Those gamer cards don't help with render times at all.

I have the Matrox P650 and it's awesome - passive heat sink, so its really silent, and the dual-monitor support is good. I've never had a problem.

However, if you want a cheaper solution, just get a G550 or 450 if you can find it. Just a word of warning though, you can't play games with these cards (well, you can, but they're not really designed for that).

Dennis

New baby born editing ideas
 

G'day

My son was recently born and I'm looking for creative ideas on editing the footage. Can you help me?

Sound Sync Problems in Vegas
 

For some reason Vegas 4.0 & 5.0 is having problems with the sound syncing for some of the audio/ video files when they are put on the timeline. The files are simply captured from a Canon GL2, nothing more or less. The clips stay synched up when played in the trimmer, but it loses it's synching once I put the files on the timeline. I have never had this problem before but it starting to happen more often, and what puzzling is not all of my clips have this problem. The clips have not been altered in any way. I have tried moving the clips to different levels on the timeline but the clips still go out of synch.

If anyone can help me with this problem I would appreciate it greatly. Thanks for your time.

How were the files captured? (What program, what method...)

What is the difference between the "good" files and the "bad" files? (Look at their properties in Vegas)

I captured all the footage using Vegas Video. I checked the properties of both the good and the bad files and they are the same.

Did you capture in Vidcap using the "Capture Tape" option which automatically rewinds the tape and then simply captures the whole thing?

Were the bad files always the first clip from each tape?

If yes, try capturing those segments again but starting about 5 seconds in on the tape.

The 3dLE plugin is no longer available. Instead, you need to use WAX which has all the features of 3dLE plus many more. The WAX plugin can be found at http://www.debugmode.com

I love it!!

Well, that is a tough question there Gustavo. Editing (and shooting)
has everything to do with rhythm, composition etc. It's also very
personal. You will create something totally different then another
person and if you like what you make that is fine. Don't forget to
learn and enjoy the experience!

Get a nice rhythm going, don't cut too fast or too slow (ie, leave
it lingering for too long) and when shooting don't move the camera
too fast (often made mistake).

The best way to learn is through experience! Go out, shoot and edit!

Slightly OT: disk failure recovery
 

I'm getting a disk failure notice on the video drive I defragged yesterday (stopped the de-frag near the end).
The drive is on one leg of my onboard RAID controller as a regular NTFS drive. Error log says bad block. Drive shows up in device mgr. but not in Administrative tools/Storage, so I can't complete the defrag. (I'm using W2k SP4). Clicking on the drive's icon shows it empty (0 items on this drive).
I need to recover the video and DVD files on this thing.
How can I repair the bad block and gain access to the drive?

Thanks for any help.
Ken

I used the capture tape option. This particular clip was near the end of the tape and the clip is in synched for a portion of the clip, but goes out of snych during the middle of the clip then comes back in synch near the end. It stays totally in snych when viewed in the trimmer. Very strange.

You could try Spinrite, which is a program designed to recover data off bad sectors and such.

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

You need to buy it, but you can refund it for any reason (i.e. it didn't work). I've heard many good things about it, although I haven't had a need for it myself.

If your hard drive isn't spinning up:
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255-5029761.html

Or the best thing to do is to send your drive to a pro data recovery service, but that's really expensive! (several hundred dollars)

I had success with restorer2000. There's a free demo that you can try. You'll be able to see what can be restored, although it won't let you restore anything until you pony up.

animation rendering looks bad. how come?
 

i am editing an animation film on vegas 5.
for some reason when i render a sequence to avi (pal dv) the image quality is much poorer compared to the exact same sequence rendered to mpeg. this doesn't seem logical, for i know that .avi is supposed to be better quality than mpeg. what is wrong?
the preview in vegas looks fine. but somehow rendering to .avi makes fine lines look wavey and motion is far smooth.

work method:
the drawings and animation were created on flash. i then exported from flash as jpeg sequences (12 frams/sec). in vegas i import the jpeg sequences and edit them.

thanks.

" for i know that .avi is supposed to be better quality than mpeg. "

This is 100% incorrect. AVI (like QuickTime .MOV for example) is
A CONTAINER format! This means that it has no way on its own
to encode content into any form (except uncompressed, which
just stores it as is).

A container format needs a CODEC (encoder / decoder) to encode
(and decode on playback) your content into a stream. This stream
is put inside the AVI (in this case) container which other computers
know how to handle (but still need that codec).

So when you exported to a PAL DV AVI the codec you are using
is the DV (Mainconcept or Microsoft) codec. I could even encode
MPEG into AVI (DiVX/XviD is MPEG-4 for example). Just so all of
this is clear to you.

There are two things of immediate concern to the story you've
written:

1. 12 frames per second

2. jpeg sequences

JPEG is a LOSSY (like DV or MPEG) compression that tosses out
information you cannot (easily) see, but depending on the JPEG
compression level this can be seen. It would be far better to
export to an uncompressed or lossless compressed format like:

Windows bitmap (.BMP), TIFF (.TIF) or TARGA (.TGA) files

12 frames per second exported as 25 frames per second will not
look smooth indeed, since it will be interpolated. I assume you
want to interpret this 12 fps footage AS 25 fps instead of converting
it to that.

A few questions:

1. what are your exact project settings in Vegas?

2. what are your exact settings of the imported flash/jpeg footage? (right-click on an event on the timeline and choose properties)

3. did you change any settings in the DV PAL templat or not?

If you didn't change anything under 3 then your output settings
will have been set to INTERLACED (your project settings may also
be set to this which is NOT what you want!) which is incorrect. It
should be set to progressive.

These are a couple of things to start with...