Vegas Video discussions from 2004 (Q1Q2)

Edward Troxel · May 8th, 2004, 09:33 PM

The Pick Hit award is in recongnition of innovative technology shown at NAB.

Judges are readers of Broadcast Engineering magazine and working professionals in the broadcast, post and network and satellite industries.

Guy Bruner · May 9th, 2004, 06:26 AM

That looks like a nice technological package. I have used AMD processors for 5+years with no regrets. One thing you might want to look into is the reliability of the e-Machines laptops. The models I have seen in the past weren't too robust. This is just my observation since I've never owned one of their laptops.

Glen Elliott · May 9th, 2004, 07:52 PM

I've been following the workflow in Vegas of capturing my tapes in their entirety as one file per tape. I originally switched to this workflow because Edward introduced me to it...just made it much easier organizational wise, etc. I however realized a "kink" in this workflow. It has to do with the way windows handles files.
The other day I captured a single DV tape (1 tape, roughly 13 gigs). After capturing it I checked the drive in xp's defrag and the entire 13 gig file was fragmented. Apparently the content on the drive (though it had be defragged prior to capturing) left gaps and the new file being captured filled the first gap then continued after the content on the disc ends and and so on. Needless to say that causes the ENTIRE file to instantly become a giant fragmented file. Not only that but I think it caused 28 dropped frames in the clip. I'm assuming when the disc had to skip a large file that got in the way to continue writing during the capture it caused enough latency for a 28 frame drop.

My question is this- if I I shot a program without any breaks (ie without hitting stop..just letting the camera roll)...is there a way to capture it in Vegas so it breaks the file up incrimentally?

Edward Troxel · May 9th, 2004, 08:15 PM

For some reason, it seems that even if a drive is totally empty a capture will be fragmented. It doesn't make sense to me be really seems to happen. However, the drive should be fast enough anyway.

Let me give you a slight modification to the "capture everything" method (and how I REALLY do it). I will capture via "segments". For example, assume I tape a wedding. When I capture the first tape I will batch capture into possibly 3 files over an 83 minute tape.
1) Complete ceremony in a single clip
2) Everything that happened between the ceremony and the reception in a single clip.
3) Reception activities in a single clip.

While I am still capturing large segments, I'm not actually capturing a full tape into a single file.

On a different note: Suppose I'm taping a 2 or 3 hour event - in this case I WILL capture the entire tape into one file as the entire tape is a non-stop run in the camera. If I wanted this into 2 or more different segments, I could, once again, use batch capture to break it up into multiple segments. Just make sure the second batch capture entry starts at the same timecode as the first one ends.

Harry Settle · May 9th, 2004, 09:36 PM

Your dropped frames have other causes than capturing 1 long AVI. Your hard drive will always, naturally be fragmented. This is because the drive arm writes wherever the disk happens to be at any given moment regardless of what you are putting on it. The clip you capture will still be shown as one long clip, no matter how scattered the bits and bytes are. This makes writing to the drive go faster. Defragging the drive puts the bits back into sequential order, which makes accessing the data quicker for the drive.

28 dropped frames? I'd be checking out my setup.

Glen Elliott · May 9th, 2004, 09:51 PM

Well prior to this I never dropped a frame ever. I had over an hour of footage capture prior to this and didn't drop a single frame. Like I explained I "think" the dropped frames (aprox. 1 sec worth...28 frames) could have been caused by me trying to capture an entire tape as a single file with a hardrive with lots of data already scattered on it. I'd have to assume the 28 frames were in one 1-second chunk when the write head had to jump a considerable distance across the drive to skip over the other 13 gig file I have stored on it as I captured. Just an assumption. Other than this recent capture I've have absolute great performance out of this external 200gig 7200rpm drive. It's a Maxtor one-touch, connected via firewire.

So Edward, how exactly do I get it to break the footage up using batch capture...do I have to litterally go through all the footage and create capture points first. UGH...how about if I wanted to simply break the footage up into a separate file every 10 minutes? Is it possible to automate something like this? Thanks in advance.

PS Edward, have you ever dropped any frames capturing a large 60-minute clip as a single file on a hardrive with video content already residing? In other words is my assumption that the fragmentation...or it having to write AROUND the content already on the drive in the gaps caused the dropped frames?

