Upgrade in mid project?
 

Hello!

Ok, I'm in a bit of a rut. I'm mid way (actually, more than half way) through a current project and I've run into an issue.

Some of the footage that I have was shot with a Canon H...something. THe one that records in AVCHD and the streams are in the .MTS format.

Now, currently I'm using 6.0 to edit, but just recently aquired 9 and Vegas 9 has built in support for the MTS files and I can edit directly, which is great, but I'm a bit hectic to upgrade in the middle of a project.

Is it too risky for me to upgrade right now? Or should everything be OK?

I mean, one option is to keep editing until I have a "final draft" with the current footage, export the EDL and an uncompressed AVI (good to have) and then upgrade, but I'd rather have everything at my disposal from the get go.

So, is it wise to upgrade mid project or should I play it safe and edit a final draft with the current setup and then chop up that with the new footage?

EDIT:

Forgot to mention my footage consists of XL2 footage, Canon T1i 720p footage and another canon HD camera at full 1080i. My PC is a quad core with 2 gigs of ram running on windows XP. No Vista mess!

Conventional wisdom says to never upgrade mid-project. Mostly because people have had some bad experiences - not specifically with V9, but generally. Something doesn't work, or doesn't work the way it used to. Some essential add-on no longer works on the new version. Those kinds of things.

But, considering the differences between 6 and 8, and 8 and 9, you'll have a pretty different editing experience if you do upgrade.

Ultimately you're just going to have to decide, conventional wisdom or no. Were I in your shoes I'd go ahead and install 9, but don't uninstall 6. Open your v6 project in v9 and save it out with a new filename immediately, then take a close look at what you've got. Maybe you'll be fine. If not, you can still open your original v6 file in v6 and continue editing.

The point here is that once saved in v9, you can no longer open that file in v6, period. If you have to go back for any reason, you'll have to start with the version of your project as it exists today - be sure to save a copy that's openable in v6!

If you've been using Cineform at all, that's an area likely to be very sticky - If I remember (no longer have v6 installed), v6 was the first version of Vegas that came with the Cineform codec, both for decoding and encoding. v9 has none! If you've used Cineform and this turns out to be a problem, you can download/install the Cineform Neo Player (free), and v9 will likely be able to decode.

However, the install of the Cineform Player will likely break your v6 cineform encoder... which can be recovered (search the forum on "rename cfhd.dll").

Roger, Do Not upgrade untill you have your current project done. You never know what will
happen with a new install. Play it safe!

Terry

you can upgrade (install and use V9) side by side with V6.They are seperate installs and one does not overlay the other unlike some other programs.

I've had 4 different versions of Vegas on my machine at the same time. BUT!!!!! If you open and save a project in the NEW version you will NOT be able to open it in the old version anymore but you can render to AVI and use that in any version.

I have always said to never upgrade mid-project unless there is something that you absolutely need in the new version. It sounds like this is the case for you since Vegas 6 has no AVCHD support. An alternate, less risky, workflow would be to buy a tool like AVCHD UpShift or CineForm Neo Scene and convert all of the AVCHD to HDV or CineForm and stay with Vegas 6.

I have Vegas 5, 6, 7, Pro 8, & 9 all living happily side-by side on my PC. Make sure that you save a version of your project (.veg) file in Vegas 6 format and don't ever touch it in Vegas Pro 9.0. If something horrible goes wrong, you will always have the Vegas 6 project to fall back on. Pretty much if you open a copy of the project in Vegas Pro 9.0 and it all plays back and looks OK you are good to go.

You will absolutely LOVE Vegas Pro 9 for editing HD after using Vegas 6 for so long. It's quite a leap forward! ;-)

~jr

Sorry for the late response guys, it was crunch time!

Thanks for all the advice, I ended up just fileserving the MTS, dumping the footage in VirtualDub and exporting to a more manageable, less proprietary codec. It worked great, but my 2 gigs of ram I think was the culprit for the last few hours worth of headaches...

...my system kept crashing at export. I had to export into 6 segments and then splice them together in VD.

I made the premiere by a mere hour and a half. WHEW!

Thanks for all the help guys! Now I need to upgrade my machine (running a quad with not nearly enough ram)