Vegas Video discussions from 2005 (Q1Q2)

[Owen Hughes]

I have done a fair share of editing on Avid Pro and find the picture in picture function easy to use. It is especially helpful when doing promo projects.

I havent been able to get it to work on Vegas 6 yet. How do you do this?

[Greg Jacobson]

Just using the interlal plug ins already inside of the softwares, which is faster as rending HDV footage?

Also, I know you can put Vegas on up to 3 computers, can you put PPro on more than one computer?

[Brian Kennedy]

Owen, I use Vegas 5, not Vegas 6, but making a picture in picture is as easy as putting two video tracks stacked on the timeline, then using the pan-crop tool on the top one to shrink and position it.

[Greg Jacobson]

Anyone using Vegas with a render farm?

I have 5 computers sitting in boxes and was thinking about setting up a render farm to get the render times down to what it takes DV to render.

Anyone doing this? How many computers you using and how much is it helping render times?

[Dennis Vogel]

Make sure your cam is in record mode. If you have it in playback mode you will not see anything coming to the cam from the PC.

Good luck.

Dennis

[Edward Troxel]

Actually, to create a PIP you're better off using Track Motion. Owen, go to the link below my name and look at the first three issues. I cover PIP's extensively there.

[Patrick King]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

Actually, to create a PIP you're better off using Track Motion. Owen, go to the link below my name and look at the first three issues. I cover PIP's extensively there.

Or even better, download the free trial of Excalibur (which Edward and Gary developed, I think?!?). Excalibur will do some really cool PIP stuff, very easily. If you use the trial, be careful...you'll buy it! ;)

[Owen Hughes]

Why didnt i think of using the pan-crop tool! DUH! Thanks for all the advice guys, I'll check it all out and see what suits me best.

This forum is like having IT services on hand 24/7, except you have one great advantage over IT services, you know what you're talking about!!!

Thanks again
Owen

[Steve Roffler]

I was trying to use Bezier masking to make a puzzle appear to break into peices and leave the field of view. I made a whole bunch of peices with the Bezier mask with no problem and then made them move with the 3D track motion. The problem is I used ADD masking to put all the peices together (one peice per track). I had to render (in DV AVI) every few tracks to a new track to keep rendering from crashing my computer and to prevent motion aftifacts.

The ADD mask caused two problems.

First, overlapping peices (as they move off the field of view) turn brighter (because they are added). This is anoying but can be acceptable. Second, as I rendered to new tracks, the puzzle became progressively brighter. It seems that some low level background is being added during each render to the new tracks and this slowly accumulates until the puzzle is superlit. Since I start with 286 tracks, this is a significant problem. I used some of the filters to adjust the final output but it looks terrible. Low resolution.

Any suggestions on how to solve these problems? I also tried converting my Bezier masks to regular masks (with the blue screen mask, forgot what it's called) but render times then increased exponentially. A render of a 60 second piece of only 5 tracks was estimated to take 8 hours before it crashed my new notebook.

BTY, I'm using V5.

Thanks.

[Milt Lee]

Hmmmm.....clicked on the link and it redirected me to a microsoft site. Is that right? Love to find out about the academy.

Milt

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

http://www.digitalmediaacademy.com/c...ets/vegas.html is the direct link.

[Milt Lee]

I've been entering a video that I completed this winter in various festivals and I had a question about the best ways to go from my computer to a tranfer house, and which facility has done a good job for people.

My film (VIDEO LETTERS FROM PRISON) is a 30 minute piece that I edited in Vegas and have turned into a DVD. I also have an AVI file of the same piece.
What I need is a BetaSP to send off to the Winnipeg Festival. Other festivals want Digi-Beta.

My question is - can these transfer facilities use an AVI file, and would that result in better quality, or should I just send a DVD? Because it's 30 minutes long, I used a higher constant bitrate, and it really looks good, but the original tape was 24P from my DVX100A and I'm wondering if it would be better if I sent them the AVI file, without the 2332 pulldown.

Shameless plug - the film recently won BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT at the Native Voice Film Festival.

Thanks for the help!
Milt Lee
Hollow Bone Films

[Milt Lee]

Cool, this time it worked!! THANKS!!

Milt

[Edward Troxel]

I fixed the top link. It should also work now.

[David Bird]

Hi,
I'm considering the purchase of V6 for my son who is a broadcast journalism major. Does the "student" version of V6 have any limitations as respects functionality as opposed to the standard retail version?
Thanks - David Bird