Vegas Video discussions from 2006 (Q1Q2)

[Phil Hamilton]

This applies to the filters I should use in Vegas so I am posting here. I have an interview clip where the sound needs to be increased to hear everything ok however when I do there is a noticable background hiss that appears.

How would I filter out just the hiss if possible? I'm guessing that I would need to stack filters but am unsure. Please point me to another post or would the one mentioned above work in some way? tks

[Fred Finn]

Hey Ron, no. No WinTV PVR card. I was able to fix it by manually changing the location of the file to an external hard drive (capture scratch) and recreating it there.

[Yegor Sak]

Originally Posted by John Rofrano

Yup. You could use the built-in script called Render Image Sequence. Since you are speeding your footage up 100x you only really need one frame out of every 100. Just have it render every 100th frame and then import those back into Vegas as an image sequence. If that doesn’t have enough motion blur, render every 50th frame and speed it up by 2x in Vegas.

~jr

How would import the sequence into Vegas? Cant seem to find that option.

Re-rendering the video 3 times seems kind redundant (and time consuming), but rendering every 3000th frame sounds like the best option.

[Gian Pablo Villamil]

Even simpler method:

1) render from Vegas to Cineform intermediate,
2) open the resulting AVI in VirtualDub,
3) in the Frame Rate dialog set it to decimate by 100,
4) set VirtualDub compression mode to Direct Stream Copy,
5) Save As... (no need to specify codec if using Direct Stream Copy)
6) Use the AVIFrate util (http://www.inmatrix.com/files/avifrate_download.shtml) to reset the framerate to 29.97 or 25.
7) Import the resulting file into Vegas.

Step 1) will be the most timeconsuming, but everthing else will be very, very quick.

[John Rofrano]

Originally Posted by Yegor Sak

How would import the sequence into Vegas? Cant seem to find that option.

To import a still image sequence into Vegas do the following:

1. Select File > Import > Media... this opens the Import dialog
2. Navigate to your image files and click on just the first one (do not click all the files! Just select the first one)
3. Check the checkbox at the bottom of the dialog that says "[X] Open still image sequence"
4. Press the Open button
5. Adjust the properties in the next dialog to match what you want the media to be (frame rate, field order, etc.)
6. Press OK

That will place a new media object in your media pool. Just drag and drop this onto the timeline.

Tip: The easiest way for you to do the export is to first change your Time Ruler to Absolute Frames. Then run Render Image Sequence and set the Step Time to 100. This will give you every 100th frame. Then when you’re done, set the Time Ruler back to SMPTE Drop or whatever it was originally set at. The Render Image Sequence script will always expect the parameters to be in the time ruler format. Setting the time ruler to Absolute Frames makes the math rather simple.

~jr

[Seth Bloombaum]

Best solution: Always monitor all audio with headphones during shooting always.

Also, this is an area where on-camera microphones have MUCH poorer performance than boom or lav mics. The further away from the subject, relatively more environmental noise is recorded.

I work with eq, gates, compression, and noise reduction frequently and every time I remind myself that these fixes in post are not as good as and much more difficult than fixes in production.

But I still do them...

I guess my favorite filters for this sort of work are:
Noise Gate. The idea here is that when the subject is speaking, noise tends to get masked by their voice. It's when they pause or stop that noise comes up dramatically. In some situations, a noise gate filter can be adjusted with minimum attack time and perhaps a 500 millisecond release (that's half a second), then adjust threshold to a point where soft dialog is heard, but noise is not. Doesn't work all the time.

Noise Reduction. This one doesn't come free with Vegas, as Glenn mentioned, but it is a great tool. Lots of people also mention the Soundsoap noise reduction plugin, but I've not used it.

There is a freeware N.R. tool that comes with Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net). Very simplified controls, compared to the Sony plugin - but hey, it's free and might work for you. Check it out. You'd render a .wav from Vegas, process it in Audacity, then reopen in Vegas and sync it up to your existing sound track, then use a volume envelope or something on the original to drop it out as needed. I suppose syncing might be an advanced audio editing skill, the idea is that you adjust the position of the .wav track while listening to both until echo is reduced to a minimum.

