How do I display timecode in snapshots from timeline
 

I have hours of tapes to go through. I would like to put them on the timeline and take snapshots, save the snaps to folders so I can view them in a program like Adobe Album. What I want is a way to save the snaps with the timecode printed on them. This way I could go to a folder which represents a complete tape. The folder would open up in Adobe Album as a zillion individual snaps which represent the highlights of the tape. Each snap would be timecoded so I can find that section easily.

I suppose if Vegas can display the timecode on the screen and be captured this is all I need.

Can this be done?

Yes, very easily. Go into your Video FX screen and scroll down to
Timecode and select the timecode that is approriate for your
settings and drag it over your clip.

You can change where it is displayed etc. Now select "Best (Full)"
for the preview and hit the save button on top of the preview.

That's all there is to it.

Use Timecode FX
 

There is a FX for videotracks which is called "Sony Timecode", add that effect to the track - you should be able to position and choose size of the timecode display, and it will be included when you click "save snapshot" from the preview window...

/magnus

Then you can use Neon to save the entire series of snapshots in a single step. It can easily give you one for every specified timeframe (i.e. 1 per second).

Thank you, gentlemen. It was easier than I had hoped. I don't remember seeing anything about this on Training Tapes or in the books but Vegas has so many tricks up its sleeve...

I will have to explore "Neon" and see what it can do for me.

thanks again

Hey Charlie- nice to see you on the board! Hey Edward.... I'm responsible for his conversion from Premiere to Vegas user. lol He's the 2nd DVinfo member I've preached the glories of Vegas to and subsequently changed his NLE.

Charlie you have to check out Neon AND Tsunami! Edward can link you to Tsunami.

I wrote Neon & Excalibur (http://www.vegastrainingandtools.com)

and Tsunami (http://www.jetdv.com/tsunami)

Well the timecode thing was easy enough. The only problem is that the files aren't numbered cosecutively as 001, 002 etc and they don't line up in order but I can correct that. I renamed them prematurely and the program started giving out the single digits again from the start but that's the way I learn things, the hard way.

thanks for the info on Tsunami. I checked it out the other day and will probably purchase it. Your stuff looks so good, Edward.

Glen did indeed talk me into switching to Vegas and I have learned of all the unique features that it has. I am now starting to see things that Premiere has and Vegas should and somehow that make me think that is why Excalibur, Neon and Tsunami were invented...or at least they fill the gaps.

Just out of curiosity, Charley: which features of Premiere are you
missing? I've never missed one since I made the leap. Thanks.

Well a couple of things off the top of my head are:

Slow motion- I like that in Premiere if you cut the speed to 50% the length of the clip is automatically doubled. I would like to see the velocity envelop stretch/shrink the clip accordingly.

Most of all I like the fact that you can save an entire timeline as a "Sequence" and use it on another timeline. Its very much like rending a timeline into an .avi and using that .avi somewhere else.

I think its easier to crop, or draw the black borders in Pro rather than generating media to do this.

But I did make the switch and that was done initially because Pro would stall the pc a lot despite a Gig and a half of RAM and there is a memory leak, either in Windows or in Premiere but I suspect in Premiere because if I use the program for a couple hours I need to save, restart the PC because so much memory gets used up...or did before I moved from 1 Gig to 1.5 Gig of memory.

Now I like Vegas most becase I can make changes while the program is playing. I can switch from one video track to another without the program stopping and I have learned to love the looping feature which is what initially turned me off about Vegas. Go figure.

With Excalibur, I have provided the means of stretching while changing speeds. However, it is difficult to, across the board, simply change lengths. For example, there *may* be times when you DON'T want it to change. Also, what length do you use for 0%? or 1% - a REALLY LONG clip?

I find cropping to be VERY easy in Vegas. The two options- Pan/Crop and Track Motion- give you a wide variety of options. Also, you can simply add a border effect to create a border.

I do understand that Premiere DOES have some neat features it would be nice for Vegas to implement as well.

Charlie,

For slow motion, you might want to check out the Time Bandit tool which is part of the Veggie Toolkit. It can slow down or speed up one or more events using either the Velocity Envelope or playback rate or both. The length of the event will be adjusted based upon the speed. So if you slow down by 50%, the event gets twice as long.

If you need to speed up more than 12 times (the Vegas max), then it will slice events into a sequence of one frame events.

You can get it at:

http://www.peachrock.com/software/veggie-toolkit.html

Randall

Randall,

Out of curiosity, how long do you make a clip set to 0%? If I have a 1 minute clip and I pick 1%, does it become a 100 minute clip?

For Excalibur, I limited the speed changes that affect the length to only those greater than 5% (or below -5% if reversed).

Edward,

Time Bandit allows the user to set the length of the final event and then calculates the rate need to get to that length. It also has an option to set the rate or the percent difference from the original length.

In the Beta 1 version, if you specify a rate of 0, it thows an exception (thanks for pointing this out). This will be fixed in Beta 2 which will be out before the end of the week. In Beta 2, the minimum rate is limited to 1%. I guess that my thinking is to let the user do whatever they want to do as long as it does not blow things up.

I wrote Time Bandit for two main reasons. The initial one was to be able to speed events up more than 12 times without rendering. The second reason was to be able to change the speed of multiple clips without having to worry about whether to use velocity, playback rate, etc.

Thanks,

Randall