I am using both Premiere Pro and Vegas. I am getting the Z1 this week and have been looking into which platform I should use. It appears that Cineform is more powerful with Premeire Pro than with Vegas. I have not used the Cineform product, just reading the info on their website.

So has Sony announced any plans to give us real time HDV editing in Vegas?

What exactly would be more powerful? From my understanding
Cineform offers the same levels of performance on both Premiere
and Vegas.

From what I heard from some users, 1920 x 1080 in HDV will not
be realtime on any system at the moment.

Just reading directly off of the Cineform website.

It says the version for Vegas is "near real time" and that the version for Premeire Pro is "real time".

Yes, Currently Aspect HD (for Premiere Pro) offer about double for the performance of Connect HD (for Vegas.) Aspect HD includes a new video pipeline and 40+ real-time effects that exploit Premiere's hardware plug-in interface (although it does this with software only.) This is why AHD is so much faster.

Rob,

HDV encoded at 1440x1080 (Sony HDV) is real-time on modern P4 systems (note: Prospect HD supports 1920x1080 10-bit in real-time.) We regularly can mix up to 3 stream of Sony HDV at 30 frames per second on a 3+Ghz P4. Aspect HD performs like a hardware accelerater without any hardware upgrades.

Key advantages so far for Prem Pro with mainconcept HDV plugin:

- renders seem faster than Vegas on same machine
- deinterlace capability on Prem Pro seems more straightforward in Prem Pro, helping to give more filmic type result from 60i/50i if you so chose...

Overall, I prefer Vegas for more straightforward, quicker editing - you just drag and overlap successive clips for transitions, etc...

It's just that some of the re-sampling that goes on in Vegas is a little wonky in terms of getting "unexpected" results.

25 fps/50i to 24p for instance doesn't seem to work as effectively as in say FCP...

Okay, thanks for the info. I was expecting both products to perform
the same, oh well, can't have everything I guess! <g>

Great to hear it is realtime as well, not sure where I read that
it wasn't (so many posts).

"It says the version for Vegas is "near real time" and that the version for Premeire Pro is "real time"."

but what is really considered realtime?? Personally, if i have to stop a looped playback while im adjusting keyframes is NOT realtime.. not in my book. as what i am seeing is not in motion and im working with video, so i have to see motion to place my Keys correctly..

as for preview and playback, it depends on how important that is to your work. most people are happy with using a reference monitor for jsut that.. a reference monitor.. for colour and gamma correction etc..

in the end, they all have to render... realtime render is all good.. but at what sacrifice within the production process??

I dunno.. im still waiting for the dust to settle then i'll move to the one which works best for me..

<<<...what is really considered realtime?? >>>

Ah, that's the million-dollar marketing question, now isn't it? It's worth noting that almost everyone tries to bill their video editing products as "real time" these days, but some are much more so than others. To me, real time editing means you don't have to render anything to see the results played back at full quality on your computer, preferably with simultaneous full quality monitoring and full quality output to your choice of recording devices. In practice, every editing program has its limits, so none are truly real time under all circumstances.

With HDV in particular, I know of only one shipping solution with real time playback to both the computer screen and an external HDTV monitor, and none which can output in real time back to an HDV camera or to current HD distribution formats. Compared to DV editing options that's not very effiicent, and means it's going to take more time to produce an HDV video than a DV one.

I'm anxiously waiting for the long-promised "hdv" update to Premiere Pro. The long wait has me worried, as they're well into their second month of beta-testing. Let's hope the bugs are not insurmountable. As a long-time Premiere user, I'll probably go with 1.51 and Cineform, provided there's batch capture and export to tape! I've accepted that the only inexpensive way to preview on an external monitor is with the also unreleased Matrox HD card.

Derek: why wait for Adobe to trouble-shoot their free version of the Cineform plugin when you can buy the real thing and get better editing performance for a reasonable price?

As far as I know you're not going to get functional batch capture with most current HDV editing solutions, but that's so "20th century" anyway--it's time to stop worrying about that and just buy some big hard drives so you can do bulk captures of all your footage.

Regarding the Matrox video card with component outputs, are you sure that's not shipping yet? Seems like that should be happening soon if it hasn't already.

Also worth investigating (out now) is the NVidia power Quadro FX 540. We are get one (hopeful) next week.

I'm waiting for 1.51 only because it will support hdv export to camera. Presently even the $499 Aspect HD doesn't help me in that regard. Once I'm sure that export to tape with Premiere Pro is actually working, bug-free, I'll invest in Aspect HD. I've been burnt before by promises from software vendors - no export, no buy.

The feature you are requesting is working in the current version of Aspect HD (2.5b is fully tested in this regard), it is just a dormant feature awaiting the new Premiere release. We do plan another release upon the Premiere arrival which includes even more cool upgrades -- free to current users.

<<<-- Originally posted by David Newman : The feature you are requesting is working in the current version of Aspect HD (2.5b is fully tested in this regard), it is just a dormant feature awaiting the new Premiere release. We do plan another release upon the Premiere arrival which includes even more cool upgrades -- free to current users. -->>>

Will this also be available for Connect HD?

Connect HD works today with Vegas 5.0d. Just get the latest Vegas download and Connect HD and you are set.

Good news indeed - now we must wait for Adobe....

The Matrox card is not shipping yet to my knowledge, but the Nvidia card looks promising, and about $60 cheaper than the Matrox.

We all need ways to keep the quality of our FANTASTIC HD images. Here are some related thoughts

1/ Premiere Pro hability to re-export to some HighDef format.

One format can be the TS at 25MB CBR as created originally by the FX1. This has value only if the clips portions which do not need rendering would be translated "as if" ( ie -without re-encoding)which seems impossible if the MT2 files have not been saved, and any TimeCode connection between the avi's and the mt2s has been lost ( not to speak of GOP,etc..)

Otherwise the TS stream will be created from the avis, and therefore you can expect VERY lengthy export times..

2/ Once and if you are confortable with the necessity of "re-encoding" from the CFHD avis, why not consider reencoding in other definitions than the FX1's ?
It would be of great value to rencode in VBR and 720 25p, for instance, to fit most of today's real world projectors. You can store the produced material on Hard disk or DVDs, and play them back easily from any decent computer..So why re-export that to the camera's DV Tape ??? ( some DVD players do even accept "extended quality" DVD with Mpeg at over 10MB/second)

The thing is that to day this type of export from Adobe Premier Pro is far from OK: the trials i have made were executed with the MainConcept encoder, which support a variety pf 1080p/i, 720 25/30p and 720 50/60p etc ...

Unfortunately it seems that this encoder, even when producing in "progressive" mode does NOT handle well the "jagged edges" effect, which destroys absolutely the quality of the reproduced video, albeit excellent on static shots.

Would any one know
a/ if i did wrong in my parameters choices
b/ if there are other encoders doing a better job
c/ of any coder that would "on the fly" correct the "jagged edges" effect during play back
d/ of a better or alternate approach ??
like DIVX HD, WMV ??

Thanks for sharing your views.

Most of the HDV samples I've seen on the internet, other than in native format, have been Windows Media HD at a bit rate of around 5 Mbps, and even at that low bandwidth it looks pretty good. I'd try various options for exporting to that format from the Premiere Pro timeline (perhaps at a somewhat higher bit rate), and see what works best.

I encode at 8Mbps, but yes, a video I downloaded from this forum that was encoded at 5Mbps looked great on my 60" Sony using the AVeL Linkplayer2.