Vegas Video discussions from 2004 (Q3Q4)

[Peter Jefferson]

okies, im in pal land and ive only just figured out why vegas slow mo's are so bad.. (after useing Vegas since its inception many moons ago... even before realtime preview.. )

anyways.. its all got to do with the maths.. for some reason, if u use an even number, or a number off a 5 percentile (ie, 50%, 60% 70% 30% 66% etc... percentile/increment of 5 being 45%, 65%, 75% etc etc, Vegas will just recalculate the needed frames.. which is what it should do, and in Pal land theres not much thinking involved its all even numbers, all its doing is literally halving or dividing the file up into a an even number of frames....

BUT

its jerky as hell.. why?? regardless of what blend method u use.. its still fixated on the main original frame, so the redrawn frames are basically copies of the original without any interpolation due to frame rate.
No interpoloation from what i can see anyways, I might be wrong, as im going thru the slowed footage frame by frame but i see no changes within those newly drawn frames.. jsut a "strecthing" of time between them.. with a static redraw
whether i output to 25p or 50i.. its the same..

BUT (again) heres the doozy...

select an odd number.. 37, 53, 67, 73, etc so long as its not calculatable up to 10, 32, 66, etc etc 25/50/100, and Vegas will have to redraw the whole file.. IE, recalculate WHERE the original frames are, in accordance to the tempo of the actual clip.. so instead of lets say.. a 5 second clip at 50% it wil end up being 10 seconds.. BUT if u have that same 5 second clip, and drop it to 53% its 9.something so its uneven..
So the fields between the originals (which are all now out of wack due to the tempo vs velocity) are actualy smoother as Vegas has actually done some work in redrawing/shuffling the ORIGINAL file frames.. ...

now, i tried setting my project to output to NTSC, and u know what, from pal to ntsc, its perfectly smooth... why, coz ntsc aint 25p or 50i (or a denomination of it.. its 29.97, so its not an actual denomination of 25/50/100 fps, hence vegas redraws the bugger from the core frame (ie REDRAW the original frame to create a workable calculation.. )
I dunno if im flipping over peoples heads here.. but im tryin to think out loud with this... and I know i might sound like a mad professor here, and some people may not agree with me, but thats cool..

I just thought id mention this as its been buggin me.... i mean i once did a slo mo at 10%... looked shite.. dropped it to 9 and 11 and it was perfect..

Supersampling doesnt make any differnce either apart from arranging a multipass render

I might be wrong in my theory about how vegas calculated this, but I'd like to hear other peoples experiences with this... (ie jerky slow mos)

but i thnk iive found the cure for Pal..
I'll be talkin to Sonys dev's about this for an update as i know theyre working on V6 as we speak...

theres alot that can be done and this is one factor which needs to be looked at....

[Edward Troxel]

You don't have to be USING an external monitor in order to push the External Monitor button. Make sure the "External Monitor" button is NOT pushed. In Vegas 4 if that button is pushed, the snapshot buttons will be grayed - even if you see the image on the screen!!!

[Gino Montoya]

Hi.

Is there an easy or "right" way to go back to the beginning of the timeline and re-cut scenes?
I'm going through a lot of trouble when I group-select and slide events to open up space to re-cut (I need to trim clips making them longer or shorter, or insert clips) because I have several overlapping audio tracks (music/room tone/fx tracks running the length of the scene)
I've read about paste insert, auto ripple, etc. but the problem is I sometimes need to give the video track just a couple more frames but keep the other tracks the way they are.
If I trim out a clip on an earlier point of the timeline, how can I make all other tracks move the same amount of frames so all the rest of the work stays in sync?

Thanks

[Edward Troxel]

You're going to have to be VERY careful. Grouping can help you keep things in sync. When you move one item of a group, all other events in the same group should also move. I also use the "Select Events" tool in Tsunami so I can select everything from the cursor to the end of the timeline. This allows adjusting everything after a certain point.

Now depending on exactly what you are doing, sometimes it is feasible to simply render the timeline to a new AVI file and then edit THAT file. Won't work in all circumstances but WILL work in many.

[John Hudson]

You are correct Edward. Thank you. I don't have an EXT MON and have NEVER had the NEED to use that feature. I guess I just CLICKED it and went into panic mode.

All is good now, thanks again!

[Jim Quinlan]

It sounds like auto ripple would do the trick making sure the triangle next to the auto-ripple selection is set to all events all tracks. Spread out your timeline so you can see frames and then trim away the excess frames and everything else should fall in place.

[Jay Mitchell]

Edward,

It appeares that the Hyperlink is not active.

Jay Mitchell

[Edward Troxel]

They're working fine. I fixed this one for you. If you want, do an "Edit" on your post to see the proper syntax.

[Jay Mitchell]

Thanks Edward,

I now understand.

Jay

[Trey Perrone]

im taking a course in school and our first project is a "news type" story. the teacher said that she wants the audio channels separate...VO and NAT on separate channels....while i remember some of this from way back in the day when i did some linear editing, i am not sure how i would go about accomplishing this doing a print to tape. i have the GL1/XL1s cameras, and i know they have two audio channels, the first one being 16bit and the second 12 bit i believe...or something along those lines...but I dont know about exporting the footage to the miniDV. honestly, our teacher doesnt seem super savvy (in fact i dont even think she knows) i aksed her about it and all she could muster up was that it was up to us if we wanted to edit nonlinear for the project.

Just to clarify a bit, i know that i can basically have an unlimited amount of audio channels (or maybe there is a limit) in Vegas5, Im only concerned about having two. If I was to export back out to miniDV, is there a way to specify an audio1 and audio2 channels, or will the export combine both of them...i figure that since some news stations are using miniDV this kind of thing would have been run into, since it is news that typically requires these tracks separated.

[Simon Wyndham]

Does anybody know if it would be possible to write a script that imports another VEG file onto the current time line, and assigns a region to that area so that if you updated the imported VEG the project containing the imported VEG could also be updated easily. Hope that makes sense?

Just trying to think of a way of doing nested timelines within Vegas, or something equivalent. I know I can open another Vegas app and copy and paste, but I was looking for a more automated way of doing this.

[Edward Troxel]

Short answer is NO.

[Edward Troxel]

Vegas will not capture OR print 4-channel audio. If you need to capture 4-channel, you can use Scenalyzer Live. I know of NO methods for printing 4-channel.

If you need to keep them separate, you may wish to simply pan the voice to the left and the rest to the right. Then you have them separate but on a single stereo channel.

[Edward Troxel]

The XL-1/XL-1s/XL-2/GL-1/GL-2 series are some of the FEW cameras that will actually record 4-channel audio. Most others will not. When you record a single stereo channel, it will be recorded in 16 bit. If you drop to 4-channel audio, BOTH stereo tracks will be dropped to 12 bit.

[Gary Kleiner]

Trey,

Perhaps you are over-thinking this.

Record your mic and nat sound onto separate L/R channels. In your project, duplicate your stereo audio track and make one be left channel only and one be right channel only. Pan the left channel left, the right channel right. NOw you have mic on one channel and nat on the other.

Since Vegas can create 5.1 surround mixes, you COULD create a 5 channell plus LFE soundtrack, but you would have to encode as AC3 audio and deliover on DVD.

Gary