Colour pass through B/W
How do you do this colour pass in Liquid 6.10 and is it possible to let through more than one colour, like in a wedding with a bunch of flowers, is it possible to keep the bride and surroundings in B/W but the full bunch of flowers to come through in colour, even if you could tell me how to let one colour through would be a great help.

Everytime I export a still Liquid crashes
Well not everytime, when liquid is opened up and I export my first image, it works fine ((file>export>mark in and out only>Bitmap>full size interlaced)
When I go to do the same again it just shuts of straight away bang, wipes of to the desk top.

I am exporting the stills to edit in Photoshop so the snap camera button is no good for what I want, it didn't use to do it but just started lately, I uninstalled it and re-installed it again but it does the same thing, any help please.

Safe Margins
On Premiere pro you have the option of turning on/off the safe margins, in liquid 6 you have this only on the title deko, is there somewhere to turn on this function for the video editing, like for a piture in picture, so I know its inside the safe margins or is the only thing to do is to get a photoshop document with the lines drew on it and put it on the top video track to make sure all is safe?

Any help for the above would be great or if you know of a good set of tutorial DVDs for this software.

Thanks
Paul
Ireland

"like in a wedding with a bunch of flowers, is it possible to keep the bride and surroundings in B/W but the full bunch of flowers to come through in colour, even if you could tell me how to let one colour through would be a great help."

AAAAAAAAAAARGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As the Soup Nazi would say... NO SOUP FOR YOU!!!!Sorry mate, but there are TONS more effects in this cool lil app that u can create and use as oppposed to using the same old crappy cheesy effects.. sorry but its been used by almost every damn video production house and its quite sad when ppl dont put much thought into the possibilie with colour pass (or colour change for that matter.....)

"Everytime I export a still Liquid crashes
Well not everytime, when liquid is opened up and I export my first image, it works fine ((file>export>mark in and out only>Bitmap>full size interlaced)
When I go to do the same again it just shuts of straight away bang, wipes of to the desk top."

Thats coz liquid has always had problems. This is a driver issues with ur video card.. basically L6 hijacks it.. and does alot of naughty things to ur system if u try to do anything else with openGL or basiclaly anything.. not just O gl... U may need to update ur gfx drivers or switch to an NVidia based display adapter..

"Safe Margins
On Premiere pro you have the option of turning on/off the safe margins, in liquid 6 you have this only on the title deko, is there somewhere to turn on this function for the video editing, like for a piture in picture, so I know its inside the safe margins or is the only thing to do is to get a photoshop document with the lines drew on it and put it on the top video track to make sure all is safe?"

No it doesn.. but liquid has a "zoom" basically it only shows you what is already in the safe zone, so reframing is a bitch. u can either turn it on or off, but u cant have the gridlines to show u the oversan area.. basically the oversan areas are ditched (in preview), unless u specifcy to allow the OScan areas to be visible.. (i cant remember right now)

Re: Safe Zones...
Remember, safe zones are only safe on the inside of the frame. (Meaning if you want something to definately show on all TV,, it must be inside the safe zone) TV models have different masks that will sometime allow more of the frame to show. The newer LCD TVs have a very wide safe zone. In otherwords, never allow something in the frame that you don't want to be seen - even if it is outside the imaginary box we call the safe zone.

"like in a wedding with a bunch of flowers, is it possible to keep the bride and surroundings in B/W but the full bunch of flowers to come through in colour, even if you could tell me how to let one colour through would be a great help."

AAAAAAAAAAARGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As the Soup Nazi would say... NO SOUP FOR YOU!!!!Sorry mate, but there are TONS more effects in this cool lil app that u can create and use as oppposed to using the same old crappy cheesy effects.. sorry but its been used by almost every damn video production house and its quite sad when ppl dont put much thought into the possibilie with colour pass (or colour change for that matter.....)

