If your cam and the drive are on the same firewire card that could be a problem. The rest of the data looks good.

BTW, in Win2K and XP the drive's DMA by default is enabled.

Uh. . .cam and the drive on same card? If the camera's not even hooked up to the to my computer, does that matter? This isn't a problem I get with external monitor previews, I'm talking when it's the preview window in the timeline.

Well, whoever suggested rebuilding the peaks: brilliant! I don't know why, but it's been running smoothly since I did that. And I just received Vegas 4 today.

Thanks all for the feedback. I figured out my problem is when I apply a video effect I am not getting the keyframe timline beneath the effect window, so it must be keyframing from the main timeline, but I don't have any of those little keyframe diamonds. I do get the keyframe timeline with the track motion application however. I can't seem to figure out how to make it appear with video effects. Any ideas? I will check out the Sonic Foundry Forum as well. Thanks again.

any time you add a FX the 1st key frame is there in the FX time line ( bottom of FX window ) ... do a right click on the key frame ( square on it's edge) and choose HOLD if you want the color/brightness to hold your settings till the next key frame .. if you want it to change slowly to the next key frame then choose linear etc ...

to make key frame easier, below the FX time line click on the "lock" icon ( sync cursers) ..now where ever you put the curser in Vegas TL it will also be at the exact same place in the FX time line ... any changes you make to the FX will add a key frame at that TC ( you can slide the key frames- right click & drag ) ...

again on the key frames you can choose HOLD , linear ,fast slow, smooth ... i think it is defaulted to linear

Actually, it's very easy. Make the pop-up configuration screen BIGGER. It sounds like you need to enlarge it in order to see the keyframe lines. Just get on the top or bottom of the box and, when the arrow turns into the up/down arrow, click and resize it larger.

Thats the weird thing. My key frame window never comes up. Even with the video effects window as big as my monitor screen it is not there. Just a blank space below. Strangely, however, it is there if I want to apply track motion. It's got to be a simple mouse click that I've somehow bypassed to get it to come up.

Thanks for all the great feedback. I was able to discover the answer at the sonic foundry forum. Somehow I had inadvertently minimized the keyframe window seperately which made it invisible (which is a new feature on VV4 apparently).

Rendering problem with VV3
 

I have read a lot about VV3 in the forum, and have decided to give it a try.
Its pretty good.

The only problem is, when I start rendering the final output of the video.

The quality of the avi, or mpeg2 files produced seems pretty bad.
I have set the rendering to the 'best' and have altered a number of parameters as well, but the video still seems pretty bad compared to the previous program i used which is ulead.

Does anyone know what has gone wrong?
Thanks.

VV3 should be head and heels over Ulead. I have used both extensively. Could use some more information, size of files, settings, system setup etc. . . I always get better results with Vegas. Are you simply viewing the mpeg files, or are you burning them?

I guess I'll post more info.
Firstly, I click File, and render as.

Then, I save the video as AVI files.
I then click 'Custom' to change some settings.

I put 1) Video rendering quality to 'Best'
2) Motion Blur type - None
3) Resample the frame rate of all video (I've tried both click and unclick it but the video is still blocky)


Under the video option
1) Frame size - Pal DV standard
2) Frame rate - 25 (PAL)
3) Field order- Lower field first
4) Pixel Aspect Ratio - 1.093
5) Video format - PAL DV ( I suspect this is the one giving me problem as there are different compressors, but i've tried a few and the result is still the same )

6) Interleave every secs - 0.25
7) Create an OpenDML (AVI ver 2.0) Compatible file (Clicked)


I am not burning the files, just viewing the completed files. I am not too sure bout the system setup, but I have set it to all the best settings too under the project properties.

What should i check/do? thanks for ur help.

Check your project settings to make sure they are concurent with your render output settings. If its trying to do conversions and so on, you make get drops in output quality.


Zac

My project settings is as follows.

1) Template - PAL DV (720x576, 25.000 fps)
2) Width - 720
3) Height - 576
4) Field order - Lower field first
5) Pixel aspect ratio - 1.0926 (Pal DV)
6) Frame rate : 25.000 (PAL)
7) Full resolution rendering quality : Best

As I see it, it looks the same as the output. Hmm this is weird.
Anything else I should check?

Can you play the file back on another computer to see if it's a playback problem you're having? I had some problems that looked a bit like yours, and they went away when I defragged and did some tweaking of the memory handling etc. Turned out the renders were good, but the system couldn't handle the through-put in real time.
Tor

I dun think that its the system fault because I could still output better quality files from ulead n read them, which means my system should be able to read good avi files.

I thought something was wrong with the setting in VV3.
Does that mean all my settings is correct?
What could be the problem?