have. This should tell you that lower-compression ratio footage with lower decoding complexities are OK and you should be fine with Standard Def video (most modern PCs should be ok).

Then do a similar test with your highest HD footage, opening it in an HD-based template session. Put in the timeline and export using both a Highly-compressed h.264 template (say 8Mbps) and a Lightly-compressed Intermediate format (Cineform or other wavelet or lossless codec). The 1st will stress the CPU/GPU but not the hard drive, whereas the 2nd will stress the harddrive but not the CPU/GPU (much). If one works but not the other, you know which area need to be addressed. If both are OK, you probably just need to tweak a few things and then all should be OK. If NEITHER will work without problems, it's a clear indicator that your system still needs upgrading (and you won't be able to do HD correctly until you do).

Scott