For all of you loyal Vegas users, Sony now offers the Vegas + DVD 5.0 upgrade editing package at a fabulous price through their website. To buy it cold would cost $799.00 but if you are upgrading from Vegas 4.0 the cost is significantly cheaper. I just ordered mine and received free shipping! Cut and paste the below thread to se the prices.

http://www.custcenter.com/cgi-bin/sonypictures.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1047&p_created=1082385390&p_sid=mgSPeW9h&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD02NDcmcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=

I just saw Edward Troxel's post! Sorry!

when keying i usually render as uncompressed as teh shots themselves are usually short enough to fit on 120gb drive.. i use a green screen with standard 3 point lighting on teh subject, but i use a halogen on the screen.

i used to use combustion to do this but im gettin lazy and im sticking with vegas coz.. well im lazy and cant be bothered.. i liek the results and my stuff aint that important.. if it was a high end payable job,.. then id use combustion and magic key (my friends.. i cant affod that.. LOL)

You should seriously go look at a product called ULTRA at www.seriousmagic.com.

It is so beyond execllent that I am not even going to screw it up by trying to describe it. Go have a look at their demo's.

I have the product and it really one of the best things I ever pourchased..

I want to have an NTSC monitor attached so I can see what I am going to get when I output for tape or dvd.

I have a compaq evo d510 minitower that came with an intel agp card which may or may not be integrated to the mother board. (I haven't looked yet)

I run Windows XP Professional.

Do I need to throw this card away and replace it or add something else to the mix?

When all is done what I want to be able to do is edit on my monitor and see the previews on a tv just as they will appear when I am done editing.

[I have tried using my camcorder for this purpose and failed. Either it doesn't support it or I am an idiot. 50/50 there]

Thanks for your help.

KIM

Yes but you'll need to purchase it through a reseller. If you already own 4, it may be cheaper to simply upgrade.

Yep. I "stuck" the upgrade information up top (temporarily) so that it would remain on the main screen.

First of all, it's best to use a green screen (as that's the "4" component). Secondly, it is VERY important to use good lighting. You want an even amount of light over the backdrop. Vegas does a wonderful job of keying.

(Remember, you can also use the other color correcting tools to help get a better key when lighting is less than perfect.)

External preview is done via firewire. Connect your camera/deck/convertor via firewire and then connect the TV/monitor to the camera via RCA or S-Video. Make sure the proper settings are chosen in the camera to allow pass-thru and you will see the image on the external monitor.

(NOTE: your camera MUST support pass-thru for this to work. If it does not, you may look at something like the Canopus ADVC-100 convertor.)

I thought it was June 7 and now I see it is June 9th. What is the truth?

Thanks,

KIM

Thanks Edward. Do I just plug the Canopus thing into firewire and then connect it to a tv and I am done? If so, that sounds like a no brainer.

Yes - GREEN is the right color. Photoflex Flexdrop2 or a westcott background seem to be good choices. You will want the talent far enough from the green backround that they don't cast shadows on it (consider 4 feet or more) and you don't want the green to spill onto the talent.

Light that background sperately from the talent. You can use flourescent lights to cover the backround - they are cheap and they wont heat up your room.

Also, make sure your camera has all the auto stuff turned off.

Try www.studica.com

Hey Folks,
There is a procedure, and I can't remember what it's called. When you capture in AVID or FCP, you can capture at low res, edit your piece, then tell the programe to go recapture only the footage on the time line at high resolution. Do you know if Vegas 5 has this feature? What it's called? And how to work it?

Michael Estepp

Vegas 5 currently does not have this feature. You could capture at full rez, render at low rez, and then recapture at the end.

Yes.

The dates seem to be moving. The Atlanta date was 5/13 but now appears to be in June. I've asked Spot for some more information.

Kim: perhaps you'd better tell us first what camera you have
before you go and buy something else. We might be able to
tell if it should work with your camera or not.

Green is only the "right" color for the screen if you are shooting relatively dark foreground objects. If your subject has blond hair or lots of bright colors (whites/yellows) a bluescreen is the better backdrop.
More details here (http://www.jushhome.com/nick/Tutorial/SelectBlueGreen.asp).

Most workarounds for DV video work by either bluring the Blue & Red channels prior to keying, or mixing Luma keying calculations with color difference keying. "Color Difference" keying is the most common technique for profressional compositing. This is not the same as the Chroma Keying calculation.

DvGarage has a product called DVMattePro (http://www.padd.com/market/product/product.php?prod=dvmatteae) that is simply the hands-down, best DV keyer anywhere, and it's only $200. Unfortunately, it's only available as a plugin for either AE or FCP.