"Everytime I export a still Liquid crashes
Well not everytime, when liquid is opened up and I export my first image, it works fine ((file>export>mark in and out only>Bitmap>full size interlaced)
When I go to do the same again it just shuts of straight away bang, wipes of to the desk top."

Thats coz liquid has always had problems. This is a driver issues with ur video card.. basically L6 hijacks it.. and does alot of naughty things to ur system if u try to do anything else with openGL or basiclaly anything.. not just O gl... U may need to update ur gfx drivers or switch to an NVidia based display adapter..

"Safe Margins
On Premiere pro you have the option of turning on/off the safe margins, in liquid 6 you have this only on the title deko, is there somewhere to turn on this function for the video editing, like for a piture in picture, so I know its inside the safe margins or is the only thing to do is to get a photoshop document with the lines drew on it and put it on the top video track to make sure all is safe?"

No it doesn.. but liquid has a "zoom" basically it only shows you what is already in the safe zone, so reframing is a bitch. u can either turn it on or off, but u cant have the gridlines to show u the oversan area.. basically the oversan areas are ditched (in preview), unless u specifcy to allow the OScan areas to be visible.. (i cant remember right now)


Thanks for your help Peter,
My Graphics card is a Nvidia model (FX5200) how do you go about updating the drivers for it?

Do you remember where you go to turn on the zoom function as its a real pain in the a$$, wait for it to render and then check if its safe, Premiere pro lets you preview it realtime but I think the liquid 6 has a lot of extra stuff but I can't seem to get time to figure it out as its such a complex application.

Paul

yes it is VERY complex for what it does.. a little too complex for my own liking, but then again, im an impatient fekker and too busy to keep learning L6 when i know there are far more efficient ways to do things.. .

I have afew training dvds here, but to be honest i cant remember how to switch between the two views.. its been since L6 (with that USB2 BoB) since ive used it. To be honest L6 aggravates me to a point of distraction. No seiously, i sell this stuff and its the only app ive ever come across which really REALLY bites my ass.... maybe i jsut dont have the patience for it...

as for gfx cards, best thing to do is head to the manufacturers website and check for updates
If that doesnt work, jsut head to Nvidia.com

Thanks Peter,

I'll just stick to my reliable premiere pro, its not got as many bells and whistles as liquid but it works and thats a big plus over liquid at the moment, maybe avids version 7 will be better.

Paul

"Colour pass through B/W"
How do you do this colour pass in Liquid 6.10 and is it possible to let through more than one colour, like in a wedding with a bunch of flowers, is it possible to keep the bride and surroundings in B/W but the full bunch of flowers to come through in colour, even if you could tell me how to let one colour through would be a great help.

Of course you can do this in Liquid 6.1 (YES soup for you). You use the CX colour corrector and use the selective colour correction. While its not a simple filter, it is extremely powerful (power comes with complexity), although once you know how it remains quite simple. Go to the URL below, download and watch this Liquid Tuturial on the Advanced Color Correction Part 1,2 and 3 to learn about the CX color corrector. What you are interested in is in the second half of part 3 (a whole 5 min long) but the other 2 parts are nice little tutorials anyway.

http://www.dilithium.com.au/pro1/edition/pinnacle_videos/Pinnacle%20Systems%20-%20Welcome%20to%20the%20Pinnacle%20Broadcast%20Network!.htm

"Everytime I export a still Liquid crashes"

Liquid doesn't do anything nasty to your video driver at all, but it does push it very hard. If there are any bugs in your video driver Liquid is likely to find them. Some NVidia drivers are better than others. You get these drivers from www.nvidia.com. Never use the drivers that came with your video card! I don't know why your system crash's, but trust me, it is a problem with your system, not Liquid, infact you are the first I have ever heard to have this problem.

"I am exporting the stills to edit in Photoshop so the snap camera button is no good for what I want."

The only problem with the snapshot button is it creates a file which can be a pain in the posterior to find and copy out (nested in the MediaAV folder etc). However this file is a full uncompressed bmp frame, perfect for use in photoshop.


