Vegas Video discussions from 2006 (Q1Q2)

[Michael Ojjeh]

I bought a training DVD from vasst by ( Douglas Spotted Eagle ) and it really had a lots of info. Buy the vegas 4 training DVD not the 5 or 6 yet. The vegas 4 DVD will get you started on the basic and everything you need to know about it.

[Edward Troxel]

Originally Posted by Roger Rosales

Got that VEG and did both again. Saved it.

So you used the Nested VEG option? What if you did the first option, speed up, render, now speed up that render instead of nesting VEGs through multiple levels. How's the render speed then?

[Tony Sellars]

May be a stupid question. How can I make a logo scroll across the bottom of a clip? Need to scroll our logo across the bottom of our outdoor tv show opening. Thanks

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Use the Pan/Crop tool, and keyframe it from one side of the screen to the other.

[Jarrod Whaley]

You can do this using either track motion or event pan/crop, depending on the situation. Event pan/crop would probably work the best.

I'm going to try to walk you through this...

Go into the pan/crop dialog by clicking the small square icon on the upper left corner of your clip on the timeline. You'll see a small keyframe timeline in the bottom section of that dialog box. Place your cursor on the left side of the keyframe timeline and then drag your logo to the left (assuming you want to start on the left of the frame) in the large window on the upper right. You can drag it all the way out of the frame, if you want to come in from the side. If you want the logo to stop somewhere in the middle of the frame, place your cursor at the point on the keyframe timeline where you'd like the scroll to stop, and then go back up to the large window on the upper right and drag your clip into the desired position. Say you want the logo to stay there for three seconds and then shoot off to the right. OK, move your cursor again to a point three seconds further along the timeline. Click on the small "+" icon below the keyframe timeline to add a key frame. Then move your cursor to the end of the timeline and drag your logo all the way to the right.

If you just want the logo to scroll past without stopping, that's even easier. At the head of the keyframe timeline, move your logo all the way to the left. Then move the cursor to the end of the timeline and move your logo all the way to the right.

If the timing or speed of the movement doesn't suit you, you can just click on the keyframes and move them wherever you want.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: I guess DSE explained it much more concisely, huh?

[Ryan Laytart]

I've got a simple question:

After rendering a particular video, during one scene I realized that part of the text overlay was off-screen. The only way I knew to fix this was to zoom out with the pan and scan and re-render/burn.

Is there an auto-fit feature in vegas or architect? Obviously if the text was partially off-screen in one shot, that means all the video is partially off-screen. Does that mean that I'm missing out on partial footage for commercially produced dvd's as well??

Thanks in advance.

[Ryan Laytart]

my apologies, this should've been in the Vegas DV forum.

[Edward Troxel]

You must allow for the "safe areas" when shooting. In Vegas, click the button above the preview that sort of looks like # to turn on the safe area overlays.

[Justin Deming]

Hi, I am running into an odd problem, this is the second time it has happened to me.

I am rendering to DV AVI trying to create some backgrounds for future projects, and just playing around.

The first time it happened I was using one of the media genetators to create some swirling blue background stuff. I created the whole project, rendered it, and it looked like it was working till I looked at the finished AVI. The whole file had vertical bands in it. I went back, started rendering little pieces of it, and changed things till the bands went away. When I changed the color of the rendered waves the problem vanished. I tried all sorts of things, and the only thing that would make the bands stay away was to not use blue.

I gave up on that, as I am just playing around, and I did learn by doing it. Recently I decided to make a 5 pointed star logo thing for fun. I drew 5 lines in photoshop, then used 5 wipes to reveal all 5 lines at the same time. The whole thing was looking great, till i looked at the rendered file. I have vertical bands again in my video. I like blue, so my 5 lines I made are blue.

Does Vegas have a problem in it's head with blue?

I will capture some stills tonight & post them tomorrow. I can show you one where all I change is the color of the waves, and the bands disapear. It's quite annying, blue is my favorite color!

Any ideas?

[Roger Rosales]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

So you used the Nested VEG option? What if you did the first option, speed up, render, now speed up that render instead of nesting VEGs through multiple levels. How's the render speed then?

Actually, this is the first thing I did before I posted on the forum, but stopped it immediately because it was still insanely slow. And this is considering I only did a 3x speed up (using only the velocity envelope to its fullest). I was going to reimport that clip and do it again, and again, but it was simply too slow, even when not sped up as much as I have it now. It was going to take about an hour to render footage sped up 3x.

Jarrod, I'm not sure EXACTLY how sped up footage works, but when I expand my timeline to view frame by frame, it looks like it drops frames to create the illusion of sped up footage. This may be true a long with what may have said, but again, I'm not a pro at how sped up footage works.

As for premiere outperforming Vegas that much, well...yeah, it does actually. I took the exact same clip, dumped it in premiere, speed it up, umm....lets see if I remember correctly...I believe it was 4,800% (could've been more, I can't remember), but I had it at the same speed that vegas has it at and it rendered in LESS than 30 minutes, on the same machine. My specs:

1GHz processor
512mb of SDRAM

I love Vegas, I truly do, but when it comes to rendering it underperformes so badly, it's embarassing.

[Jarrod Whaley]

I think it's more complicated than dropping frames, at least in Vegas. My impression based on my own work with Vegas is that it's more of a blending kind of thing.

I agree that Vegas' renders are reeeeeeeeally slow. For what it's worth, at least the Sony guys are working on it, it seems. By all accounts 6.0 renders much faster than 5.0.

Which reminds me... I really need to upgrade from 5. :)

[Vince Debart]

That’s what I love about Vegas it’s like working in a word Doc. I find it very easy when wanting to make some changes in a project but want to keep the old version. When you right click in Avid its a deferent world to me. in Vegas its like going home…..

Vince

[Steven Davis]

Is there a table of contents for the Absolute Training for Vegas+DVD, Vol. 1-3? I was going to order some DVD stuff for Vegas, and was looking to get a better comparison of what VAAST has.

[Ron Arrivillaga]

Thanks for replying Jeff. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite clear in my request. I have 3 audio tracks in the project:
- Stage mic (stereo)
- External mic on camera (wide stereo, back of theater)
- Music (stereo wav)

Using the surround panner I've assigned each track as follows:
- Stage: LeftFront, Center, RightFront
- Camera: LeftRear, RightRear
- Music: LeftFront, RightFront, LeftRear, RightRear (pushed mainly to the fronts)

Using only these three tracks I don't get any signal in the LFE channel. The only way to get a signal in the LFE channel seems to be to specifically assign a track to LFE using the surround panner. So I've created copies of the stage and music tracks and assigned those copies to the LFE track. The final result looks like this:

1 - Stage: LF-C-RF
2 - Camera: LR-RR
3 - Music: LF/LR-RF/RR
4 - Stage (copy): LFE
5 - Music (copy): LFE

This achieves the goal of getting the signal to the LFE channel, but isn't exactly intuitive. I would have thought that I could pick any audio track and mark it for LFE based on some crossover point. As it is now, if I change the stage or music track, I have to remember to re-copy to the LFE track. Am I doing this correctly, or am I missing something?

[Jeff Mack]

No, I think you are right on. Sorry for my misunderstanding.

Jeff