Vegas Video discussions from 2005 (Q1Q2)

[Kyle Ringin]

If you are running WinXP it uses a fair bit of RAM. I think minimum requirement is 128MB (?). If you have a shared video card (probably unlikely though) that'll use a bit more RAM too.

[Bob Costa]

Philippe

I can't envision what that would look like. Maybe I am doing something different than you with my text? I am too much of a rookie. Wanna post a sample? LOL

[Edward Troxel]

With 1 Gig, my max is 895 meg.

[Ray Sigmond]

I just ran across a review of Sony Pictures Sound Effects Series by Charlie White. The Series sells for $349.95 on B&H. Has anyone used this yet?

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/products/showproduct.asp?PID=916

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=29761

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=NavBar&A=search&Q=&ci=10001

[Dennis Vogel]

These folks http://www.womble.com/products.htm claim to have a program that does frame-accurate MPEG-2 editing. I've not used it so can't say whether or how well it works. If you give it a try please give us a report, OK?

Good luck.

Dennis

[Bob Costa]

I hitnk DSE posted some comments about it maybe two weeks ago?

[Tony Rockliff]

I've used it a number of times (Womble's MPEG Video Wizard) and it really does what it claims.

After you've done your editing (and it is frame-accurate indeed), you click on render and it shows you graphically what and where will be re-encoded and what will be left as it is. If you've just done cuts, nothing will be re-encoded. If you've done any transitions, just those will be re-encoded (and very quickly).

It has a very pleasant and fast intuitive interface with multiple tracks and input and output windows, a lot of nice transitions and filters and effects, titles etc. Of course if you use any filters, those sections will need to be re-encoded.

There's a free 30 day trial. I'm very pleased with it for mpeg work.

The only thing I didn't like was if my audio was AC3 and I wanted to add a fade, Video Wizard converted the audio to mpeg (this is a limitation of AC3 editing, though).

Hope this helps.

Tony

[Philippe Gosselin]

Hi ,


I would if I had one :)


One quick example would be to do a mask with your text and some footage of fire.

You put your text at the bottom of the screen and with the cookie cutter you slice of the rest of the screen

You could have scrolling fiery text at the bottom of the screen , that would be cool.

I'm still a rookie myself but I am learning all the time , this is what I like so much about NLE with Vegas.

For example I just finish one of my project today (with the help of you and a couple of others :)

Very easy : text event with a nice font , white letters over black screen. It ended up not looking good. i thought then that the same logo with letters outlined in white instead of being all white would look good.

Fool around a bit but couldn't find the way to do it and ... BINGO , reverse engineering:

Instead of having the white letters on top of black background I will do black letters on black background and apply a white outline effect to the text. i had to play in the dark a bit because i was working black on black but it ended up being exactly what I wanted to be.

I am discovering that by thinking backward instead of forward and sideways instead of straight forward I (we) now have limitless possibilities with the wide range of effects available in Vegas.

It was difficult at first and there are still some stuff that I don't comprehend but by keeping on fooling around with it I'll get to know it on no time :)

Have fun :)

[Bob Costa]

Oh, now I understand. I was having trouble envisoning hoe the cookie cutter came into it. I would do that effect differently, but I understand now and you are right, it would be cool.

I too am learning that there are ten ways to get different effects, and I just have to learn how all the pieces hook together. Even more interesting is that the sequence you link them totally affects the end result. Its more than learning a new language its learning a new way to think.

[Jack Smith]

Your probably running XP.If you check your allocated memory it will show your app and Xp has eaten your memory.256 is minimum for XP and prefer 512 or more IMHO
Like Edward said add the memory
smitty

[Rob Lohman]

I must confess that I haven't read everything of your "rant", but:

- why are you doing slow-motion after a conversion to progessive? I would slow down the interlaced footage which creates progressive on the fly

- it is a known fact that most NLE's aren't very good at slowing stuff down, that's why there are specific programs to do it

- I didn't quite follow your 4 min 37 story. I've never had a problem exporting anything in Vegas 4 or 5

[Rob Lohman]

Can your monitor display a PAL signal?

What are the Vegas project settings? I assume you set it to PAL?

[Edward Troxel]

the problem lies in the fact that even with supersampling, im gettin really REALLY choppy slow mo.. so from interlaced video to frame mode to slow mo.. obviously im losing frames....

Why is it obvious you're losing frames? Naturally some things slow down better than others. If you slow down a person walking across the camera it is not going to look as good as slowing down a person walking toward the camera. Just the nature of the beast.

On top of that, rendering in interlaced is a nightmare and i no longer wish to put my HDD to that much strain.. i kid you not.. a 2 hour wedding took 33 hours to render and al i had was a widescreen mask, and my basic film bleach bypass, effects being colour curves, sepia, glow and corrector.

Not exactly true. You're doing a LOT of changes to the footage - that's what's taking the time. It's not like the hard drive is going to be constantly hitting over that period of time. You've added a lot of CPU intensive effects. Also, if you're going to render to interlaced, shoot interlaced. Up above you mentioned rendering to 25p!

Theres a myriad of other issues with it, such as output files only allowing a playback of up to 4 minutes and 37seconds.. irrespective of the output file type, if i wanted to encode in another app, such as procoder, forget it..

I have never seen this. I routinely render multi-gig files usually in the 2 hour range. Never seen one that did not play back correctly in other apps. 4:37 sounds suspiciously like some app on your system is hitting the 1 Gig barrier.

Have you tried holding down CTRL-SHIFT and then starting Vegas? This will reset everything back to the factory defaults. What happens when you render then? Do things look any different? Can other apps see past the 1Gig point then?

I know you're frustrated at this point but some of these issues you mention aren't problems on my system. I have no problems with other apps seeing the full file. You also have another option you haven't mentioned and that is to frameserver to the other app.

[Rob Lohman]

Ray: ehm, what has a DVX book todo with the Vegas NLE?

[Joe Carney]

do you have an external firewire drive connected while you are trying to preview?