Safe Margins
There is a "switch to overscan" function in Liquid 7, I am sure it is there in 6 as well. It toggles the view between overscan and underscan which is what safe margins represent. You might need to add the button to the desktop via the customise option. It is under the miscellaneous section of the "Special" tab.

Thank you very m,uch Guy for your help, theres not a lot of liquid lovers on this forumt as you have gave me the most possitive reply to date and I don't want to give up on it after paying out £300 for it.

Should I un-install all of my Nvidia drivers that came with the card and the one I downloaded from Nvidias site and just install the ones from the site then on its own?

If the snapshot button creates an uncompressed bmp image in the media av I can use this in photoshop anyway, does the extension name of it have to be changed to Bmp or is it named as a bmp image?

I found the overscan button as well, thanks a lot for your help, I might consider upgrading my graphics card to a 250mb as I only have a 128mb at the moment and that should help things as well.

Paul

Nvidia has always recommended uninstalling previous drivers before installing new ones. Its a pain as you desktop gets messed up if you have lots of icons on it like I do but it is best practise. Also ensure you uninstall any utilities that might have come with your graphics card, they do more harm than good. Then install only what you get from NVidias site.

Not all Nvidia graphic driver releases are created equal. The latest isn't exactly their best, and many stick to 77 or 78 series for stability. You might want to test a few different versions before deciding if it is or is not a graphics driver problem. I use the latest version to test with Liquid so as a beta tester I can feedback any new problems that might arise. NVidia used to be Pinnacles recommended chipset, however now I must admit that they do recommend ATI.

The snapshot does create a standard bmp file with bmp extension but a horrible non discript name. Right click on the image in Liquid and select properties. On the V tab it will tell you exactly where the image is stored and its name. Just copy it out and rename it to something useful.

A 256MB graphics card is only really useful if you want to edit HDV. It won't do much for editing DV, 128MB is more than enough. You'll also need at least Dual 3GHz CPUs for 1080i but that is becoming much more entry level NLE now.

I am running Liquid 7, and while there is a service pack out, it is small and doesn't address many of the bugs in 7. You might want to wait until a point release comes out (eg 7.1) they tend to be much more solid. Having said that, with Instant save you never loose any work when a crash does happen anyway, its only the annoyance of having to start Liquid again or worst case reboot the PC. Nothing I didn't have to do back in the days of Premiere 6.5 anyway (but back then I always lost work). None of the problems with 7 are show stoppers, just annoyances like most NLEs (though I hear Edius is very stable, as 5.6 and 6.1 are generally considered by most Liquid users). Just remember, Liquid does push your PC harder that most games even do, so if there is a problem, Liquid is likely to bring it out. Turn virus scanners off while editing as well.

A great idea is a removable HDD for your boot drive. Have one disk for all your normal crap, and when you want to edit, you reboot to the dedicated NLE disk. Alternatively if you do a lot of editing, the best idea is to have a dedicated PC just for editing and keep ghost images of known good configurations. Thats not unique to Liquid, it works well for any NLE system.

Download and go through all the Liquid tutorials on that site, they are all pretty good value (for free) even if some are a bit tacky in their presentation.

Best wishes, cut hard!

Many thanks once again Guy for your help.

I would agree with you about maybe holding of on Liquid 7 just until all the bugs have been sorted with a new software, its not to expensive to buy the upgrade disk then and download the patch. I have the 6.1 version and its not the most stable of packages with sometimes more crashes than I would have the patience for, it does save them all the time but when capturing it can pick a name for a file unoticed to me and replace maybe a 1 hour capture with that one just captured meaning I have to put in the other hour long tape and capture it again.

Premiere Pro have (Fingers crossed) never once crashed on me yet over a 6 month period, liquid might crash this amount on me in one day at times and thats why I gave up on it but I still build my dvds on it and miss some of its transitions and effects, people find them cheesy at times but I think when used right they make for an interesting edit and thats why I want to build myself up to using it full time again.

