Vegas Video discussions from 2004 (Q3Q4)

[Charley Gallagher]

I have a virus program with updated virus definitions. It runs when I am not rendering. I have only the firewall that comes with my router. I do not feel I have a virus.

Power supply? Hmmmm. I have replaced the power supplys on the last 4 machines I purchased but only after they gave me obvious symptoms like shutting down when hot. This PC has 4 Hard Drives and a DVD drive. That is a lot of power. I believe I have a 400 power supply. I would not know how to test to see if its a power supply problem.

I run Norton Utilities religiously and never really get disk or cluster errors.

I have since taken a few .veg files from a safe drive. They start to load and when they go to load a corrupted .avi file Vegas asks me to replace it. I then replace it with a good .avi from the external IOMEGA and it plays. So my problem is not that Vegas doesn't recognize its own file format, it is just what Vegas reports when it has a problem with a file being used in Vegas, such as a corrupted .avi.

Bottom line, I feel, is that this is NOT a Vegas problem now but one of having both corrupted .veg files and .avi files. I need a safe drive to run them from until I figure this out. This discussion belongs on some other board at this point.

But one question for anyone who might know...

I am runnnig a fairly new motherboad but it doesnt recognize the 250 gig drive as such. It would see it as 137 GIG without the controller. If I purchased a 250 GIG external firewire drive, would that be seen as 250 or would it also be seen as 137? An external 250 GIG drive would temporarily rescue me.

[Rob Lohman]

An external 250GB drive should be seen as 250GB by Windows
since it will control it directly instead of through the bios who
doesn't understand such things through USB/firewire.

[Edward Troxel]

Seems to be working for me. While stopped, drug the scrubber icon both directions and the timeline cursor moved just fine.

[Edward Troxel]

This has been debated several times. When you render a crossfade, what time code do you use? Since it is NEW video, it would be NOW. Then you end up with date codes bouncing all over the place. If you do a full render, the entire file is new which should also be set to NOW??? Maybe you could provide some suggestions to Sony on possible ways it could operate - maybe even options so that it could behave like now, or behave in this manner, or behave in that manner...

[Dennis Vogel]

Excessive heat can also make external hard drives do weird things. I haven't seen the kind of problems like you've seen but it's a good idea to make sure your drives are running cool.

Good luck.

Dennis Vogel

[Trey Perrone]

1. the QT format was in DV. my classmates had previously rendered HUGE uncompressed movs using 4:2:2 colorspace - I then rerendered to QT and selected DV/DVPRO AVI 29.97fps best quality. from FCP / apple support this seems to be on par with what i render from Veg5

2 the footage was all shot on my GL1/XL1s cameras in normal mode. I leave Vegas at a default of lower mode...all clips were originally imported with Veg5cap and then distributed among us all. Unless FCP render did something weird.

3. possible - but i think maybe it was during mpeg encoding

4. it performs this way on mutliple set top, multiple pc/macs so i believe it to be in the mpeg2 encoding...

[Paul Bisaillon]

i have been in photography for a log time now. and have some experimental photo's of me like 5 times, 10 times, and i am working on one now where i am in it over hundreds times...


but i am starting to get into video and would like to transfer my style into this. is cromakeying the best solution? some green screening? because i am looking into making videos where i interact with myself. anyone have any tutorials or software i should look into.

I have Vegas 5.0, and after effects 5.5, can this be done with just tons of masking? i have NO idea where to begin with this...


one example might be in the newest austin powers movie where austin goes and visits dr eveil, he interacts with himself. or dare i even say a really good example is the matrix...

[Peter Jefferson]

Vegas is good for standardish and advanced 2d chromakeying composites, but for really advanced stuff, with moving 3d layers, id suggest Combustion. Its VERY advanced, and not that easy to get into.. works totally different to Vegas... but its a lil more powerful... Vegas comes close.. but ther are some things like lighting, which it still cant match

for stuff like Matrix and austin powers, ur lookin at a Silicon Graphics workstations running advanced renderfarms...

u can try to emulate this, but i wouldnt try doing shadows, and actual interaction (ie, like in teh movie Secret Window when johnny depp grabs hinself)...

its al in the editing... if u can overlay your audio with a different pitch ot tone for each of ur personas, with some clever cuts and angles, as well as sporadic "dual" shots, u should be able to pull of the ilusion if 2 yous..

[Edward Troxel]

It really depends on how sophisticated you want to get. If you never cross paths, just split screen. For example, if you sit on each end of a couch, you can easily separate the left and right halfs using a locked down camera shot and a split screen. If you're going to be walking in front of yourself, things get more difficult. You may also want to experiment with using a green screen.

[Randall Campbell]

Cosmin,

Go to Options, Preferences, and check the General tab of options. There are a couple of scrubbing options near the bottom of the list.

Randall

[Rob Lohman]

One thing (and I could be wrong on this): if I remember correctly
interlaced DVD is actually upper field first instead of lower. I
haven't really looked that much at DVD Architect yet so I don't
know if that is a setting you can alter in the project properties
or whether it saw the DV file correctly (lower first).

You can always try changing the field order of the imported file
(if changing the project doesn't help) and see what that does.
It might be that it just went screwy somewhere along the line.
That will be hard to tell.

[David Jasany]

I just came across this new product for printing on CDs & DVDs. It's from Primera and it costs about $140. I don't have any experience with it but I thought you may find it of interest.

http://www.primera.com/signaturez1.html

[Edward Troxel]

I saw that too. My first thoughts was "it's a little expensive for what it does". It appears to be a single color thermal printer. I recall seeing the same thing from other companies for under $100.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Lance, be sure you've got a converter device that obliges ASIO drivers. you can run into significant issues. While Gary is apparently having good luck with the MOTU, that is more rare than common. Echo and M-Audio, Frontier, Aardvark are more performance oriented. 24 channels of input are quite possible and capable if your system can sustain. Firewire won't sustain this many inputs simultaneously either, unless you've got lots of RAM.
Sorry for the delayed response, I've been overseas for Vegas training.

[Trey Perrone]

ok ...

i took all the .mov files today and brought them into Veg5 and outputted with the mpeg2 option and made sure the field order was set for lower field...

things look great now!!!

i couldnt figure out HOW to set this up directly in DVDarch... it give me options for bitrate, apsect ratio, resolution, frame rate, and a few others, but nothing about field order in DVD arch...so it seems like i may be better off in the future to simply output directly from Veg5 mpeg2 as it has more options...does that seem right? maybe im missing something here...i would assume that DVDarch would have the same mpeg2 options as Veg5

i guess ive never run into this issue before because ive always used Vegas4/5 and always had it setup for lower field interlace in proj and render settings.