Another company, CSB-Digital, puts out a product called Chromanator (http://fxhome.com/chromanator/overview.html). I've never used this, but the existing users (mostly young, amateur movie makers) are downright fanatical about it. It's designed to be used as a stand alone application next to Premiere or Vegas, sells for under $100 and includes some of the most critical compositing calculations including a color difference keyer, garbage matting and spill suppression.

The ULTRA Key product really has nothing revolutionary in terms of the compositing calculation itself. It is good, but the keyer is no more advanced than what is in the two products above. What it DOES have that is above and beyond ANYTHING else is that it is bundled with automated, moving, virtual sets. These allow you to easliy place your subject into one of several preset environments and the ULTRA product automatically moves the subject in sync with the set as the camera "moves" along a pre-determined path. You can't really edit the sets or create your own (as far as I know) but if one of the sets fits your needs, it's basically a plug-'n-play operation.

I'm not a Vegas user, so I'm sorry that I can't address any questions specifically relates to keying in Vegas, but hopefully some of this information will be useful.
Have fun.

If I capture at high res and render at low, why would I need to recapture at high res

If you re-render as low, I would assume you would delete the original. Otherwise there's NO reason at all for using low-rez during the editing phase. Personally, I'd just stick with full rez throughout.

The whole reason for that workflow (capturing and editing in low res first before master) is to help speed up the responsiveness of the NLE beings it's dealing with low res footage and effects won't take as much of a toll on framerate.

Why not just capture in high res (standard) and edit using the video preview window in Preview mode. Once your ready for your final render just render it out at full res.

Can Vegas 5 do reverse pulldown of 60i footage (such as laserdisc or VHS films)? And can you set the offset and polarity manually like with virtualdub? Thanks a lot.

I actually wanted to capture in low res because I thought it would save room on my hard drive.... even one gig counts, ya know?

I would use VirtualDub for that. Why? Because Vegas to the best
of my knowledge will only handle inverse telecine with DV footage
that is marked as such. I don't think it has any manual options
in that regard.

You can always try out the demo of 5, ofcourse....

Yeah I have used VirtualDub and it works great. But sometimes I notice that the 3:2 offset actually changes in the middle of the footage, in which case I really need a good NLE to help me spot those points and then change them on the fly without having to wait until everything's output before I realize halfway through it's messed up. :)

But I will for sure be downloading the 5 demo. I just want to see if it's worthwhile before upgrading, since I'm strapped for cash between Gigastudio 3.0 and the possibility of an XL2 successor on the horizon. :)

Thank you all very much. i have had my eye on the ULTRA key from Serious Magic - for lots of reasons, including the virtual sets. Nick, thanks a bunch for the extra info also.
I dont want to have to do a bunch of extra tweaking and detail work to get a good lookin, professional key.

Hi Guys!

This may be a bit OT but I'll run it any way.

A friend of mine is going to get me to produce a 5 - 6 min promo for his business in Vegas, and put it on DVD. (Could be my first pro job - here's hoping!)

He then wants to run the DVD on his ;aptop, but display it on a screen or Overhead projector.

What's the best way for him to achieve this?

Thanks in advance!

Andy

I have a SONY TRV27, TRV120, and TRV460

I am using Vegas to create training videos for students in a university science course. I am trying to position text at precise places in the frame and then animate its motion using keyframes. I find this very tedious to do in Vegas because it is time consumming to get the position of the text accurately placed. I have been using either motion tracking or the pan crop tool. Movements of the text are coarse and Vegas updates the display slowly. This makes it difficult to quickly position the text where I want it. Using the arrow keys for movement is precise but slow. In addition The Vegas Media Generator cannot make superscripts and subscripts in the text (unless another layer is used.) This means using photoshop to make graphics files instead. Can anyone suggest a better way.

Try this ---Open and create your text using Media Generator. Then click on the Placement tab in the Video Media Generator dialogue box. Position your text and create your key frames---This is super fast---I have used many dedicated titlers and none are this fast. No need to consider other software unless you are doing complex titling.

You might want to consider a separate titling software, like Blufftitler (http://www.blufftitler.us/).

In Vegas 5, you can make use of the new track nesting compositing ability to move multiple tracks as a group. Just make them all children to a blank track and use Track Motion on that parent track.

I will have to agree with Nick. I use DVMatte with Vegas and it was money well spend. Eventhough I could use Vegas keyer, the DVMatte is well worth the time having to import and export the footage. Vegas doesn't hold a candle to this plug-in.

Er, plug the projector into the laptop, insert the DVD into the laptop...

Yeah, I would just plug the projector into the Monitor connector on the back of the laptop. Then you can simply play back the video full screen.