Edward Troxel · May 10th, 2004, 07:06 AM

Quote:

So Edward, how exactly do I get it to break the footage up using batch capture...do I have to litterally go through all the footage and create capture points first. UGH...how about if I wanted to simply break the footage up into a separate file every 10 minutes? Is it possible to automate something like this? Thanks in advance.

Yes. You have to pick the capture points and, yes, you could do something like every 10 minutes. I used to have to do 9 minutes in EditDV/Cinestream because of the 2 gig limit. Something I would NOT want to go back to.

Quote:

PS Edward, have you ever dropped any frames capturing a large 60-minute clip as a single file on a hardrive with video content already residing? In other words is my assumption that the fragmentation...or it having to write AROUND the content already on the drive in the gaps caused the dropped frames?

No. Something else has to be going on in order for you to have dropped frames. I seriously doubt that the dropped frames was because of a fragmented hard drive UNLESS it is a really slow drive. Even on the 5400rpm in the laptop I have not experienced this problem.

Glen Elliott · May 10th, 2004, 09:33 AM

Well it's a 7200 rpm drive (external). Like I said I captured an entire tape with my PD-170 just fine...not a single dropped frame. I went over my friend's house to capture the b-roll footage from the event from his Canon XL-1s. I'll have to keep an eye on it in the future.

Glen Elliott · May 10th, 2004, 10:11 PM

Finally got a good nights worth of editing in the new Vegas 5. I ran into some things I'm curious about- maybe some can give me insite on a few of them.

1. Is it true you have to set up a compositing parent/child when using the cookie cutter now? I tried using the cookie cutter but it didn't seem to be working. It only showed black over the areas that were supposed to be masked. As soon as I made the one layer a child to the other the cookie cutter worked.

*Oddly enough I found I was able to break out of the parent/child mode and still maintain the mask. When I first did this I thought I was wrong and I DIDN'T need to set up compositing for the cookie cutter to work. I then tried going back and using the cookie cutter WITHOUT setting up a composite- no dice. A glitch maybe...but difficult to reproduce- I was only able to get the making to stay a few times after turning OFF the composting mode...and it was when I wasn't trying to reproduce the glitch.

2. Is it me or does the ram render no longer render smooth slow motion?! I used to be able to ram render a clip that was slowed and get the silky smooth preview. Now I have to do a pre-render to get a smooth preview of what my slow motion is going to look like.

*Another oddity I ran across was the inability to alter a peice of footage that was prerendered. I tried applying a pan/crop to a fresh prerender and I couldn't get it to change the view of the clip?! Later I tried again on another pre-render and it was fine?!

3. Lastly, my workflow doesn't entail me usually using prerenders so I don't have much experience using them. Should prerenders render out a single clip as multiple files? If so, why?
I was watching a pre-render render out and it kept chopping the file as it rendered it.

Glen Elliott · May 10th, 2004, 10:35 PM

Found a few things out in the past few minutes:

-May be old news but new to me but you CANNOT alter a prerender with pan/crop, it does nothing to the prerendered clip. You can, however add filters, though as soon as you click add, choose your filter(s), then hit ok- the prerender is nullified.

-You most definitly DO need to put the tracks into compositing mode for the cookie cutter to work now. I'm still trying to reproduce the glitch where turning off the composting mode didn't disable my cookie-cutter.

-Apparently Vegas 5 handles the levels of preview window quality differently than Vegas 4. In Vegas 4 you could be in Preivew (auto) and do a shift-M (ram render) to get an accurate depiction of the footage's movement. You now have to change it to at least "best" mode to get smooth slow motion preview even with ram renders.

-Lastly, having a track in child mode cuts frame rate tremendously. I a small section in the beginning of my timeline I needed to use compositing....but further down the track I had a lone clip with no parent above it, yet it still played back at much slower framerate?!

Magnus Helander · May 11th, 2004, 01:18 AM

Hi Glen,
there is something not 100% right in the parent/child code in vegas 5 - i had a project with a parent/child mask and the mask did not show up on external preview - only in preview window.

Then a [can't go wrong with] XP reboot and the problem was gone. Multi-child is new in V5 so I think this could be on the software engineers to do list for 5b release... maybe they had an intern write that part of the code...

