Vegas Video discussions from 2005 (Q1Q2)

[Edward Troxel]

Scripting cannot "see" the "beats". You have to determine those manually.

[Rob Lohman]

It is no problem if the CPU is at 100% as long as the job gets done. Vegas
(like any video application) is a demanding one resource wise. However, if
it didn't work like that before it may indeed be wise to do a re-install.

Something may have been messed up in the driver area or perhaps you have
a virus etc.

[Rob Lohman]

I've moved your thread to the Vegas forum since it has nothing to do with
the GL2 (except that no DV camera can record slow motion).

Vegas is usually accepted as being pretty good at doing slow motion. However,
remember that it creates frames from thin air where nothing exists. In other
words it will never look as good as true slow motion.

I also did a search for you (search -> advanced -> restrict to just the vegas
forum and entered slow motion for the keywords) and found these:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=33074
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=29601
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=27289

If you need/want to look at external products I believe "Twixtor" was a good
product to do slow motion (try a demo first).

[Edward Troxel]

Vegas does great slow motion. By default, it is already very smooth. However, you may need to do more if slowing down a LOT (remember, it has to make the information for all the "New" frames). You might want to do a search in the help file for "Supersampling".

[Peter Jefferson]

hmm.. slow mo..

quick and easy solution..

go to ur project properties.. and set the motion blur to gausian with a deinterlacing method using interpolation..

now in ur slow mo trac, make sure the video bus is active and set ur supersampling to 8 (as high as it goes)
Also after watching it, u might notice the image is a lil soft, so it might be an idea to run a sharpness filter on the clip as well..

[Glenn Chan]

Vegas 5 usually doesn't usually peg the CPU to 100% with a single processor hyperthreading CPU (which is seen in Windows as two CPUs... two graphs will show up in task manager). On a non-hyperthreading processor, I forget if 100% is right.

Hopefully you met your deadline Chris...!

2- One thing I can think of:
It might be that your hard drive is in PIO mode. When your hard drive gets errors (which is not good) Windows will drop its transfer speed down.

If your hard drive is in PIO mode, Windows will take a long time to boot and your computer will be slow.

[Fred Foronda]

I plan to step up to vegas 6. I am currently using a lap top. Specs are pentium 4 HT 2.8Hz 80gb HDD 512MB DDR. I know I will need a seperate drive to store video. I was thinking of Gtech 160. How many storage drives do I need? Will this one be enough? I normally work with one project at a time then its deleted once I author it. My videos are family videos and are about and hour long or so.

Thanks

[Edward Troxel]

I can capture to the C drive on my laptop. It also has a D drive I also capture to. External firewire drives also work fine. Not knowing all the specs of the particular laptop I can't guarantee it will work but haven't had any problems on two different laptops.

[Rob Lohman]

Fred: I would advice you to get a drive that at least has an USB2 connections,
if you want it can also have firewire (but I would not get a drive with JUST
a firewire connection!). I've had problems in past with firewire connecting
a drive. USB seems to more of a "PC" connection.

1 hour of video is 13 GB. If you don't use your laptop for anything else you
can store at least 5 hours of footage on it probably. If that is enough depends
on the amount of footage you shoot for a 1 hour production and how you
like to work. Don't forget you may need music for things like music, pictures
and DVD authoring (if you are gonna do that, at least 9 GB for a single layer
disc and 18 GB for a dual layer one to be safe).

[Magnus Helander]

I've successfullt used three computers for "distributed rendering" and then stiched a project together, here are some of my experiences...

1. As i understand it you can not use distributed network rendering to MPEG-2. When rendering to uncompressed AVI or DV (which works with network rendering) vegas will create chunks/segments of your project, and then tell the other clients to render the segments, and then use a "stitch host" to put all the segments together.

2. We use a gigabit hub from D-link to connect the render stations, which are all fitted with gigabit network cards.

3. The renderhosts need to have unique ID's in the TCP/IP tabs "DNS-suffix", this is described in the manual/whitepaper. Then reboot all computers and restart hubs and routers, just to be sure...

4. All files and folders (source files/folders and render output folder) needs to be shared and available with full access to all render stations. This is what I had the most problem with..

Overall this is very good - instead of a two hour render we were down to 30 minutes, and then approx 30 minutes for MPEG-2 encoding.

Another very good use is to have a single "render station" (not distributed) which does the rendering, which does not lock up the editing station.

