Thanks for the suggestions guys. I think Vegas might be the way to go for me.

K-Lite Codec Pack works well with Sonar x64. No problems opening H.264 or pretty much anything else you throw at it once you install the codecs. Make sure you grab the 64-bit pack if you do it.

http://codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

absolutely +1

I can import MOVs no problemo.

StepD


K-Lite Codec Pack works well with Sonar x64. No problems opening H.264 or pretty much anything else you throw at it once you install the codecs. Make sure you grab the 64-bit pack if you do it.

http://codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

∞

Yeah, I'll have to look into that Mike. I find that the biggest hog when working in Sonar is the thumbnail drawing. If I turn thumbnails off and just use video view with CPU <= 50% I get smooth playback even on my old machine. It would definitely be nice to loosen the limitations though. Plus I just basically screw around with video, and anyone doing serious work will want the best performance. Need to be able to work as efficiently as possible.

I wouldn't attempt to use Sonar for video work (unless X2 has delivered a radical change). Another strong vote for Sony Vegas from me: it's stable, inexpensive and performs much, much better than Adobe Premiere. Lining up audio and video is reasonably easy: particularly if you set the time ruler to measures and beats rather time code.  

Syncing the audio shouldn't be that hard if you can see the wav forms on both the audio sources matching a peak somewhere...that said if I could give you a couple pointers the next time you do this:
-starting and stopping the recording on both sources (camera and the audio source) as close to each other as possible (if they are not physically close together give the other person a visual 3 second countdown)...not a big deal but it makes post easier.
-after you start rolling have someone clap their hands in view of the camera (like a movie clapper) then use that peak to sync.
I've had to do this quite a bit over the years to sync up multiple cameras along with the main audio source(s)...once everything is on the timeline it takes only a minute or two to sync.

I use Sony Vegas as well. I use the platinum edition. I will only use sonar to edit audio. If I am doing a music video I will export from vegas in AVI and import into sonar. Once the audio is done I export that from Sonar and import that into vegas and hook the two together. Vegas does the final render.

Vegas has a lot of cool editing features and transitions but the real cool thing about the platinum is that it comes with Sound Forge as well. For some reason exporting anything out of Sonar other then wave does not sound good when I use dither. In fact I get the best export from using Wav microsoft. then I import that file into Sound Forge to get the other audio formats like mp3. I get much better sounding mp3 formats by converting wav from sound forge. I don't know why?

For synchronizing audio with video -- When I import a video it comes with the original audio file. I then zoom in on the wave form with my mixed audio and nudge the mixed final mix until the wave forms are matching up. Then I must the wave on the import and export the video with only the mixed version of the tune. Works fine for rough videos for youtube.

Well I ordered Vegas Pro 12 from Amazon. Hopefully that should work pretty well. Thanks for the helpful suggestions made in here. I will stick with using Sonar just for audio alone as suggested and I really liked the idea of making visible transients on the audio track to serve as alignment tool. I will keep in mind the codec suggestions also. Lots to learn.