Well, I could delete it for you BUT sometimes it's these kinds of things we need to hear periodically so that WE don't make the same mistake. Thanks for reporting the "fix".

I am a new user to Vegas 4.
I have a problem with my brightness & contrast. FX video window. I can not
get it to lighten up the video. (Clip) I have tried the split screen button. It use to work fine, Is there a lock that I have turned on?
Any suggestions.

For what it's worth, I have >two< Monarch computers, one of which is dedicated for editing. Yes, it can take longer than expected to receive a customized unit (3-4 weeks), but I think they really want to please and keep their customers.

It's the 11th hour, the montage is due at the reception, I go to print to tape from the timeline, and the output jumps up and down on the camcorder screen as well as on the tape.

Running Vegas 5 on a Dell Inspiron 8600/512Mb/5400rpm 40 GB HDD. I got messages about running out of disc space, so I plugged in the IOGear PCMCIA firewire card and attached an external drive (WD 120GB) and relocated the prerender file location to a folder on that drive with plenty of space. Print to tape worked OK, except there were three audio glitches (the volume drops noticably) and one audio/video glitch (picture disrupted and blue frames interspersed). I'm guessing those were times I inadvertently bumped the external drive.

So I capture the footage from the camcorder, patch in the correct audio over the glitches, patch in the correct photo over the video glitch, select the region, hit Print to Tape, and the same screen jittering happens. What I'm seeing is the blue screen with data display jittering up and down while Vegas is prerendering.

Could it be that the file locations are not allowed on the same drive i.e. the captured video now on the timeline, must not be located on the same drive as where the pre-render file is located?

Or?

I just did a Print to Tape from the laptop last week and everything was fine.

Also, now that I've used the PCMCIA firewire card, the laptop's built-in firewire port is not recognizing the camcorder...any thoughts?

That was a little too nerve wracking for one wedding. Would prefer not to repeat it.

thanks,
Scott

Hard to say exactly what is going on except that it sounds like the machine is not keeping up with the necessary data flow. You can specify any location for the various files as long as there is plenty of space.

Here's what I think I would try: Render the project to a single new AVI file. Now print just that one file. If it still won't to a PTT, try using the capture program to send it out. If that still doesn't work, try something like Scenalyzer Live.

If it's not the split screen button causing your problem, my next guess would be that you're changing a keyframe AFTER the current cursor position OR you have multiple keyframes and the keyframe you're changing is before the keyframe directly in front of the cursor postion. See if it might be a keyframe issue.

Whenever I try to capture a tape with Vegas 5 1.0b, it keeps splitting it into 2 or 3 clips. I DID uncheck the scene detection so that is not the problem. It splits at random spots in the tape. I am capturing 24p DVX100 footage with a PV-852 (used as a deck). It's very annoying and I have never had this happen to me with Vegas 4. I'm running XP home with p4 2.4ghz and a gig of ram. 160 gigs of hard disk space with about 100 free.

Thanks for any help

David,
I'm on my second ABS system and have had little problems so far. Just make sure that when ordering that they put the OS on the drive you specify (they got that wrong on my newest PC).


I'm currently doing all my editing on a P4, 3 gig, 5500.

The price was nice also.

How large are the clips? What format is the drive? If you are capturing to a drive formatted for FAT32, you have a max file size limit of 4Gig.

You might want to check that the Maximum size for DV clip option is not checked under Options, Preferences, then the Disk Management tab.

I am shooting my first feature on DVX AE (PAL) with anamorphic lens adapter.

What settings should I use in "NEW PROJECT"?

I mean: Template, Field Order, Pixel aspect ratio, Full resolution rendering quality, Motion blur type, Deinterlace method.

I would appreciate your help guys.

Voytek Stitko
Joyvoitech@yahoo.com

Hey Edward:

Is this film look plugin you mention the same as the download from the Sony website called "Magic Bullet" film look and the "five free film looks" they offer?

No. Magic Bullet is something totally different.

So should I download this plugin and use it instead of the one on the Vegas 5 disk? Is it better? Worse? Different stuff to do?

