Editing HDV as DV?
 

Hello

I recently started playing with Vegas using footage from my sh**ty consumer camcorder. I plan to buy HC1 withing next few weeks and get into more serious stuff and learn more about shootig editing.

Editing DV in Vegas is pretty smooth with my current machine. Renderig project with magic bullet effets applied takes sometimes 14 times the clip lenght but thats understandable.

However, when i downloaded some HDV footage from the internet my Vegas almost crashed, the playback is barely working, footage is scattering etc. My machine is simple not fast enough to edit HDV smoothly.

Is it possible that, after buying HC1, i could somehow downsample my HDV footage to DV format in terms of resolution (i dont know if i use it in right context - im talking 720x480 in dv and 1440 x 1080i i hdv, right?)

is it possible and how to be able to work with a footage that has details, colors etc. of hdv but resolution of dv so its easier to edit on a slower omputer than actual HDV?

i know it is a basic question but i did search and didnt found exact answer.

thanks a lot

One thing that might be your problem is the version of Vegas you are working on. You didn't mention if you were using Vegas 5, 6 or 7. Vegas 7 does a *much* better job of working with HDV than previous versions.

Check with the camera to see if it will downconvert HDV into DV during capture (The HDR-FX1 does this) or if not, see if the camera will shoot in regular old DV mode.

There are probably some third party type applications out there (check VASST) that will capture and do the conversion for you as well.

It's a bummer to get something like HDV though and not be able to work with it.

Jon

Yes you can
 

Voitek, you don't have to feel bad about your older computer and its limits when it comes to editing HDV. You're not the only person in this situation, we live in a transition time and even professionals with many years of experience in editing DV are looking for answers. Sure, to work efficiently, you need a killer PC but until you get that system, you can get your feet wet in HDV with some work-arounds.

Yes, it is possible to decompress and resize your HDV footage and edit it as regular DV. You can use a software called MPEG Streamclip to convert to AVI. Play around with the different formats, different settings and I'm sure you will find something that works for you.

An even higher quality resizing and conversion can be done using VirtualDub MPEG2, but VDub will not take the m2t stream, you will need to convert it first to mpeg using the same MPEG Streamclip mentioned above. Both of these are freeware!

Good luck and come back here, tell us how it worked for you.