DV Info Net - Vegas 8 Pro problems with 30F acknowledged by Sony

After three long months, my colleague and I finally got an explanation from Sony about the problems we've been having trying to edit HDV 30F clips:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sony Technical Support

Thanks for your continued patience in this matter. After testing and reproducing the error that you have reported, our Vegas development team has supplied us with the following information.

Canon F mode HDV files, no matter how they are captured, do not work well in Vegas, and a large number of these files can cause instability or crashing. The workaround is to load 20 or so files on the timeline and then render as HDV 1080 60i, empty the project, and repeat until all the original files are rendered, and then you can edit with these new files. We plan to address F mode support in a future version of Vegas.

I hope this information is helpful. If you have follow up questions or need further assistance with this issue, please update this incident.

Here is some additional information on the problem:

Our clips were 15-90 seconds each.
More than fifty HDV 30F source clips in the project causes a crash.
Adding about twenty HDV 30F source clips to the project at once causes a crash.
The 8.0a patch does not help.

There are several potential work-arounds:

Use multiple nested projects (we did this, but it's a big hassle).
Break source video into clips manually (if your time is worthless).
Use a different frame rate (60i works, 24F probably works too).
Use a different intermediate codec (e.g. Cineform).
Use a different NLE (e.g. Premier Pro CS3 works fine with 200+ clips).