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USING P2 HD WITH

VEGAS AND RAYLIGHT

when it counts


Computer/OS specifications:
Pentium 4 3.0GHz or better, preferably dual-core processor 5MB of RAM, recommended GB Windows XP (Home or Pro) DirectX 9.0 or later A sound card Sony Vegas 5.0 or later (current version is 7.0) DVFilm.com Raylight software, version .0 or later

Overview:
This paper will provide current and prospective P customers a step-by-step understanding of how to use P with the Sony Vegas video editing application, by using the Raylight program from www.DVFILM.com. Vegas 7.0 (and earlier) has no support for DVCPRO50, DVCPRO-HD, or MXF files from P cards; you must use Raylight to have access to these features. Raylight is a codec and file conversion package which gives Vegas the ability to work with P MXF files; its available for purchase from www.dvfilm.com/raylight/. Updates to the latest version can be found at http://www.dvfilm.com/update/ updateR.htm. The basic P workflow described is available for use with the AG-HVX00, AJ-HPX000 and other Panasonic P HD camcorders. Please contact Panasonic for further details, or, visit http://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/home. asp

Acquisition In The Field:

Footage must be acquired in normal MXF-compatible means, principally on P cards or on the FireStore FS-00. If acquiring on P cards: a) Footage can be edited directly from the cards b) Footage on the cards can be transferred to the P Store Drive (model AG-PCS060G), and edited directly from the P Store, or later transferred to your editing computer. c) Footage on the cards can be transferred to a hard disk, and edited from that hard disk. In order to provide compatibility across multiple Operating Systems and computer platforms and non-linear editing systems, we suggest purchasing disk drives that are already formatted FAT 3. Some P camcorders (such as the AJHPX000) can supply BUS power, and some (such as the AG-HVX00) cannot. Make sure your hard disk can be appropriately powered by your camcorder, or by battery power, or by AC adapter. Additionally, always copy the entire CONTENTS Folder (video, proxy, etc), as well as the LASTCLIP.TXT file. Please note, this drive is generally intended as an intermediate storage device and will not necessarily provide enough throughput for editing.

Acquisition In The Studio:

Footage may be acquired using any of the above means; additionally, live streaming footage can be captured over an IEEE 394 interface cable, using a video capture application such as Serious Magics DV Rack .0 HD. However, footage cannot be captured directly by Vegas, even with Raylight. Vegas software cannot be used for live streaming capture of DVCPRO50 or DVCPRO-HD footage. If you want to do live capture of streaming footage of these formats youll need to use a program that supports live capture, such as the aforementioned DV Rack .0 HD. Regardless of how you acquire footage, its vital that you archive it before erasing your P cards. Whether archiving to tape, or optical disc, or hard disk, make sure that you copy the entire contents of the card (CONTENTS folder and LASTCLIP.TXT file) to an archival media before formatting or erasing the cards. See the Archiving section at the end of this paper for more details. Also, the P Viewer is a free application and a helpful solution for viewing and copying P card content to a disk drive / PC. This software also supports metadata, voice memos, and text memos. Please contact Panasonic for further details, or, visit 

http://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/home.asp

Preparing For The Edit:

When first starting an edit session, make sure that you have properly installed the Raylight software using its Install.exe program. Do this before running Sony Vegas. If you intend to edit DVCPRO50 footage, you must also make sure that youve first installed the Matrox DVCPRO50 codec available for download at: http://www.matrox.com/video/support/ds/software/codec/home.cfm Run the Raylight Control program (raylightControl.exe) to set your default settings.

Before importing or converting footage, you should set some default parameters. First, choose a target output folder for any Raylight output:

Click on the Browse button to choose the folder you want to store any compressed/output footage. Also, make sure the 60i/60p radio button is selected.

Next, choose your default playback quality level:

Raylight can play back your footage in one of three quality levels; lower-quality modes are provided for faster playback performance on slower computers. If youre using a fast computer, you should probably leave it selected on Raylight Blue. If performance on Raylight Blue is too slow for satisfactory editing, try Raylight Yellow. Raylight Red is a very low-quality proxy file, which should only be necessary on the slowest of computers. Note: if importing MXF files directly into Vegas, Raylight Red will not be available; Raylight Red is only available when using converted .AVI files created by Raylights RayMaker application (see the Preparing Footage For Import section for more details on RayMaker). You can always change this playback setting later, even while running Vegas, so what you choose here is not a permanent decision. Finally, select the Advanced Options you want to use:

For simplicity and ease of use, we recommend to select only the Make self-contained AVI and Mark Frames Red/Yellow as shown in the picture above. Raylight has many options and powerful features; these two options make the footage easier to work with and easier to avoid mistakes. For information on the other options, visit www.dvfilm.com/help.

