@pdlumina, I am not sure that I understand your answer entirely. Are you saying that inter frame (non-GOP1) needs to be decompressed and intra (GOP1) does not? The 110MB/s is a sustained speed per spec sheet; it's not burst speed. I do not understand "GOP1 does not equal MJPEG or DVCProHD/DNxHD intra". Please clarify this.

Thanks.

@Dusty42 What I mean to say is.. (in no particular order)

Playback (on VLC, WMP) is not the same as Playback inside an editing application. GOP1 encoding (from the patches) is not the same as video in ProRes/DVCProHD/DNxHD/MJPEG, since these formats are optimized for editing (with intra-frame encoding and low compression). GOP1 H264 on the other hand, requires a lot of processing power to be de-compressed during playback.

A spec sheet is just that, and the real performance of a drive will be measured once you start using it on your system. Your fastest component on a computer is only as fast as the slower component causing a bottleneck. Simple analogy: take an SSD drive and place it on an USB2 enclosure and plug it to a USB 1.1 port and see what speeds you get out of it.

Editing in Vegas gives you an edge, since this is one of the few editing applications that playbacks footage on the timeline with ease. However placing a couple of compressed streams of H264 video on the timeline will tax your system. The CPU will be stressed, the RAM will be consumed, the hard drive will be spinning and needles jumping to different places when playing back more than a single stream.

For plain old playback, sure.. any hard drive will work. For editing is a different issue. Your best bet to edit with comfort and little stuttering is to transcode your footage to an edit-ready format.

Assuming that when you refer to performance you are talking about pure playback outside Vegas Video: try a different player. For example, regularly I use VLC on Ubuntu fro playback and have no issues, but when I boot up Windows, Media Player seems to play the footage much better than MPC or VLC do.

If you are talking performance with the clips in Vegas.. again, an editing application is a different story. Of course you'll be able to scrub a GOP1 file with less issues than a non-GOP1. Intra VS Inter frame. In editing you jump back and forth at different positions on your video.

A quality hit is expected, but no noticeable to the eye. You see, the GH2, GF2, GX1, etc shoot video in a delivery format: Highly compressed H.264. There's a reason that by default the colors are over saturated on these little cameras: delivery. A P2 camera (for example) shoots in an editing friendly format, so there's no transcoding needed.. but there's a price to pay.

Agree with VK.

It takes a lot more processing overhead to decompress a heavily compressed file for editing or playing. You'd think that a large file would be harder to render than a smaller file, but it's the efficiency of the (de)compression codec that matters more. It's part of the reason I still use something like Cineform. It decompresses the long GOP into I frames which is easier to edit and/or play. It's a more involved process but I find it easier than dealing with the stuttering while editing AVCHD natively.

Are there any free software to convert non-GOP1 clips to some easy to edit formats for Vegas?