Different. It renders the file to 24p. Basically it follows Spots tutorial.

These appear to be seperate issues with DVDA 2.0a.

First the audio. I render my avi file to be used for the DVD buring process with the audio format: 48,000 hz and 16 bit (using Vegas 5, of course). However, when I go to play back this very file within the DVDA 2.0a program, I need to configure my audio hardware to 44,100 hz. Is this normal??? I thought audio files to be used for DVD needed to be rendered to 48,000 hz/16 bit?!?!?!? I tried searching DVDA's help files and could not find anything regarding this issue. (Below, you'll find my computer configuration and hardware used during audio/video editing).

Second, the External Monitor option. Simply put, I can't get it to work consistantly like I can with the Vegas 5b program and even the Sound Forge 7a program! When I plug in my Panasonic AG-DV2000 MiniDV device, the DVDA 2a program SAYS that it recognizes it when I click on "Options/Preferences/Video Device". It recognizes the OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394/DV device and further states in Details: "Hot pluggable device" & "Device connected". Also, under options, I click on "Preview External Monitor", but it doe not always show up on the external monitor screen. It's not reliable like the Vegas and even the Soundforge 7 program. Is this a known issue??? Is there a better way to configure my computer so that the DV2000 is better recognizable by DVDA2a???

Otherwise I have no other complaints/concerns. . . so far. The bottom line, I'm able to burn DVD's (-R & +R) without any major issues except the ones noted above.

Here's my computer set up with external devices included:

*** Dell Workstation 650
*** Intel Xeon 2.8 Processor
*** 1 GB RAM
*** Two internal SATA hard drives that came with the computer: Drive C = for programs; Drive D = for temp files for various programs and wav files for softsynths, etc.
*** A 3rd internal Ultra ATA hard drive (with its own controller) used for audio/video editing.
*** One external 1394-based hard drive using a Granit Digital FireVue casing used for audio/video editing.
*** NVIDIA Quadro FX 500
*** XP Pro SP1
*** Motu's 828 MK2
*** Motu's MTPAV (USB)
*** Panasonic's AG DV2000
*** JVC TM-H1375SU external monitor
*** Note: I network this computer to my aging Dell Workstation 420 which is used primarily for archiving and internet access.
*** Note: My Dell Workstaion 420 has Windows XP Pro SP2, which has caused problems with my two computers networking together. I disabled the Windows Firewall associated with the SP2 and all seems to be fine.
*** Note: Because I do primarily audio sequencing & recording, I have the MOTU 828 MK2 set to word clock, synced to the MTPAV. Could THIS be an issue for the my audio concern? (But I STILL need to set the 828 & the MTPAV to 41,000 hz in order to correctly hear the avi file which is rendered as mentioned above.)

THANK YOU in advance for any feedback or suggestions that you my share to me.

Regards,

Ted Fiebke

Template: PAL DV Widescreen (720x576; 25,000 fps)
Field Order: None (progressive scan) [if you didn't shoot in interlaced]
Pixel aspect ratio: is set by the template (1.4568)
Full-resolution rendering quality: at least good (I choose best, can do this when rendering as well)

Motion blur type: don't think it is used unless you add this?
Deinlterlace method: not needed if you shoot interlaced (so doesn't matter what you set it to)

Hi all, I was wondering about capturing stills off of Vegas. When my camera is still, it's pretty easy, but I have this shot of teh groom and bride walkign towards me that everytime I use vegas to capture that still, the product is pretty blurry.

I'll post an example: http://droptodesign.com/test/Image0.jpg

just isn't good enough and I've tried several different parts of them walking, but:

http://droptodesign.com/test/cake.jpg

doesn't look too bad. I was just wondering if there are other ways to capture stills off of clips that would look better.

Thanks a mil!

Other than setting the Preview window to Best/Full, deinterlacing the still in Prefs, and saving as a PNG....that's the best you're gonna get.
It's only 720 x 480...
you can always do some nice upsampling in small chunks in Photoshop, getting the weaker image to look better.

