Vegas Video discussions from 2004 (Q3Q4)

[Ralph Morris]

For the projector, a light oil such as "3 in 1" brand or sewing machine oil will do fine. Do it sparingly, a few drops at a time.

I also see that there is an adjustment available to allow the rheostat knob to be positioned for slower speeds. It's on P11 of my booklet. It's possible someone has done this adjustment and that it's now preventing you from achieving the highest speeds.

For film cleaning and lubrication, see the supplies at urbanskifilms.com Probably whatever lubricant is available in the smallest size would be your best bet. Some people use Lemon Pledge, but I've never tried that (and never will).

A set of film winders helps, but if you are not doing a lot of film, it's a sizeable investment. You can probably rig something to get you through cleaning a few reels.

[Glen Elliott]

How similar are the Magic Bullet presets to the Ultimate S film looks? If they were specifically design to mimic each and every effect (not that you could openly admit to that) I might seriously be interested. I've been considering picking up MB editors for V5 and Ulitmate S might be a cost-effective alternative...not to mention giving Spot more of my patronage. TIA

[Bob Costa]

I have been using Vegas intermittently for a few months. Every time I use it, I have to reboot my computer after closing Vegas, or everything runs at about 20% of normal speed until I reboot. This is indicative of old-time "memory leaks" or unreturned resources upon program closing. Damn sloppy programming for 2004.

Do other people experience this, or there something wrong with my Vegas installation?

[Edward Troxel]

I have NOT experienced this. After you close Vegas, is there a "Wowexec" listed in the Task Manager? If yes, what happens if you kill that process? While in the Task Manager, what does it indicate is taking CPU time?

[Bob Costa]

No wowexec listed. Also no processes running that are obviously taking CPU cycles. I do have FIVE svchost.exe processes sitting there (zero CPU), and that seems odd. But it may be related to something else, so I will watch it now before and after Vegas.

As I said, it acts like a memory or resource leak. Imagine how slow your computer would run if suddenly you only had 128M instead of 512M or ram. BUt this kind of thing does not show up easily, since memory is still there, just flagged as "in use" or some other such id. I have not done extensive research, since I don't know what the knowledge would do for me. I have never seen a software company admit to having a memory issue like this or even be willing to discuss it. I just reboot after using Vegas and before going back to regular tasks. But it is becoming more of a PITA to do this..

[Edward Troxel]

I know they would be interested if you can narrow down the problem. I know this is NOT a common problem as I have not seen it on multiple systems and I have not heard of this problem before.

Vegas does access a lot of things - video, sound, scanners, firewire devices, etc... Are all of those drivers up to date?

[Bob Costa]

It took me forever to get a DVD combo that would work. As part of that process I updated EVERYTHING I could find (as of October). It would shock me if a device driver could cause this problem, but maybe. I do know all firewire drivers are up to date.

Since it is not a common problem, I will try to figure out what it is about my configuration that is causing it. I have lots going on in my computer, although I typically shut off everything visible to edit or render or capture. I do leave Norton system protection running, along with wireless network and similar. Thanks for replies. If I learn anything more concrete, I will report in. :)

[Glenn Chan]

John, task manager will allow you to see how much resources each 'process' is taking up. This may be useful to check if there's a single process taking up a lot of CPU or RAM/memory. You can also see how much RAM is available- anything lower than 40MB may be bad.

2- It might also be that Norton is slowing things down. On older computers Norton Antivirus' real-time scanning can slow things down to a crawl. You could try temporarily disabling it. If that does work, look into alternatives (i.e. beef up security and disable Norton's scanning, or use NOD32 [fastest AV, but commercial] or AVG Antivirus FREE or Avast, also free).

Those are my guesses.

[Rob Lohman]

I'm pretty certain that the problem is not in Vegas (assuming you
are running the latest version of this). Yes a driver or video/audio
codec would have no problems at all to cause these kind of things
if they where badly programmed (and believe me, A LOT of drivers
are, especially the ones for older hardware!!!).

The problem which such leaks or other issues in drivers and/or
codecs is that they are nearly impossible to find. Especially since
such blocks of code are loaded INTO the calling process (in this
case Vegas). So the taskmanager is of no use at all to see which
process is using the most resources (which should be Vegas in
this instance anyway).

The only thing you can do is the following. Go into task manager
and into the performance tab and write down things like:

- PF Usage
- Handles
- Threads
- Processes
- Physical memory: available
- System cache
- Commit charge: total + peak
- Kernel memory: total + paged + nonpaged

Then start Vegas, do some silly work, exit the program, wait for
30 seconds or so and compare the numbers. You should have
some small differences, but if you have some big ones then you
should have a problem somewhere.

Which (exact) version of Windows would you be running?

You say you took a long while to get something running, that is
a pretty good indication that something is wrong on your system
or you are trying to work with some old hardware.

Which DVD combo would that be?

How are you on anti-virus software and things like spyware?

[Brian Bechard]

Help me...I just installed and began using vegas 5 and I can't figure out for the life of me how to apply a video effect to one clip (event) and not have it affect my next event or events. Example...If I want an event with a sepia filter/plugin on it to dissolve to a regular event with no effects, how do I do this? Every time I apply an effect to an event it gives everything in that track the same effect. Do I need to have the event with effects on a different track and if so how do I dissolve the two events??? I've looked in the manuals and I have ordered one of Spot's books, but I need help now to get me going with this. Thanks in advance...

Brian

[Bill Ravens]

The answer to your question may lie in how you have the keyframes set up. If you right click on the last keyframe(the little diamond in the effect timeline window) in your transition, you should see whether the ramp between keyframes is set to HOLD, LINEAR, or whatever. Make sure you have the right ramp selected.

[Gary Kleiner]

>Every time I apply an effect to an event it gives everything in that track the same effect.<

This shouldn't be happening. I suspect you are not applying the FX the way you mean to. Sounds like you are applying at the track level.

Excaltly how/where are you applying the FX?

Gary

[Brian Bechard]

I've tried applying effect to the event on the timeline as well as to the video in the preview window.

[Edward Troxel]

Applying an effect to the timeline (not on an event) will apply that effect to everything on the entire TRACK

Applying an effect to the preview window will apply that effect to the entire PROJECT

Instead, you want to apply the effect ONLY to that one event on the timeline.

Vol 1, #12 of my newsletter talks about the scope of effects when applied various places. You may also want to look over the other issues as well. I have a "Beginner's Corner" series that started in issue #4. Check the link below my name.

Gary Kleiner also has some instructional DVD sets available at http://www.vegastrainingandtools.com

DSE has some instructional DVD sets and books also available from various sources.

[Brian Bechard]

Thanks everyone...looks like I'm over that hurdle...Stay tuned though as I'm sure to be in need of your expertise again.