VASST GearShift User’s Guide
GearShift is a tool to help you work with HD projects in Sony Vegas. Whether you have the latest and greatest PC hardware or you have an older PC that works fine for DV editing but doesn’t have the resources required for HD editing, GearShift can help.
GearShift was developed for several reasons:
1. HD requires a lot more resources to edit than DV. The native M2T files are very demanding on your CPU and can’t be played back in real-time on even the latest CPU’s because of the processing power required to navigate the MPEG data stream. When rendered to a Sony YUV AVI file the CPU utilization is less but the hard drive space is huge and thus hard drive throughput becomes the limiting factor. How does GearShift help you deal with this? By providing a Proxy that is easy on the CPU and hard drive and thus allowing you to edit HD on your existing PC that you are editing DV on today.
2. The MPEG2 Transport Stream files that HDV cameras capture to use long GOP (Group of Pictures). This means that each frame is not a full image as is the case with DV. For example, the MPEG2 GOP for the Sony Z1 and FX1 is made up of a group of 15 frame sequences. Only one frame in the 15 (I-Frame) contains an entire image. The other 14 frames (B-Frames and P-Frames) contain delta and predictive data only. This means that color correcting on these 14 delta frames is not recommended since the frames don’t actually exist (they are composed of the I-Frame and B & P-Frames combined). It is much better to edit in an AVI format known as an intermediary file and GearShift can make these files for you.
3. You might not want to use all the footage you captured so it doesn’t make sense to convert all of your footage to YUV, intermediary, or DV Proxy. GearShift will allow you to convert only the footage you need for you final project saving you valuable time.
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