/magnus

Bogdan Vaglarov · May 11th, 2004, 01:49 AM

Well I made very simple test home movie and decided to burn to a DVD-R.
I left it to encode the neccessary files from .avi and to burn afterwards before to go to work.

Later on I had the successfull mesage but the PC doesn't recognise that there is DVD in the drive at all.
I repeated the whole action (this time I had ready the files from the DVDA project) using DVD+RW. The only thing I changed from the default settings was the size to 4.7GB media.
This disk work without a problem in the PC and stand alone DVD player.

So is it the media size left at 3.5GB the reason for the failed DVD-R?

Edward Troxel · May 11th, 2004, 07:43 AM

1. Is it true you have to set up a compositing parent/child when using the cookie cutter now? I tried using the cookie cutter but it didn't seem to be working. It only showed black over the areas that were supposed to be masked. As soon as I made the one layer a child to the other the cookie cutter worked.

No it is not true. It works just fine without a parent/child relationship. I just tested it on two tracks with NO parent/child relationship and all appeared as expected.

3. Lastly, my workflow doesn't entail me usually using prerenders so I don't have much experience using them. Should prerenders render out a single clip as multiple files?

Pre-rendering does multiple files - usually in the 10 to 12 second time range (depending of format).

-May be old news but new to me but you CANNOT alter a prerender with pan/crop, it does nothing to the prerendered clip. You can, however add filters, though as soon as you click add, choose your filter(s), then hit ok- the prerender is nullified.

This is an acknowledged bug. You can remedy this by right-clicking the "pre-render" indicator and choosing delete.

Edward Troxel · May 11th, 2004, 07:45 AM

The media size would not have affected the playability of the DVD. Was anything really burned onto the DVD-R disc? It may still be blank.

Glen Elliott · May 11th, 2004, 07:58 AM

Apparently there's something wrong on my machine- the cookie cutter will not work without setting up the top track to be a parent, etc. If I simply add the cookie cutter to the top track it shows black where the mask would be. As soon as I click the make child button it works.
*Granted I was doing a ctrl drag duplicate of the track. And applying the cookie cutter to the top track. Though I don't think that should make a difference.

Watch I'll go back in there today and the cookie cutter will work perfectly (like Magnus said...after a nice XP boot...). Hopefully Sony will clean this up....

PS Yet another thing that was acting up was the ram render interuption....usually during a ram render you can hit the space bar to snap out of the ram render and watch what you had renderd up till that point. On some ram renders I could escape...I was stuck untill it was finished. ?!?!?

May 9th, 2004, 07:52 PM	#1578
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	Kink in the 1 avi file per tape workflow...seeking insite I've been following the workflow in Vegas of capturing my tapes in their entirety as one file per tape. I originally switched to this workflow because Edward introduced me to it...just made it much easier organizational wise, etc. I however realized a "kink" in this workflow. It has to do with the way windows handles files. The other day I captured a single DV tape (1 tape, roughly 13 gigs). After capturing it I checked the drive in xp's defrag and the entire 13 gig file was fragmented. Apparently the content on the drive (though it had be defragged prior to capturing) left gaps and the new file being captured filled the first gap then continued after the content on the disc ends and and so on. Needless to say that causes the ENTIRE file to instantly become a giant fragmented file. Not only that but I think it caused 28 dropped frames in the clip. I'm assuming when the disc had to skip a large file that got in the way to continue writing during the capture it caused enough latency for a 28 frame drop. My question is this- if I I shot a program without any breaks (ie without hitting stop..just letting the camera roll)...is there a way to capture it in Vegas so it breaks the file up incrimentally?

May 9th, 2004, 09:36 PM	#1580
Harry Settle Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Bemidji, MN Posts: 276	Your dropped frames have other causes than capturing 1 long AVI. Your hard drive will always, naturally be fragmented. This is because the drive arm writes wherever the disk happens to be at any given moment regardless of what you are putting on it. The clip you capture will still be shown as one long clip, no matter how scattered the bits and bytes are. This makes writing to the drive go faster. Defragging the drive puts the bits back into sequential order, which makes accessing the data quicker for the drive. 28 dropped frames? I'd be checking out my setup. __________________ "DOH"!!!