Preparing Footage For Import:

Raylight provides several ways to work with footage from P cards. Primarily you can choose to either: ) edit the MXF files directly from the cards ) edit the MXF files directly from a hard disk 3) convert the MXF files into standard Windows-compatible .AVI files. The easiest, simplest, and fastest way to work with the footage is to keep the footage in its native MXF format. However, pre-converting your MXF files into .AVI files can offer one rather significant benefit: .AVI files can be used in applications other than Vegas, whereas the Raylight plug-in only brings support for MXF files within Vegas. If you wish to use your footage in other applications (such as Adobe After Effects for additional compositing, or for integration into a 3-D program such as LightWave) you may need to convert the footage to .AVI format first (since .AVI is a more universally-understood file 4

format on the Windows platform.) Also, variable frame rate footage (using overcranking and undercranking in 70p mode) should be converted to .AVI format first. As more and more programs begin to support the MXF file format the necessity of converting MXF files into .AVI files should become less important. With Raylight and Vegas, you can freely intermix .MXF and .AVI files on the timeline. Working With Native MXF Files: If the footage currently exists on P cards, no preparation is necessary. P cards can be read by either a PCMCIA/CardBus slot on a laptop computer, or through an AJ-PCD0 or AJ-PCD0 P Drive, or through an AG-PCS060G P Store (when the P Store is being used as a pass-through slot), or through a USB-equipped P Camcorder such as the AG-HVX00 when in USB Device mode. If the footage has been transferred to a hard disk or is currently on a P Store, no preparation is necessary; just plug in the hard disk. If the footage is on a P Store, plug the P Store into a USB .0 port (and ensure that the P Store is in PCcompatible mode). The P Store can appear to the computer in one of two ways (as specified by the P Store Manager software): a) As a series of sequential external drive letters (such as J:, K:, L:, etc) where each card thats been copied to the P Store appears as its own drive, or b) As one large external drive, where each card thats been copied to the P Store appears as its own subdirectory on that drive. If footage was acquired on the FireStore FS-00, you will first have to run the FS-00 Organize P command before attempting to import footage into the computer. Then set the FS-00 into direct drive mode, and attach the FS-00 via an IEEE 394 interface cable; make sure to plug the cable into the FS-00s COMPUTER I/O port, not its DV I/O port. Regardless of where the source footage is, if youve chosen to edit your footage in native MXF format you can now skip ahead in this document to the Setting Up Vegas Project Settings section. Converting MXF files to .AVI Files: If youve chosen to convert some or all of your MXF footage files into .AVI files, use Raylights RayMaker program. Navigate to the directory where you installed Raylight, and double-click on the RayMaker icon to bring up the RayMaker program window.

Before converting any footage files, go to the Process menu and choose Options. Raylight has the capability to remove/strip out 4PA Advanced Pulldown from 080i/4PA clips or 480i/4PA clips (note: it cannot remove :3 pulldown from 080i/4P or 480i/4P). For working with 080i/4PA or 480i/4PA it is recommended to always remove the pulldown. That way you can edit the footage on a 4P timeline, and never have to encounter interlaced frames or pulldown. Raylight can also remove redundant frames from 70/60P clips. If you have shot using variable frame rates on a FireStore FS-00, this option will allow you to convert those variable-frame-rate clips into true overcranking/undercranking .AVI files. If your footage was shot in 4pN or 30pN mode, this setting will have no effect in 4pN or 30pN mode, duplicate frames have already been removed during recording. But for footage that has been recorded using the Over 60 modes, Raylight can strip out duplicate frames, making the resulting .AVI file require less space on your hard disk. The process of converting your footage from MXF files into AVI files will take time, and it will take hard disk space. A Raylight conversion to MXF files runs at faster than realtime rates, and the new .AVI will be slightly larger than the source .MXF file. You must also tell Raylight where to place the newly-created .AVI files; by default Raylight will store the files in the same directory where the MXF video files are found. It is recommended that you always specify a new directory for the output footage, especially for footage thats still on a P card. You should use the User selects output folder checkbox and path to specify a new output directory so that Raylight will put all the created footage in your selected directory. In the Configure Raylight dialog box, Raylight offers two ways to convert the footage: either as self-contained AVI or not.

Checking this box on will result in Raylight creating self-contained .AVI files. These .AVI files will contain all the original, unmodified DVCPRO-HD data that the MXF files contain. This is the most convenient and foolproof way to work with Raylight .AVIs and is the recommended workflow. Once youve selected your options and your target directory, simply go to Windows Explorer and navigate to your P card (or, to the hard disk where youve copied the contents of a P card). Find the CONTENTS folder from your P card, and drag and drop the CONTENTS folder right into the RayMaker application.