REgarding the external monitor problem, this is a problem with how the resource switches, and it definitely is a problem.
Here's a silly, but simple workaround for the time being;
Click external monitor in DVDA.
Then go to prefs in DVDA and set the External format to widescreen
It will come up on your external as a squished image
Now reset it to normal NTSC, and it will keep the preview on the external monitor.

You shouldn't have to reconfigure audio. Seems like something is weird with the MOTU, maybe it's internal mixer is set to 44.1? Dunno. I used to endorse their gear, but they really don't support PC stuff very well.
I'd shut down word clock, let the clock come from the internal clock. See if it sniffs the 48K properly.
Is it resampling, or is Vegas/DVDA resampling for you?

Have you expanded the track as far as it can go? This allows you to view 'frame by frame' and perhaps find a better grab.

Well, I tried that and it's teh same blurryness, almost as if my video card wasn't clear enough. I have 128 megs of ram on it, not sure. Still beating my computer for an answer.

Vegas Movie Studio is a TERRIFIC app. And DVD Architect Studio is a great app too. For an upgrade of 30.00 US, people that have Screenblast can be rockin', and for 99.00 US, people can get into a great NLE package with DVD authoring.

We've just competed a book on Vegas Movie Studio, co-written by Jeffrey Fisher and myself. Both of us were blown away at the power found in Vegas Movie Studio. Pan/Crop, Chromakey, great audio tools, some compositing tools...stable and fast.

I know what he meant.. I am trying to do the same thing.

Shot in 4:3 and letterboxed.
Now I want to create a DVD and make the DVD player pretend it is is anamorphic footage so it uses my full 16:9 TV-screen.. sorta pseudo-anamorphic.

My guess is resizing the material until it "fits" the 16:9 TV and then squeeze it back to 4:3 horizontally and just render it as widescreen DV.

What ist the resolution of a 16:19 TV?

720x576 is 4:3 PAL
1024x576 is 16:9?

PAL uses rectangulas pixels, right? So.. how should I render the material? I need a 4:3 image that is 1024 pixels wide.. I hate aspect ratio calculations!

Cheers, Peter

<<<-- Originally posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle : REgarding the external monitor problem, this is a problem with how the resource switches, and it definitely is a problem.
Here's a silly, but simple workaround for the time being;
Click external monitor in DVDA.
Then go to prefs in DVDA and set the External format to widescreen
It will come up on your external as a squished image
Now reset it to normal NTSC, and it will keep the preview on the external monitor.

You shouldn't have to reconfigure audio. Seems like something is weird with the MOTU, maybe it's internal mixer is set to 44.1? Dunno. I used to endorse their gear, but they really don't support PC stuff very well.
I'd shut down word clock, let the clock come from the internal clock. See if it sniffs the 48K properly.
Is it resampling, or is Vegas/DVDA resampling for you? -->>>

Thank you for the kind reply!

I also posted this in Sony's DVDA forum. Someone, too, suggested this very work around for the External Monitor. This work around. . . well. . . works! :)

Regarding the audio issue. I know that MOTU stuff is wacky-wierd with the PC world. When I first started out in the computer-based audio recording/editing, I had LOTS of problems getting everything to work together. It was a mini nightmare. Thanks to a lot of knowledgeable people from various forums, I did manage to configure the MOTU devices and my computer so that all worked well. . . most of the time.

At present, I have NO issues with my newer MOTU gear, except with DVDA2a. I wish I can tell if it's DVDA or the MOTU software/hardware doing the resampling. Is there a way to investigate this??? All I know is that in order to correctly hear the avi file with the audio set at 48,000 hz/16 bit, I need to set the 828 (and because I word clock the 828 with the MTPAV), the MTPAV to 41,000 hz. I am embarrassed to say that I did not try to set the 828 to "Internal" rather than word clock. It's like trying to change an old habit. I don't even think about changing this particular setting. (I'm so embarrassed.) Will try and report my success or failure.

