Vegas Video discussions from 2005 (Q1Q2)

[Adi Head]

i downloaded Divx player and installed the codec. i can play Divx, which i think means that the codec has been successfully installed, but for some reason, rendereing to Divx in vegas is not an option.
i found a thread saying that once the Divx codec is installed, it should be available as one of the .avi templates. did i misunderstand something? what am i doing wrong?

[Vovka Chopine]

To have avalible output in divx format you also need instal divx encoder.
http://www.divx.com/divx/drdivx/

[Emre Safak]

It is not available as a template; you have to create one yourself. First install the encoder; xvid or divx should be fine.

[Adi Head]

it might be my ignorance to the whole deal with file types and compression. but i'm still not clear on what i should be doing to render a piece of video on vegas to Dvix.

i just downloaded the codec and encoder (or whatever) from the site vovka listed. installed it. now what?

sorry for being so helpless. i wish i could understand more. searching google on the subject just gave me lots of techy info which gets me dizzy just looking at.

thanks...

[Bill Ravens]

1-make sure you deselect "Ignore 3rd party codecs" in PREFERENCES
2-go to file/render as/avi
3-select CUSTOM button
4-select VIDEO tab
5-slect DiVX in the dropdown list

[Vovka Chopine]

this example for avi
File->Render As->Select Avi output->Custom button(this will open custom template)->select Video tab->Video format (drop down selector) chose DiVX.
Recomendation if you downloaded drdivx, best preformance, render non compressed and use dr divx encoder for best result.

Hehe, Bill Ravens outpost me, in time i submitet, fill like lost bid in ebay :))))

[Sam Looc]

I prepared my project with DVDA-2 and save the audio and video file in a specific place. Then I use nero to burn, I locate my audio and video file for nero. this is because DVDA don't recognize my external dvd burner. I go and burn, 1/10 of the way through the burning process it stops and displayed the error message and it dont tell me why. Can anyone help? This is frustrating me! Thank you. Anyone uses Nero 6?

[Nick Kerpchar]

Kevin,
Of all the Vegas5 training books and DVDs that I have I like Douglas Spotted Eagle's V5 Editing Workshop book and Gary Kleiner's V5 and DVDA2 training DVDs best (I don't have Edward Troxel's DVD although I have pasted his newsletters into the back of Spot's book and use them as supplement chapters). They are all excellent to get you up and going, although the DVDs are faster because you don't have to read; just watch, listen and do. But as far as content, it's hard to beat Spot's Vegas5 book (and it has a bonus DVD that includes mucho ACID loops, video files, stock stills, motion backgrounds, sample veg files, and more). I only wish there was a Vegas users group in the Houston area.

[Edward Troxel]

First of all, I'm assuming you mean the Video_TS and Audio_TS FOLDERS (not "file")? If yes, then they should contain the proper files for the DVD prepared by DVDA.

You then open Nero, start a new DVD project, add these two folders, and tell it to burn. If Nero can't burn to the blank DVD, you'll probably have to ask Ahead Software for help.

[Frank Aalbers]

CF24 in Z1 uses plain 2:3 pulldown. The problem is it's upper field first and Vegas can't handle it.

If you flip your footage vertically you get lower field first. Then you can take out the 24p by taking out the 2:3 pulldown.

But it's not really worth it. The FX1 doesn't shoot with a clean 24p timing. It's just some fake 30 fr/sec to 24fr/sec by skipping frames. Very stuttery. I had an example a while back online, but I took it out and can't find it anymore. It showed a constant moving bike, After getting the clean raw 24p footage, it was very stuttery.

Barry Green saw it to and can confirm this also.

Frank

[Glenn Chan]

Not very many people have either setup so it's hard to get data on them. However...
A- There are rendertest.veg results for dual processor systems. At rendertest.veg, the second processor does very little.
B- There are also data on network rendering... there are a few caveats to network rendering:
Your project is split into chunks, which doesn't always end up with the rendering load distributed. One computer might get the first portion of the project where all the complex rendering is, while the second computer gets the easy stuff. The overall render will have to wait on the first computer. Also, both computers should be roughly balanced in terms of processing power.

There's a "stitching" process where the rendered (.avi) file has to be assembled on a host computer. This is an additional step in the end.


There are some cases where a single processor computer can outperform 2 computers network rendering. For Vegas, a single processor system (the faster the CPU the better) is by far the best bang for your buck.

After that, cost effectiveness drops dramatically (EE/FX version processors are quite overpriced, duals are expensive and not much faster, and network rendering is sometimes faster and sometimes slower).

An overclocked single processor system is definitely the best bang for your buck, but you need to make sure it's stable. It's a tossup as to which of the following is fastest (depends on what you do and how you test):
An overclocked single processor system
A dual processor system
2 systems network rendering

(Obviously 2 overclocked systems network rendering is even better)

2- For MPEG2 encoding (for DVD), a dual processor system is fastest. There are also hardware cards available to speed up DVD encoding (those don't go with Vegas).

[Keith Paisley]

Sorry if this is a FAQ or is well documented somewhere, but I've run several google searches and a few searches here and can't seem to find an answer to this.

I'm a long time user of Premiere and since much of my content is destined for web distribution I have to use a fairly arduous and time consuming process to get the results I want.

Once I edit all of my footage and am happy with the final results, I render it in full NTSC res using HuffYUV to try to keep a lid on disk usage.

Then, since the resizing algorithms in Premiere and pretty much everything else sucks, I use avisynth or virtual dub to scale the video to my target size, also using one of these to deinterlace if necessary (now that I have an XL2, not so much...). So i have a 2nd intermediate file that I then use to feed into Microsoft's Windows media encoder. One good thing about Windows Media Encoder utility is that I can tell it that I want the distribution format to be set such that the files can be played almost as soon as you start downloading them, assuming you have a fast enough connection to keep the buffer full. This is not the same as streaming, but close. The beauty of this is that i don't have to set up a farm of streaming servers to maintain - i simply use standard web servers and it works great.

With Vegas I was hoping to streamline this process, and have rendered several clips directly to WMV, skipping all the intermediate rendering, with pretty good results (though I'm not sure the scaling is as good as avisynth/vdub). But I can't find a way to tell it to encode the clips such that they can be downloaded and played progressively. Please tell me I'm overlooking something, and if I'm not, please tell me there's a way I can convert the streams to this format after they've been rendered.

I sure hope I can dump my old workflow because it's agonizingly slow.

thank you.
kp

[Dan Euritt]

it's been awhile since i used the microsoft wm encoder, so i'm having a hard time visualizing how you told it to start playing the files as soon as they start downloading.

what you could be referring to is the wm9 fast streaming technologies, which include fast start, fast cache, and fast reconnect... but i think that those only work if you are using true streaming from a microsoft streaming video server(??)... they essentially allow you to do things like initally buffer the video stream much quicker than the bitrate of the video itself, before it actually starts playing.

if you have seen delays in the way that http streaming functions because of settings in the wm9 encoder, please let us know the exact details.

also, be aware that every user has the ability to change the cache settings in their individual windows media player.

[Sam Looc]

I found out what the problem is, for some reason It messes up if I burn in 4x speed but it does fine if its 2x. My dvd's and the burner states 4x but i guess I'll have to burn in 2x speed. Thanks.

[Christopher Lefchik]

I've been exporting from Premiere Pro directly to WMV 9 to put on my web site, and it plays fine via http. Windows Media Player will buffer a few seconds and then start playing the video as the rest downloads in the background. I've never had a problem, and haven't changed any buffer settings in Windows Media Player.