When you drop the CONTENTS folder onto RayMakers window it will bring up a dialog box showing a list of all the files that it will convert from MXF to .AVI. (Your list will obviously look different than this list, depending on what the particular contents are of your P card or your hard disk.)

Press Start and RayMaker will begin converting your footage files to new .AVI files (leaving the original MXF files untouched and unharmed).

(Note: while converting the footage, you may see a warning message that says WARNING: could not find the Audio MXF files for this clipAVI will be silent. This message occurs when converting 70pN footage that was shot at variable frame rates; for example, the HVX00 records no audio when using off-speed frame rates; in cases like that Raylight will not find audio files. This is not a bug or a problem; its just the way the system works.) 7

Setting Up Vegas Project Settings:

Run Sony Vegas and choose File->New Choose your project settings based on what type of footage you intend to edit. For DVCPRO-HD, you may have to customize the settings, as Vegas doesnt include project presets for all the possible DVCPRO-HD projects. Here are the appropriate project settings for the various DVCPRO-HD formats: For 70p/4P:

For 70p/30P:

For 70p/60P:

For 080i/60i, the existing HD 080i/60i preset can be used, or you can use this:

Note: since Raylight and Vegas dont yet allow for on-the-fly :3 pulldown removal from 080i/4P footage, you would also use this 080i/60i template to edit 080i/4P footage (but not 080i/4pA footage; see below). For 080i/30P, simply change the Field Order to None (progressive scan):

For 080i/4PA you can use the existing HD 080-4p preset, or match these settings:

Raylight can strip out the :3:3: pulldown from 080i/4pA footage (or 480i/4pA footage) either when creating new .AVI files, or on-the-fly from MXF files. Therefore its appropriate to edit 4pA footage on a pure 4P timeline.

For DV or DVCPRO or DVCPRO50, you can choose one of the existing NTSC DV project presets; just specify whether you want 4fps or 9.97 (for either 60i or 30P); also whether you want normal 4:3 or Widescreen. There are four NTSC DV project presets. Note: if you are using 30P in DV, DVCPRO, or DVCPRO50, youll want to choose the appropriate NTSC DV 9.970 fps project preset (either normal or Widescreen), and then youll want to change the Field Order drop-down box to None Progressive Scan. 9

(The above settings are appropriate for a 4:3 DV/DVCPRO/DVCPRO50 project at 30P.)

Importing Footage:
Raylight provides the ability to directly import Ps MXF files, either from a P card or from a hard disk (assuming youve copied the contents of a P card onto a hard disk, or are importing the files from a P Store). You can either drag the MXF files directly to the timeline from the CONTENTS/VIDEO directory using Windows Explorer, or you can use Vegas File>Import->Media command to select the MXF files you want to import. Of course, if youve used RayMaker to convert the MXF files into .AVI files, you can always use the File->Import->Media command to import those new .AVI files. Vegas will allow you to mix and match MXF files and .AVI files (and many other types of files), regardless of frame rate, resolution, or aspect ratio. Vegas will automatically scale the footage to match your project preset. One note about importing MXF files: if youve used 70p mode (instead of 70pN mode) to shoot a variable-frame-rate clip, the Raylight timeline MXF import function may not accurately show the proper frames in version .0. Later versions may correct this, but the recommended workaround is to use RayMaker to convert those variable-frame-rate clips into .AVI files. 60p/4p/30p/60i and 70pN clips can all be directly used via MXF; only 70p variable-frame-rate clips require conversion to .AVI.

Outputting Footage:
Once your project is edited, you can export the footage in a variety of ways, including to DVD or as a Windows .AVI file or Quicktime file, or you can also render back to a P card or to a virtual card on a hard disk or other archival media. Raylight .0 cannot render out a standard-definition file back to a P card, but it can export high-definition files to a P-compatible MXF file.

To render out a P-compatible DVCPRO-HD MXF file, first choose File->Render As 0

Choose a Save as type: of Video for Windows (*.avi). Then click the Custom button to choose your file export attributes.

Click on the Video tab, and set the parameters according to what type of file you want to render out. For DVCPRO-HD 080/4P, use the following settings:

For DVCPRO-HD 080i/60i, use these settings:

For DVCPRO-HD 080i/30p, use these settings:



When working with DVCPRO-HD 70p, you can use the same basic template for all possible export modes, changing only the frame rate. Start with these basic settings: The above settings are appropriate for outputting a 70p/4p project. To modify that template for 70p/30p, change the Frame rate option to 9.970 (NTSC):

And to change the above settings for outputting a 70p/60p project, change the Frame rate option to 59.940 (Double NTSC):

For all DVCPRO-HD exports, the Audio tab should be set like this:



Click OK to go back to the export dialog box, and click SAVE to export your footage into a Raylight .AVI file. Note that a Raylight .AVI file uses the same DVCPRO-HD codec as the original MXF or RayMaker .AVI, so no recompression or quality loss will occur to your footage (excepting, of course, segments with transitions or video effects that need to be rendered). Once you have a finished Raylight .AVI file, you can now use the PMaker.exe utility to create a P-compatible MXF file. Using Windows Explorer, locate the PMaker.exe program icon and double-click it:

The P Maker program window then appears.