Other than this particular problem, I'm happy with my current set up! The MOTU stuff is working well for me on all SONY software as well as Steinberg's SX and Logic's LAWP 5. It's just the DVDA2a that's acting funny. . .

Warm regards to you, Spot, and to all on this forum. (Thank you, Ed, for being moderator!!) I lurk here often and learn lots! :)

Ted

thats the beauty f it my friend!

Problem is people here in oz are a lil brainwashed when it comes to NLE's...

Sure Prem Pro 1.5 and a Matrox RTx100 are a good tool, but when you consider adobe have changed Premier to work along the same lines as Vegas (not A/B editing) its an expensive substitute..
Vegas is less than half that price..

One thing is for sure, Sony will never bring out a Hardware card like the matrox which offers realtime.. its sad, but thats jsut not SOnys way..

I mean that SDI card theyre bringing out is all good, but its stilll doesnt let me run multiple tracks and filters and output in realtime..

and thats the ONLY problem i have with Vegas.. apart from that, it absolutely kicks ass..


As for Studio, there is no other application out there that offers this level of audio and video as well as DVD authoring.. hell i paid $400 alone for DVDA.. and now theyre almost giving it away..

this happened to me too. it WAS infact a keyframe issue. check if you have any small triangles somewhere along the bottom of the effect timeline.

Hi all,

This is a followup to the thread titled "Vegas 5.0 Delinterlacing methods" as originally posted by James Lilly.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29954

I posted a short article on my website about de-interlacing with Vegas. I included full-rez sample stills from a narrative short film that originated in 60i on my JVC GY-DV500 and then de-interlaced to 30p.

http://michael-morlan.net/pages/learning/learning_video_deinterlacing.htm

Enjoy,

Peter Koller's method will work just fine as long as the material isn't interlaced and played on a standard television set. Then, the interlaced lines will be munged vertically and your temporal sequence will be fubared. :-)

As it happens, I had just tried the resize and render method that Peter describes with a progressive project this afternoon. While the result is obviously softer since their is less information, it still works.

My one concern is I observed some stairstep tearing in high-contrast, diagonal edges due to the resize.

If it's not the keyframe problem, then here's the probable solution.

if you click splitscreen then the little triangle next to it and click select all, your fx's won't show. Playing with splitscreen you may have selected that by accident. I only know because I did the same thing with Vegas 5 recently and couldn't figure out why my effects weren't displaying.

I'm in PAL land, so you might have to adapt this a bit if you're in NTSC, but here's what I do, following some tips on these forums.

Select a small part of video you want to capture the still from.

Render it, using avi render.

rerender but select upper field first, instead of the lower field first default.

align both rendered avis on a new timeline, and reduce the opacity of the upper track to 50%.

Rerender using progressive scan, and then in a new time line, take your stills from there.

I'm typing this from memory, as I'm not in front of my Vegas PC.

Hope this helps.

Andy

I'm using NTFS, and the clips are often over 4 gigs, but some of the clips are only a few minutes long. There is no maximum file size specified (the box is unchecked). It's not consistent either because the tape splits into many different file sizes. Also I don't touch the computer while it's capturing. And if it matters, this computer is spyware free.

Wait, could dirty heads and drop outs cause these splits in video? I thought that was the case, but the tapes split in different places. Although some tapes didn't do this.

Yes, dirty heads and dropouts COULD cause this. So could breaks in the timecode. For example, suppose you took a tape out of the camera and when you put it back in it didn't start in the previous recording but, instead, started over at zero.

I went into the 828 MK2 Audio Console and changed the setting from "Word Clock" (with MOTU's MTPAV as the source) to "Internal", then set the 828 MK2 to 48,000 hz. Finally, went to a recent project used in the DVDA2a and played back the avi file (with the audio set to 48,000 hz).

For whatever reason, the setting within the 828 MK2 Audio Console was switched to 44,100 hz. My guess was this was done by the DVDA2a program. It's like the DVDA2a program wants ONLY the audio device to be set at 44,100 hz.

I'm stumped.

