Posted by Martin Heffels on 04/26/07 13:45

On 26 Apr 2007 05:44:49 -0700, robinchristmas@gmail.com wrote:

>I know there's no one answer to this question, but I like to get some
>opinions on what editing software works best with HDV footage from a
>Sony Z1 camera. My first experiences with Premiere and Avid Xpress
>haven't been great.

I've just started editing on a HDV-project. We've been testing several
programs: Apple FCP, Avid Xpress Pro and Sony Vegas. Vegas is the most
rigid when it comes to handling HDV-data. But what I dislike is the
bin-handling. No program can beat Avid in that regard :-)
Vegas captured the data in one go, while FCP and Avid could not handle the
starts/stops, and insisted on either creating new clips or just stop
capturing. The camera we used was a Z1 as well, so maybe there is an issue
with the camera's timecode?
But, I have prevailed, and managed to get the data into Avid. I ended up
capturing the clips in Vegas as *.m2t-files, and import them into Avid.
However, Avid can not import *.m2t larger than 1.6GB, so the material has
to be split. I used a utility for that, called HDV-Split, which splits the
material in clips, according to camera starts/stops. They easily import in
Avid.
Next was importing the sound. We recorded the sound seperately on DAT, and
captured them on the computer as AIF-files. Of course, Avid could not
import them. But, in the Import Settings, you can choose a different
audio-format, and I selected WAV (instead of AIF/OMF), which let me import
the AIF-files then.

Avid can play back the files quite well, so there is no stuttering, and my
system is not a big machine (Athlon 64 - 3000 + 3GB RAM + 500GB Raid 0
array + Geforce 6600GT). Even a 3 cam multicam section is being played back
(in lower resolution though).

So, if you are up to a bit of experimenting, try Avid again, or else I can
recommend you Vegas.

cheers

-martin-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

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