The bizarreness had nothing to do with the format Sony et al introduced, but more with the fact that they introduced a camcorder that it was unable to capture from using Sony's own NLE!

It'd be a bit like if Ford Motor bought up a petroleum company and then brought out a new model Ford that wouldn't run on fuel you got from their own brand gas stations...

How many edits of multiple HDV native m2t streams have you done on your G4? I'd suggest that you'd have a little bit of a problem then. Playback of HDV isn't so much of a problem for 'older' CPUs regardless of whether they're Intel, IBM or AMD. The editing of HDV is where the power difference begins to bite...

Shame you can't get any HDV back out to tape, as it's about the best way to view any edited clips without recourse to a HD capable Network Media Player like the Avel Linkplayer.

Steve, you're right - on both counts. It's true, I haven't started editing yet - I'm holding out as long as possible to go G5 (before beginning edit on the doco I'm shooting now). My brother, an mac addict, told me something along the lines of... "when the new chips arrive... the effect will be more like having quad chips than doubles..." When they will turn up? I'll have to ask my brother...

Are you going to the Douglas Spotted Eagle training sessions coming up in Sydney next week? It's mostly about Vegas I believe.

www.newmagic.com.au has the info.

Cheers,

Nigel

Considering that it took Apple almost two years after the HDV format was originally introduced to offer proper support for it, and considering that the Vegas/Cineform solution was available before FCP5 came out, that seems like a rather biased question. In this particular thread we've got someone who hasn't installed the latest OS updates required to connect easily to Sony HDV cameras, so you can't judge much from this discussion.

As far as editing HDV is concerned, this appears to be a serious strain for almost all current editing setups. I've heard FCP5 users indicate that their preview quality starts to deteriorate with just two layers of HDV on the timeline on today's fastest Macs, and Canopus Edius is the only program I know of which can do any better without specialized hardware support. Output to HDV (or other HD formats) from a 1080i HDV timeline is currently a problem for pretty much everyone, and it's going to take some serious computing horsepower (or long rendering times) to overcome that.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been helping me to learn how to capture HDV in Vegas. Did my first successful capture last night. Wohoo! Your help was very much appreciated. Now I have to learn how to edit HDV :)