Good luck,
Magnus

[David Ennis]

For a stage productions I tend to run both of my two camcorders with the incandescent lighting preset for white balance. On the last shoot, my son, running the second cam, forgot and ran with auto white balance. As a result, his footage is uniformly yellowish compared to mine.

I'll guess I'll have to poke arround with the color corrector and see what kind of improvement I can get, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Chris Trainor]

How can I find out more about the PIO mode?

And here is a crazy update on the situation....

Considering the time it was taking to render, I knew that I would not be able to complete on time given the performance. So I ran an app called Norton Ghost (which basically is a backup utility) to an exteral Lacie drive, making a complete backup.

I then reformatted my machine, installed 2000 instead of XP. Just seems a bit more stable in my opinion. I installed only what I needed to get running, video drivers, directx, etc. Then Vegas.

I opened up the file from another interal hdd, and kicked off a render. The CPU immediatly maxed out to 100%. My heart dropped.

JUST before posting this to this forum, I had an idea. I selected all of the data in the timeline, then copied it into a new, blank veg file. Renamed it, and rendered, and it flew the way I had grown to love.

So maybe the file was corrupted?

Now it seems to render most of the time quickly, however, on occasion it will creep again and max out the cpu. If I repeat the above process however, it works. What is up with that? When its rendering at what I would consider 'normal' speed, the cpu toggles around the 85%-95% usage. But never peaks out.

Also, I had pulled a few files off the lacie drice since the install, yet now when I try and access it, its not showing up. I can go to the computer management in control panel, and it shows up as an unallocated drive. Where is my data!!! Very crucial backup exists somewhere on there!

So I dont know what to do. Guess I will be calling Lacie tomorrow and see what they suggest.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!

Chris

[Barry Stokes]

Does anyone know if I can transfer video from Vegas to my JVC SR-VS3OU deck through a firewire? I can't seem to get Vegas to recognize the deck in the preferences. In fact, I don't even know if the record function on the JVC works backwards through the firewire port. Anyone know?

[Chris Hurd]

Moved to Vegas forum from The Long Black Line. Cross-posts removed.

[Glenn Chan]

Grasping at straws here... the information below may not be that helpful.

Hey Chris, if you re-installed Windows then PIO mode is not your problem. If you want to double check, go
control panel
system
hardware (tab?)
hardware or device manager
expand the branch for IDE/ATA controllers
right click the first entry
get properties
click advanced tab
read what mode the window says the interface is using

rinse and repeat for secondary controller

2- Totally esoteric and probably not your problem:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=...G=Search&meta=
Certain older models of Pentiums can be very slow when it deals with a de-normal mode. You may encounter them if you do audio work that deals with small floating-point numbers (i.e. reverbs).

Check by muting audio or something, or making a .veg copy and deleting audio tracks.

3- There are a few bugs in Windows that can cause slow performance. You can try updating your machine to fix that (windows update).

4- Maybe some of your software is corrupt???

5-

Also, I had pulled a few files off the lacie drice since the install, yet now when I try and access it, its not showing up. I can go to the computer management in control panel, and it shows up as an unallocated drive. Where is my data!!! Very crucial backup exists somewhere on there!

Apparently certain Lacie drives have a high failure rate (this is from reading the Sony forum). It's an un-fun possibility that the drive overheated.

Data recovery should be possible as long as there is no physical damage to the hard drive platter (which is likely the case). That's expensive though. If Lacie is just going to replace your unit but you want your data, you may want to look at a data recovery service.

It could be something else though. But if it used to worked and now has stopped working, then it probably has a failure of some sort :/

One thing you could try is to mount the drive internally. If it's just one drive, you can do it. Don't do this if the Lacie enclosure/drive has two physical hard drives inside.
Watch out for static, find instructions on disassembling it (not sure if this is possible), make sure you select the right jumper setting on the drive by moving the jumper (cable select should work... otherwise master/slave both drives, or cable select both).
If the drive spins up, you are in luck. WIndows should be able to read the data off it. If it has formatting problems, take a peek at the drive with Active Undelete demo. It will show if the data is recoverable.
I really wouldn't do all that though... call Lacie first and ask them what gives.

6- Workaround:
If you really need to get this done, perhaps you could edit your material on another computer.

Borrow a computer from a friend.
(Possibly unethical) Buy a computer from a store with a good refund policy (check for restocking fees).
Use a lesser specced computer?
Early upgrade... get yourself a new computer.