Vegas Video discussions from 2006 (Q1Q2)

[Sean Seah]

I'm trying to render my 1080-50i to Quicktime H264 but an error pops up. No matter what settings I apply for the rest of the parameters, the error comes. Is there a specific set of parameters to ahere to?

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Do you have Quicktime 7 installed?

[Tim Goldman]

ok, still looking at different editing options before i buy. I was wondering how involved is the color correcton in Vegas. I ran across a sample of color correction doen useing a program called magic bullet. Is vegas on par with this, or is magic bullet a special software made for color correction. Any help would be great

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Magic Bullet isn't for color correction, but rather color "enhancement." MB is for generating filmlooks more than anything. That said, with a little creative ability and a fair amount of time, you can get Vegas to do the same thing. The color correction tools in Vegas are plentiful and very good, and generally real time on a reasonable machine.

[David Jimerson]

I would agree. There's little you can't do with Vegas's own tools.

[Bob Safay]

Ed, glad you are back. Hope you are feeling ok. I decided to remove the desk top icon and just leave Vegas 5 on the computer, it really does not take that much room on the drive. Bob

[Glenn Chan]

Magic Bullet Editor's 2 is a filter/plug-in that works in many NLEs, including Vegas.
MBE (the original) renders very very slowly. About 30:1, but it depends on what settings are on and what machine you have.
MBE2 allows for GPU acceleration... but with specific graphics cards. See the website for information on how to get 'real-time' performance out of Magic Bullet.

Magic Bullet Suite adds 60i to 24p conversion. Vegas does a very good job of that type of conversion itself. Vegas is *much much* faster and (I believe) a little lower quality.
I think MBS is After Effects only. It'll work with any NLE if you just export files into AE for processing.

And I believe there's also Misfire, which adds film damage and transitions.

2- You can get the same idea as the MBE looks in Vegas using Vegas' tools (the maths are slightly different).

VASST Celluloid uses Vegas' tools to create looks, and makes the process easier. Because Celluloid uses Vegas' tools, it can render much faster (unless you have a Geforce 7800 and GPU acceleration working).

But anyways, if you use Vegas you definitely have options. If you like MBE or MBS then you'd be able to use those tools.

*Disclaimer: Incidentally, DSE David and I are all affiliated with VASST.

3- You can get an idea of what you can do with Vegas' tools alone in the following clip:
http://www.glennchan.info/Proofs/dvi...comparison.mov
11.3MB download (my web server is very slow unfortunately, so it'll take a while to download)

[John Rofrano]

Sean, There should be no guesswork in what the footage actually is regardless of your preview window. Just right-click on it as I said and read the properties from the file. What do they say? Does the format say DV? Does the pixel aspect ratio say PAL DV or PAL DV Widescreen? That will tell you what it is.

~jr

[Sean Seah]

Yeah. But it 7.0.4. Downloading 7.1 to try it out now.

[Gian Pablo Villamil]

If you have Vegas 6.0d, it now includes the MainConcept AVC codec, which is H.264.

So render to Mainconcept AVC .mp4 instead. Works fine.

The MP4 container format is preferred over MOV for H.264, even by Apple.

[Peter Jefferson]

"The MP4 container format is preferred over MOV for H.264, even by Apple."

Makes u wonder hey.. lol

[Nick Outram]

Hi,

I am planning on doing some timelapse still image capture on my Sony HC1. This sequence when assembled will be added to a project using the HDV 1440i template -capturing the compressed output from the camera. Eventually I aim to output to a Blue-Ray disk although for the next 12 months I will have to settle for standard PAL DVD or play output from Hard Disk

My question is this: for best quality what image size should I select in the HC1? Options that look likely are:

1. 1920x1440
2. 1920x1080
3. 1440x1080

The first looks sure to squash the image in the vertical direction but what would 2 and 3 do? (HDV 1440 uses 'rectangular' pixels...)

Any help appreciated.


Regards, Nick.

[Sean Seah]

Oic.. I'll give it a try. Trying to toy with this as the HDwmv doesnt run well on my 1.83Ghz laptop. Works fine on the 3GHz desktop. I hope the mp4 will work better.. Thanks!

[Gian Pablo Villamil]

Originally Posted by Sean Seah

Oic.. I'll give it a try. Trying to toy with this as the HDwmv doesnt run well on my 1.83Ghz laptop. Works fine on the 3GHz desktop. I hope the mp4 will work better.. Thanks!

If you have a horsepower issue, and WMV doesn't play well, then H.264 is going to be even harder. Try an older MPEG4 codec like XVID instead. Single pass mode with quantizer at 2 or 3 is very good quality. Don't use single pass mode with a fixed bitrate.

H.264 is nominally part of the MPEG4 standards, but actually has little in common with previous MPEG4 codecs (eg. Divx, XVID, 3ivx). It requires more CPU to encode and decode, but is more efficient in terms of quality/size.

[John Rofrano]

I am not familiar with the HC1 (I have a Z1) but my guess is that the still image capture is using a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0 so 1920x1080 is the way to go if you are going to output to HDV.

~jr