Seems like a glitch to me. . . at least between DVDA2a and the MOTU audio device. Understand that no other programs does this when playing an audio or avi file set at 48,000 hz. Also understand that this issue is just a minor inconvenience to me. I am otherwise happy with the end results provided by DVDA2a: a functional DVD.

Just wondering why this is happening. . . . (?????)

Ted

The stairsteps could maybe eliminated or at least minimized if the resizing would be done with a software that smoothens the steps after a resize. Depends on the calculation method of the application. I think irfanview has a very good algorhythm and Photoshop should be fine, too. I would try and export the images as a tif oder tga sequence and batch resize them.

I have no idea how the various video editing packages handle resizing..

Although this procedure is quite some heavy messing around with the image, it might still be better to do this yourself than letting the viewer hit the zoom button on his tv set, as this might degrade the image a lot more. Oops, interesting English I am fabricating here...

Michael.. "softer" does not imply more filmic, does it? ;-))

Cheers, Peter

I have done this in the past by using a Widescreen preset for the project settings and then using pan/crop to Match Output Aspect on all of my 4:3 material.

Then for DVD, I simply rendered to MPEG using a Widescreen preset and created the DVD in DVD Architect.

For the web, I rendered to windows media and set a custom output size for widescreen. You can quickly determine the custom output size that you need for widescreen by looking at the bottom of the preview window. If you have Simulate Device Aspect Ratio selected and the project is set to a widescreen project, then the "Display:" info at the bottom of the preview screen will show the square pixel equilivant for the widescreen preview. Simply use these values as the custom output size for the windows media encoder and select "Stretch video to fill output frame size (do not letterbox)" in the render dialog.

This worked well for me.

Randall

I can't tell you why you are experiencing what you're experiencing. I can say that on my editing computer, I have the audio locked to 48K so that I won't hear any audio that isn't 48K, acting as an alert to errors I've made in the editing stage. DVDA doesn't attempt to shift anything on my Delta nor my Layla. I just have to suspect the motu no matter what, unless you are rendering 44.1k files for your video, and that would take a will and effort.
Remove the MidiTimePiece from the process for purposes of experimentation. Just use the 828 as a separate box. See what happens.

The avi files are rendered so that the audio is 48,000 hz/16 bit.

But I will do as you suggest, Spot. (I have to work tonight, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow when I'm fully awake and everything is on and running.)

Given the problems I've experienced before in the past with MOTU products, I guess I should suspect one or the other MOTU devices I use in my set up. What confuses me is that they both (the 828 MK2 and the MTPAV) seem to work well with the other programs. . . so far.

Thanks! :)

Ted

Michael,
Thanks for sharing this. I like the short film as well, with regard to cinematography and lighting.

anyone know how to get it up on Vegas 5??

for the life of me i cant find it.......

I does not appear to be there. I guess I never missed it because I never used it in Vegas 4.

Have had a lot of fun recording into tracks - Mixing board with various intruments attached going into sound card going into Vegas. Interestingly it will not record to the drive that I keep
Vegas files in it will only work on the drive that has the actual
Vegas progam on. the manual says you can tell it where to record
the files to but it will not work on a drive that does not have the
program on it. No big deal but a little bothersome for media management.

I occurs to me that I always find the most complicated solution to a problem :-)

Thanks, Randall!

I do the same thing sometimes Peter!

I just posted a short tutorial on this in the Vegas FAQ at the following URL:

How do I create a Widescreen video from 4:3 source material? (http://www.jetdv.com/vegas/forum/viewtopic.php?t=163)

Randall

Have you set the setting to record to the other drive? That setting is in File - Properties under the Audio tab.

Indeed - It starts and immediately stops recording, the cursor
still moves down the timeline but nothing is recorded. There
is then a message at the bottom right of my computer screen
(not in Vegas) saying Write Failure, all data has been lost.

All I can say is WOW.....IF you thought multicam editing was fun in prior versions, version 3 has truly impressed me....
Thanks Edward

On behalf of Edward and myself...you're welcome.
We really enjoy knowing that our products are truly helpful to our fellow Vegas editors.

Gary