When the P Maker program window appears, choose Process->Options to bring up the P Maker Options dialog box.

From this dialog box you can choose to export your file directly back to a P card (assuming a card is mounted to your computer). Or, you can export to a virtual card by choosing to write to the Raylight Folder. You can change which folder gets used by clicking on the Config Raylight button. If you want to export directly to a P card, type in the Drive Letter of where your P card is mounted. If you dont know the drive letter, use Windows Explorer to identify which drive letter is associated with your P card. Then click OK to return back to the P Maker main window. 3

To begin the process of exporting your RayMaker .AVI to your P card (or to a virtual card), use Windows Explorer to locate your RayMaker .AVI icon, and drag and drop it onto the P Maker window. P Maker will bring up a dialog box describing what it is about to do:

Click Start and P Maker will begin the process of exporting your .AVI as P-compatible MXF files. When its finished, the resulting P card image should be able to be played in any P-compatible camera or deck, or viewed in the P Viewer application. (Be aware that the P thumbnail icon for your file will have a red X on it, but this does not affect the ability of the clip to be played back).

Exporting Footage To Other Formats:

Nothing about Vegas, or the MXF workflow, limits you to only working with the files as MXF or P files. You can of course export your footage to DVD-compatible MPEG- files, or downconvert to standard-definition (even DV files), or to any format. Use the Vegas Render as function to export files in a wide variety of formats other than DVFILM Raylight .AVI files.

Archiving Footage:
P cards are not necessarily permanent data storage media items; many people use them as temporary containers, filling them up with footage, using that footage, and then archiving the footage onto a permanent storage format before re-using the card. If editing straight from the card, you can archive either before or after the edit process. But if you intend to erase the card and record more footage onto it, obviously its vital to properly archive the cards contents before erasing it. Data from a P card should not be thought of as video data; instead, it is computer data and should be archived as such. You do not need to archive your P data onto video tape; instead, you can archive onto any computer-readable media. If you explore the data on a P card youll see that each P card is viewed by the computer as a removable-storage disc drive. It should be archived just like you would archive any disc drive. Common archival methods include: a) storing the footage on external removable hard disks b) exporting to data DVD-R or DVD+R c) exporting to data Blu-Ray or HD-DVD optical discs d) archiving footage on data tape drives such as DLT or LTO tapes When archiving, you want to store all the originally-recorded data, in its original form. Dont just archive certain portions or 4

certain files, but back up the entire contents of the card. Additionally, it is vital to keep and preserve the directory structure and archive the entire CONTENTS directory and the LASTCLIP.TXT file, if any. To archive to an external hard disc, create a new directory on the external hard disc for each card you intend to archive (for example, if you had three cards to archive on to your external drive K: youd create the following folders: K:\Reel_\, K:\Reel_, and K:\Reel_3). Then simply use Windows Explorer to drag the complete contents of the appropriate P card (dragging the entire CONTENTS folder and LASTCLIP.TXT file) into one of those directories on your external hard disk. Another common archival process is to use optical discs, such as recordable data DVDs. A 4GB P card can be archived onto a regular 4.7GB DVD-R or DVD+R; an 8GB P card can be archived onto a dual-layer DVD-R. 6GB and larger cards may be able to be archived onto data Blu-Ray or dual-layer HD-DVD discs. To archive onto a data DVD-R youll need a DVD burner as well as a DVD burning application (such as Nero AGs Nero) which supports making data DVDs. Note: you do not want to create a playable video DVD, you want to create a data DVD. Then, using your DVD burning application, create a data DVD image that consists of one cards CONTENTS and LASTCLIP.TXT and burn one DVD per card. Data tape (such as DLT or LTO tape) can be used to archive large amounts of data; an LTO-3 tape holds hundreds of gigabytes of data. Use a data backup program to create large archives of card data directly onto high-capacity LTO or DLT tapes. Whichever method you choose, archiving footage as data (rather than as video footage) makes your project easier to restore if/when you need to work on it again in the future.

Written by Barry Green, Fiercely Independent Films Inc., March 007. Barry Green is the author of The HVX Book and The DVX Book and publisher of several training DVDs for P products.

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