When you're done with noise gate or noise reduction, you might find that the track doesn't sound the same as the rest of your footage. Grabbing a piece of environmental sound (aka. room tone) and looping it under the edited section can help smooth things out.

[Charley Gallagher]

A friend asked me to help with her problem. I am enclosing the email and my reply. Obviously I didn't solve the problem for her. I would appreciate any help with this.

"Well, I thought I would just make a simple DVD of my church's baptism. Last summer, I captured the file, as an avi file. Now, when I open it in Vegas, there is no audio!!!! But the audio exists, because it plays video and audio in RealPlayer and in Movie Maker....any thoughts?"

My reply:

"Do you have the "mute" button pushed in?
Is the volume set to zero?

It will work in Vegas if it plays elsewhere. Did you put it in a new project with the default settings or did you add it to something?

Try this, open an old project that you imported .avi files into. Rename it as soon as you open it. Call it audio test. Now you can't mess up your original project. Import this .avi file as an additional .avi to the project and see if it plays. If it does, your setting are correct in your project. You can delete everything but the .avi you just imported and start from there. this method won't tell you WHY you had no sound, you won't learn from it, but it might get you up and running if your time is limited."

And hers:

"In answer to your questions, the audio should be OK. I put in a new project with default settings.

Well, I was trying to follow your directions, and I opened another avi file, but it said it was building an audio proxy file, so I decided to see what that did....it gave it audio. However, it does not prompt me for an audio proxy file when the baptism file opens, nor do I see a way to do it manually. Is this a clue?

[Brandon Wood]

Anyone know how to recreate that 16-18 fps look to mimic the old 8 or super8 mm choppy filmlook in Vegas? A script or filter maybe?

I have the everything down as far as the grain, scratches and such, but it just doesn't look quite the same without that "choppiness" you see at that filmspeed with an 8mm projector - which I know of course is the projector's shutter opening and closing - not sure if it can be done.

[Peter Jefferson]

hehehehe this is where Vegas shines... right click your clip, and check properties... teh lil box will pop up now look down to see playback rate and undersample rate...
the Undersample rate is what u want to mess with...
i usually set mine to increments of thirs, such as 0.33, 0.66, and 0.50 for film reel emulation. It wont change the speed of your footage but it will kill off afew frames.
1.0 = full frame rate, then from there u can literally just throw down some random numbers until your happy. Couple this with some film looks filters and your on your way

[Peter Jefferson]

one thing ive found, and im yet to find a solution for, is that when working to create a VBR mpg, how high can one really go?? I mean ive rendered out to 8500kbps with an average of 6k, but some players just cant handle this.. for some reason???

ive now resorted to encoding down to averages of 7500 as a high, 6 for the average... which really isnt to my liking...

[Brandon Wood]

thanks Peter - I should have guessed you would know...lol

excellent!

[Neil Fontaine]

Software vegas 6 +DVD Arcitect

The software recomends to save the audio and video seperately I never done this before.

If I burn the video to mpeg2 and the audio sperately to ac3 how does DVD artitect assemble these two files?

Do I simply import the mpeg2 file and then drop the ac3 file below that?

Also I do not want to spend all the time rendering 4 hours then have to have DVD arcitect have to render it all over again because the files are to big. So what settings should I use to fit 4 hours on a 4gig size DVD?

Also should I choose top field for output, it will be played on SD TV.

[Edward Troxel]

If they're both named the same, and there's no audio in the MPEG2 file, it should automatically happen. If it does not, you can manually add the audio. Take a look at Vol 4 #1 of my newsletters for more info.

[Fred Foronda]

Okay I utilized the CFHD file and batch render to dvd architect and made a dvd. Now in order to print back to HDV tape do I re-render that file again or can I upload the rendered dvd architect onto the timeline (since its already rendered) and print to tape.

Thanks

[Fred Foronda]

I think I may answer my own question after looking into it more. I need to re-render to print to tape because I needed to change the porperty settings since its going to HDV not dvd.