May 10th, 2004, 10:11 PM	#1584
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	Some Vegas 5 questions Finally got a good nights worth of editing in the new Vegas 5. I ran into some things I'm curious about- maybe some can give me insite on a few of them. 1. Is it true you have to set up a compositing parent/child when using the cookie cutter now? I tried using the cookie cutter but it didn't seem to be working. It only showed black over the areas that were supposed to be masked. As soon as I made the one layer a child to the other the cookie cutter worked. Oddly enough I found I was able to break out of the parent/child mode and still maintain the mask. When I first did this I thought I was wrong and I DIDN'T need to set up compositing for the cookie cutter to work. I then tried going back and using the cookie cutter WITHOUT setting up a composite- no dice. A glitch maybe...but difficult to reproduce- I was only able to get the making to stay a few times after turning OFF the composting mode...and it was when I wasn't trying to reproduce the glitch. 2. Is it me or does the ram render no longer render smooth slow motion?! I used to be able to ram render a clip that was slowed and get the silky smooth preview. Now I have to do a pre-render to get a smooth preview of what my slow motion is going to look like. Another oddity I ran across was the inability to alter a peice of footage that was prerendered. I tried applying a pan/crop to a fresh prerender and I couldn't get it to change the view of the clip?! Later I tried again on another pre-render and it was fine?! 3. Lastly, my workflow doesn't entail me usually using prerenders so I don't have much experience using them. Should prerenders render out a single clip as multiple files? If so, why? I was watching a pre-render render out and it kept chopping the file as it rendered it.

May 11th, 2004, 01:18 AM	#1586
Magnus Helander Major Player Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Sweden Posts: 221	Roches Hi Glen, there is something not 100% right in the parent/child code in vegas 5 - i had a project with a parent/child mask and the mask did not show up on external preview - only in preview window. Then a [can't go wrong with] XP reboot and the problem was gone. Multi-child is new in V5 so I think this could be on the software engineers to do list for 5b release... maybe they had an intern write that part of the code... /magnus __________________ Magnus Helander, Crossmediageek on G+

May 11th, 2004, 01:49 AM	#1587
Bogdan Vaglarov Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Yokohama, Japan Posts: 366	Coaster in DVDA Well I made very simple test home movie and decided to burn to a DVD-R. I left it to encode the neccessary files from .avi and to burn afterwards before to go to work. Later on I had the successfull mesage but the PC doesn't recognise that there is DVD in the drive at all. I repeated the whole action (this time I had ready the files from the DVDA project) using DVD+RW. The only thing I changed from the default settings was the size to 4.7GB media. This disk work without a problem in the PC and stand alone DVD player. So is it the media size left at 3.5GB the reason for the failed DVD-R?

May 8th, 2004, 09:33 PM	#1576
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	The Pick Hit award is in recongnition of innovative technology shown at NAB. Judges are readers of Broadcast Engineering magazine and working professionals in the broadcast, post and network and satellite industries.

May 9th, 2004, 06:26 AM	#1577
Guy Bruner Major Player Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Ashford, AL Posts: 937	That looks like a nice technological package. I have used AMD processors for 5+years with no regrets. One thing you might want to look into is the reliability of the e-Machines laptops. The models I have seen in the past weren't too robust. This is just my observation since I've never owned one of their laptops.

May 9th, 2004, 08:15 PM	#1579
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	For some reason, it seems that even if a drive is totally empty a capture will be fragmented. It doesn't make sense to me be really seems to happen. However, the drive should be fast enough anyway. Let me give you a slight modification to the "capture everything" method (and how I REALLY do it). I will capture via "segments". For example, assume I tape a wedding. When I capture the first tape I will batch capture into possibly 3 files over an 83 minute tape. 1) Complete ceremony in a single clip 2) Everything that happened between the ceremony and the reception in a single clip. 3) Reception activities in a single clip. While I am still capturing large segments, I'm not actually capturing a full tape into a single file. On a different note: Suppose I'm taping a 2 or 3 hour event - in this case I WILL capture the entire tape into one file as the entire tape is a non-stop run in the camera. If I wanted this into 2 or more different segments, I could, once again, use batch capture to break it up into multiple segments. Just make sure the second batch capture entry starts at the same timecode as the first one ends.

