# Video editing and codecs...need a little advice!



## chimp_spanner (May 25, 2011)

Hey all! Just a quick one this. I have a couple of decidedly average cameras (some old Samsung digital camera which also does video, and a Toshiba Camelio S10). They encode to XVID and H.264 respectively. My problem is that while my media players will open the files okay, Sony Vegas won't play any video when I import them. Only the audio track. The only way around it is to convert to .MOV and then it works.

So I can get around it but it's hassle. What I'd like to be able to do is just chuck anything from my cameras directly into Vegas and start chopping them up.

I've googled this, and I always come to a dead end. I do know it's a very common problem. I just can't seem to fix it. Thoughts? Pleeease?


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## Fred (May 25, 2011)

Which version of Vegas are you using? My camera also encodes in H.264, and I have no problems importing the video to Vegas without converting. (I'm using a "decidedly average" version of Vegas, though, haha - Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0)


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## chimp_spanner (May 25, 2011)

Fred said:


> Which version of Vegas are you using? My camera also encodes in H.264, and I have no problems importing the video to Vegas without converting. (I'm using a "decidedly average" version of Vegas, though, haha - Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0)



Vegas Pro 9! Damn man. It's the weirdest thing. And it's annoying too because I know that in the past I have been able to use files from my Samsung with Vegas without conversion. So maybe my codecs got screwed somewhere along the line. I'm loathe to re-install though with so much to do right now. Ughhhh.


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## Fred (May 25, 2011)

Hmmm... That's very strange. I've run through all the menus available but can't see anything which could obviously affect how Vegas treats certain formats - I'm sure the Pro version has far more options, but I'm still not sure what could have happened!

Very strange. Do you have some kind of codec pack (like CCCP) installed? To the best of my knowledge I only have the codecs packaged with the VLC media player, but they seem to be sufficient for Vegas and for media playback in general.


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## ghostred7 (May 28, 2011)

Is the file extension by default .mp4? One of the tricks I used to use in Adobe Premiere when handling .m2t (mpeg transport stream) files was to simply rename the the file extension.

With your H.264 files....instead of converting them, try just renaming them to .mov instead of whatever extension it is for a work-around.

Outside of that Vegas 9 should be able to handle the H.264 with no issues. It sounds like you have some codec weirdness like you said. 

I wish I could be more help, but I pretty much hate Vegas so haven't messed with it much. 

EDIT: Read on the internet...the Toshiba specs are .avi (h.264). This was for the S20, presuming the S10 is the same. Others having problems with the avi import into vegas actually uninstalled the Xvid codec pack and it worked for them after that. Now, if you don't have it, try isntalling it. There seems to be weirdness with the Xvid codecs & Vegas.


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## Ancestor (Aug 26, 2011)

chimp_spanner said:


> Hey all! Just a quick one this. I have a couple of decidedly average cameras (some old Samsung digital camera which also does video, and a Toshiba Camelio S10). They encode to XVID and H.264 respectively. My problem is that while my media players will open the files okay, Sony Vegas won't play any video when I import them. Only the audio track. The only way around it is to convert to .MOV and then it works.
> 
> So I can get around it but it's hassle. What I'd like to be able to do is just chuck anything from my cameras directly into Vegas and start chopping them up.
> 
> I've googled this, and I always come to a dead end. I do know it's a very common problem. I just can't seem to fix it. Thoughts? Pleeease?



i've had the same problem since about 3 years ago. never had a problem with vegas before. now some files have to be converted.


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