I have just checked my processor and found its not a pentium 4 like I thought and might I add asked for when getting it built a year ago but a 2.6 celeron D, so I think I've found why liquid will not run right on my system, the processors useless.

This should make a big difference when I upgrade it and no I am not going to be using HDV for sometime yet to come.

Paul

Yes, since you are learning Liquid, wait to upgrade. You could still buy it while the upgrade is $199, but wait for the full SP to install it. I have it and it has a lot of promise. I have found a couple of minor issues and they removed one of my primary features (but there is a workaround).

Liquid prefers ATI, so you might consider an ATI card on the next upgrade. I bought a X800XT All-In-Wonder myself. It gives me 256MB of video memory on a fast chipset that is still AGP.

For nVidia, the 83.xx drivers have done really well from what I have seen.

Additional resources for Liquid questions...
http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/54/ShowForum.aspx
http://www.planetliquid.us/

Edit, btw, as Paul G posts, Liquid does not hijack your video. In fact, it behaves very well using DirectX. It does not reserve lots of video memory like some games do (an MS is going to fix this in Vista by adding a video memory manager because currently First In Wins is how it is handled.)

While a Celeron will not perform well compared to a PIV, it should not crash your system. If you are experiencing crash's on a regular basis just capturing with 6.1 your system has more wrong with it than you might realise.

Look for a BIOS upgrade and try a virgin clean OS install for XP (just take an image of your drive as it is now if you want to restore your current config).

My admin PC should run Liquid in theory, and it did run it perfectly some time agi, but I wouldn't even bother trying now. I have so much other crap loaded now I know that Liquid wouldn't be stable anymore. But thats not Liquids fault, that's my fault for loading all this crap onto my PC over time. I see it all the time, XP itself dies because of it, its nothing new. If you want a stable system for such a demanding application such as Liquid, you need to run a system with minimal other applications installed.

Heck try a dual boot set up. Thats easy enough to create.

For the record, I have lots of 'stuff' loaded and Liquid is rock solid. I cannot say for 6, but I ran 5.5 on a 1.6GHz P4 (400MHz bus). I would try the video driver first. That is one of the top crash dumps that MS gets reported (video drivers.)

I never meant to say you can't have lots of 'stuff' loaded and have to work flawlessly, but the odds are more against you than for you, and of course, it does depend on what your 'stuff' is ;-)

While a Celeron will not perform well compared to a PIV, it should not crash your system. If you are experiencing crash's on a regular basis just capturing with 6.1 your system has more wrong with it than you might realise.

Look for a BIOS upgrade and try a virgin clean OS install for XP (just take an image of your drive as it is now if you want to restore your current config).

Heck try a dual boot set up. Thats easy enough to create.

Thanks Guy,

By right I should have one PC for the admin/internet and the other for editing, its what I will get some time. How do you do this bios upgrade and os clean install?

I have a load of crap on the computer with trials of other apps etc and even when you un-install them they still are on the system somewhere. I think I'll back up all my data onto an external drive, clean it all out with a spyware/adware and virus check in better detail and re-install windows again and put on just what I am using now I've tried lots of other software out and upgrade the processor as well, it can't do any harm.

George, liquid 5.5 isn't just as demanding to run as liquid 6 and you do need a higher spec system to run it, as I've only found out from Pinnacle.

Thanks to both of you for your help.

Paul

I know about the specs for Liquid (wink). I have a dual Xeon 3.06 with a ATI X800XT All-In-Wonder as my editor (upgraded while on 5.5, just added the AIW from a 9600XT).

Thats one hell of a nice system your running, no wonder its all so smooth for you, do you edit with HD?
Paul

I sort of edit HD. I have played with some of the M2Ts floating around, but that was not so much fun (they are not the native format). But, I have worked on a 720p slideshow and am using a 720p animation in my timeline for a video I am working on.