May 9th, 2004, 09:51 PM	#1581
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	Well prior to this I never dropped a frame ever. I had over an hour of footage capture prior to this and didn't drop a single frame. Like I explained I "think" the dropped frames (aprox. 1 sec worth...28 frames) could have been caused by me trying to capture an entire tape as a single file with a hardrive with lots of data already scattered on it. I'd have to assume the 28 frames were in one 1-second chunk when the write head had to jump a considerable distance across the drive to skip over the other 13 gig file I have stored on it as I captured. Just an assumption. Other than this recent capture I've have absolute great performance out of this external 200gig 7200rpm drive. It's a Maxtor one-touch, connected via firewire. So Edward, how exactly do I get it to break the footage up using batch capture...do I have to litterally go through all the footage and create capture points first. UGH...how about if I wanted to simply break the footage up into a separate file every 10 minutes? Is it possible to automate something like this? Thanks in advance. PS Edward, have you ever dropped any frames capturing a large 60-minute clip as a single file on a hardrive with video content already residing? In other words is my assumption that the fragmentation...or it having to write AROUND the content already on the drive in the gaps caused the dropped frames?

May 10th, 2004, 09:33 AM	#1583
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	Well it's a 7200 rpm drive (external). Like I said I captured an entire tape with my PD-170 just fine...not a single dropped frame. I went over my friend's house to capture the b-roll footage from the event from his Canon XL-1s. I'll have to keep an eye on it in the future.

May 10th, 2004, 10:35 PM	#1585
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	Found a few things out in the past few minutes: -May be old news but new to me but you CANNOT alter a prerender with pan/crop, it does nothing to the prerendered clip. You can, however add filters, though as soon as you click add, choose your filter(s), then hit ok- the prerender is nullified. -You most definitly DO need to put the tracks into compositing mode for the cookie cutter to work now. I'm still trying to reproduce the glitch where turning off the composting mode didn't disable my cookie-cutter. -Apparently Vegas 5 handles the levels of preview window quality differently than Vegas 4. In Vegas 4 you could be in Preivew (auto) and do a shift-M (ram render) to get an accurate depiction of the footage's movement. You now have to change it to at least "best" mode to get smooth slow motion preview even with ram renders. -Lastly, having a track in child mode cuts frame rate tremendously. I a small section in the beginning of my timeline I needed to use compositing....but further down the track I had a lone clip with no parent above it, yet it still played back at much slower framerate?!

May 11th, 2004, 07:43 AM	#1588
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	1. Is it true you have to set up a compositing parent/child when using the cookie cutter now? I tried using the cookie cutter but it didn't seem to be working. It only showed black over the areas that were supposed to be masked. As soon as I made the one layer a child to the other the cookie cutter worked. No it is not true. It works just fine without a parent/child relationship. I just tested it on two tracks with NO parent/child relationship and all appeared as expected. 3. Lastly, my workflow doesn't entail me usually using prerenders so I don't have much experience using them. Should prerenders render out a single clip as multiple files? Pre-rendering does multiple files - usually in the 10 to 12 second time range (depending of format). -May be old news but new to me but you CANNOT alter a prerender with pan/crop, it does nothing to the prerendered clip. You can, however add filters, though as soon as you click add, choose your filter(s), then hit ok- the prerender is nullified. This is an acknowledged bug. You can remedy this by right-clicking the "pre-render" indicator and choosing delete.

May 11th, 2004, 07:45 AM	#1589
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	The media size would not have affected the playability of the DVD. Was anything really burned onto the DVD-R disc? It may still be blank.

May 11th, 2004, 07:58 AM	#1590
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	Apparently there's something wrong on my machine- the cookie cutter will not work without setting up the top track to be a parent, etc. If I simply add the cookie cutter to the top track it shows black where the mask would be. As soon as I click the make child button it works. Granted I was doing a ctrl drag duplicate of the track. And applying the cookie cutter to the top track. Though I don't think that should make a difference. Watch I'll go back in there today and the cookie cutter will work perfectly (like Magnus said...after a nice XP boot...). Hopefully Sony will clean this up.... PS Yet another* thing that was acting up was the ram render interuption....usually during a ram render you can hit the space bar to snap out of the ram render and watch what you had renderd up till that point. On some ram renders I could escape...I was stuck untill it was finished. ?!?!?