Vegas Video discussions from 2006 (Q3Q4)

[James Talus]

I forgot to mention that I filmed both in 24p, thanks...

[Jon McGuffin]

Thanks so much John! That's much appreciated. I have interest in your tutorial package for Vegas, but disapointed there's nothing yet on Vegas 7. Any plans to introduce a Vegas 7 tutorial?

Jon

[Jarrod Whaley]

Did you change the pulldown setting on the camera?

Vegas does pulldown removal automatically if the have the pulldown removal box checked in the global preferences. So if it's removing 2-3 on a clip, it's because it was shot that way. If it's removing 2-3-3-2, it was shot in 2-3-3-2.

The thing is, either pulldown scheme should look more or less the same... pulldown doesn't really affect the look, they're just two different ways of putting 24p video into a 60i stream.

Are you sure you shot the footage that doesn't look right in 24p, or might you have been shooting 60i or 30p by mistake?

[Andy Davis]

Hi guys.

I have been using a borrowed comp with Vegas 4.0. I have encountered a small problem that is now driving me crazy! When I render a project to AVI it stops the render at exactly 18.48 minutes and an error comes up. The error says that the file is either write protected or I have insuffiicient space. I have lots of space and no idea why this is happening! Help?

[Mike Kujbida]

Sounds like the drive you're rendering to is formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS.

[John Rofrano]

Originally Posted by Jon McGuffin

Any plans to introduce a Vegas 7 tutorial?

It’s in the works. ;-)

~jr

[Michael Krell]

Thanks Edward - so it sounds like it's a matter of preference, not an issue of quality loss? And thanks for the tip of adding VEG files to the timeline. I didn't know you could do that.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Carl Downs

if my machine is not fast enough... I may have to put together a new machine... keep reading if you like... and help if you can... keeping in mind final goal is Vegas 7 >

I have built two systems, both of which are used for my Vegas6 work. One was built 4 years ago. It was a Dual Athlon MP 1800+ with 512MB PC2100 DDR ram and an 80 GB RAID 0 stripe (7200RPM ATA133s running through a 64bit PCI bus). Then a year ago I bought an Alienware MJ7700 with a P4HT(3Ghz) with 2.5GB of DDR2 RAM and a 160GB ATA100 7200RPM RAID 0 (motherboard raid controller).

Now here is the fun part.... I rendered the same video on both systems at the same time (source stored on the raid partition and rendering to the raid partition) and performance was only ~3% better on the $3000 Alienware when compared to my 3 year old custom dualie.

All this to say that you need to put your money into CPU and RAM because that is the limiting factor. The GPU doesn't matter a bit, other than to provide multi munitor support, which I HIGHLY suggest.

You MUST go either new new pentium Core 2 Duo (just can't beat that performance) or quad Zeon / Opteron. Get a $150-200 GPU and put the rest of the mony into the CPU.

As far as RAM, it obviously has to be fast, but I have NEVER has a single instance of Vegas use more than 1GB of ram. I usually operate with at least 512MB of unallocated free physical RAM. Part of this is due to a programming decision by MS where the OS automatically reserves 1/2 of all physical RAM for the OS & kernel, leaving the remainder for running applications.

As far as a RAID goes, you may notice the need for a RAID, but if it is going to cost you more than ~$300 to put in the RAID, I would suggest a 2nd render computer. Yep. Vegas comes with 3 licenses (as far as I know this is tru for v7) so make use of it! Get a moderate 2nd system that is bare bones.... Core 2 Duo, 1GB ram (or less) 100GB HD to store your sorce and a gigabit ethernet card in each system (or get an nForce chipset because they should come with Gigabit onboard). Put down $50 for a small 5 port gigabit switch and use remote desktop between the two (WinXP Pro only of course, not home).

You can either set up a render on one, and then keep working on the other, or do the true network rendering where your master pushes out the render jobs to the 2nd computer. Then you are still free to edit while the slave system renders your test footage.

Note that due to licensing issues with the MPEG2 codec, if you use the true network rendering feature (where you select "render to network" then multi threaded support will NOT be used on the 2nd system. BUT if you just copy the source over the gig network and copy the project file, you WILL be able to make use of the multithread rendering for MPEG2.

Above all, like my title mentions, keep your work flow in mind. If you usually are at good stopping points every once and a while, then a 2nd render system might not be a bad idea. Get a 2nd monitor so you can stretch that time line over the entire 1st display, and put all your preview, sound levels, and other tools on the 2nd display.

Hope this helps some.

jason

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Michael Krell

...so it sounds like it's a matter of preference, not an issue of quality loss? ...

That's right. A tool like Vegas offers many ways to acheive a particular result, which is great for those who do a lot of editing. You have tools to optimize your workflow for a particular task.

Time is money and workflow is king, if you're getting paid for your work.

[James Talus]

Yeah, they were both 24p...but not sure if one was 24pA or not.... I wonder if 24pA records in 2332....

[Mike Kujbida]

James, Sony has a white paper titled "24p and Panasonic AG-DVX100 and AJ-SDX900 in Vegas and DVD Architect" that you might be interested in reading. You can find it at http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/dow...p2.asp?DID=511

Mike

[Ross Metzler]

Sorry for all these questions on one posting but it seems to be the most efficient way of doing this. In advance, I thank you for your help.

Question 1: I have downloaded Vegas 7b. It works fine except when I first open up the program. A window appears stating to

"Please Wait. Opening Media Library Default".

This goes on for a few minutes and finally a window opens up states that

"The media library default could be opened".

You can click OK and you are good to go. It is just annoying. I have unloaded and reloaded Vegas and Media Manager twice according to the Sony forum but the problem persists. The uninstall and reinstall was done for Vegas, Media Manager and Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine. I am not married to the Media Manager and can work without it. Any suggestions?

Question 2: This is probably very simple for some of you. When preparing an uncompressed AVI file in DVDA4, is there a big difference in the final quality by moving the video bitrate from 8 to 9.8? i.e. for smaller files such as 15 or 20 minutes videos. Is there any downside to doing this? I do understand that increasing the bitrate increases the mpeg2 size.

Question 3: Is there a good beginners book for basics of HDV? I have been using Vegas for a few years but never with HDV. Mainly a hobbyist looking for something more challenging.

[Ross Metzler]

A quick question about a more efficient way to "Match Output Aspect" in Vegas 7 for a batch of jpeg images. Is there a way to do this for many digital images all at once? Is there a technique or a script that helps to accomplish this?

Thanks

[Kyle Ringin]

In Vegas 6 you can copy the event (image on the timeline) that has the correct setting, then select all the other events, right click and select 'paste event attributes' (from memory that's what it's called, might be slightly different though). This should work in Vegas 7 also.

HTH,
Kyle

[Jarrod Whaley]

Originally Posted by James Talus

Yeah, they were both 24p...but not sure if one was 24pA or not.... I wonder if 24pA records in 2332....

Yes, Panasonic's "24pA" uses a 2-3-3-2 pulldown scheme. The regular 24p mode on the camera uses 2-3 pulldown. That's the only difference between the two 24p modes.

As I was saying, there's really no difference (visually speaking) between footage using the two pulldown schemes. 2-3-3-2 pulldown is better for editing on a 24p timeline (or for eventually going to film). 2-3 can be edited in a regular 60i timeline and treated like 60i footage in pretty much every way.

So if you have footage that looks like "regular DV" to you (by that I assume you mean 60i), then it either is 60i, or it's 24p and something about it is tricking your eye, so to speak.

What shutter speeds were you using in each of the two cases you mention?