Editing Canon 24PF using Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10

For a software project, I had to recently update my old Windows XP machine to a newer machine running Windows 7.

I decided to also look at the free demo version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 editing software.

Update: The following review is not quite correct. My original test footage was inadequate to test this out. Here’s the scoop: Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 will work with true 24P video. You can set a timeline to 23.976 and import video clips that are true 23.976. However, video recorded in the 2:3 24p “pulldown” mode which involves mapping 24p images into a 60i interleaved stream, will not work unless you use a separate program like Voltaic HD or CineForm’s NeoScene to remove the pulldown prior to editing.

I still really like Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 – in fact I have ordered a copy – but it does not do  pulldown removal. But once I had everything in some form of 24p – including a combination of HDV, SD and AVCHD transcoded to remove the pulldown – I was able to edit the entire mix just fine in Vegas.

For a test, I gave it what I thought would be a difficult challenge – I combined 24PF video from an Canon HG10 in AVCHD format, with 24PF from a Canon HV30 in HDV format, with a 24P DV video stream. For those not familiar with those terms, 24PF is a 24 frames per second video stream embedded into a conventional 60i (interleaved) set of frames. To edit a 24PF video requires removing extra frames used to fit the 24 full frames into a 60 half frame (60i) video stream used by conventional video recording.

Incredibly – it worked!

I set the Project Properties to 23.97 IVTC (inverse telecine) option. I then imported the media – in the case of the AVCHD video clips, these were already on the system hard disk. The HDV was imported from tape using the Sony Vegas video capture function. The 24P DV video was actually shot as 60i on a Panasonic DV camera, imported and converted to 24p using DVFilm Maker.

And it just worked! I didn’t have to do any futzing around – it just worked.

I output the result to an MP4 file at 1440×1080 and the results are excellent.

Since the DV video was shot outdoors at an evening concert, the colors were muted. I used some Vegas filters to slightly increase the contrast and saturation, and added a bit of sharpening. This was then scaled up to the AVCHD/HDV frame size, producing an excellent result.

I’m still using the demo/trial version but I think Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 is a keeper. I’m pleased so far.

You can learn more and download the demo version at Sony Creative Software.