1. set the laptop resolution to 800x600 if it can or otherwise 1024x768

2. connect the projector and see if you can get a picture. Most laptops have special buttons to activate output ports. Sometimes you can also do it in display properties of Windows (under advanced). Sometimes it might take a (re)boot WITH the projector CONNECTED before you can switch outputs! Make sure it is set to 24 or 32 bit color

3. start a software DVD player like WinDVD or PowerDVD

4. make the software full screen (usually a double-click in the playback window)

5. insert the DVD

That should be all. Ofcourse it is easier to just use a normal
DVD player with a projector that accepts composite or SVHS
in. Then it's just hooking up and hitting play basically. Since
DVD players can be had very cheap now-a-days this might be
a better way to proceed.

I want to set up a workflow where I can work on projects at home on my desktop and on the road with my laptop w/ external hd. I'd have to put all the media and .veg files on the external and swap them from machine to machine during the length of the project.

1-Are there any problems with this workflow?

2-What if I do some prerenders on my desktop computer (which is configured to render it out to an internal drive)....once I move the project to my laptop will the prerenders simply just NOT be available...or will Vegas recognize it and ask me to search for them?

3-I know you can set up the Vegas presets to define where you want the default drives for capture, prerenders, temp files, and recorded files. Is there a way to save the location of these within the .veg file? In other words can I have it so when I load a project off my external drive on my desktop it will look to the external for the prerenders/temps, etc? In other words can you define the drive locations specific to a project (.veg)?

4-Lastly, if you cannot do what I asked above...and I set my laptop to save the prerenders, temps, etc to the external drive on my laptop...what happens when I open up Vegas on my laptop WITHOUT the external drive there? Does it automatically save prerenders, etc...to the default locations. Will it throw me an error message?

Thanks in advance!

1) that is NO problem. The ONLY trick you will need to do (if you don't want to click through endless dialogs) is make sure both machines see the partition(s) on the external drive on the same drive letters. I usually use M for media and O for output.

Just go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. Right-click on the partition(s) in question and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths". Click Change and then choose a new drive letter. Once
you've done this on both machines Windows should remember
it!

2) If they are on the internal drive Vegas will definitely not find them. If you somehow save pre-renders to the external drive I do believe Vegas will ask for them and you can locate them. Better yet, if you setup both Vegas installations to point to the same drive letter (you setup under point 1 above!) it should load it automatically. But I've not worked with this much myself, so I might be wrong here

3) To the best of my knowledge, you can't. But if you do things under point 1 above you can then setup both installations of Vegas the same way.

4) I think it will through error messages

You can also do the same if machines are networked with
networked drives. Always have them at the same drive letter
on each machine so you can load everything up in a go.

A well known 3D application called LightWave have has a nice
trick. You start the application and then set where the content
folder is located. It will then try to load everything from that as
a start point. Works great, especially with network rendering.

It is always a good design philosophy to have network drives
and external drives mount on each system to the same drive
letters. The higher your drive letters are, the better the chance
every machine has those available. For example:

If you mount your external drive on your laptop as the E drive
since it only has a C and D (DVD player for example) and you
then move it over to your main tower who has a harddisk with
3 partitions (C, F & G) and 2 CD/DVD players (D & E) you'll have
a "problem". Therefore I always choose drive letters for such
specific things like: M, O, X, Y & Z for example. Works great that
way.

Hope this was of some help to you.

In my personal opinion you are going about it the wrong way if
even 1 gig counts. Why? Because you can easily need some
re-shooting, or some uncompressed saving, or some audio tracks
and whatnot.

I gotta ask why just not get a big (external) harddisk. They are
very cheap and will save time with the recapture (and problems
that might arrise from it). I believe 120 GB is the size for most
bang for the buck at the moment. You can easily store 9 (!!)
hours of DV on that. So if you go with a 60 GB you can store 4.5.
Or 6 hours on an 80 GB drive. Check your local prices! It is far
easier to just go in once and be able to do a final render and be
done with it.

If you are going to be doing batch capturing like this you will need
to have 30 seconds (at least) of head space on each and every
tape and not have a single timecode break or else it will not work.
Not even to talk about the extra time this all takes.

As said here, Vegas does not have it and everybody in this
thread would go with the full resolution files.

I agree with Rob - should be no problem at all. It would be BEST if you used the same drive letters in both cases and it would also be best if pre-renders were put on the external drive.

If any files are not present (such as pre-renders), then Vegas will ask for the new location. If they are truely not available, you have an option to "leave offline".

If you start Vegas and the "default save location" is not available, I believe it will go back to using an available drive (probably the original default location). It may also present an error message. In the times I have started Vegas with the external drive turned off, I have not seen any error messages but also have not tried to do much editing until the drive was reconnected.

If you mount your external drive on your laptop as the E drive
since it only has a C and D (DVD player for example) and you
then move it over to your main tower who has a harddisk with
3 partitions (C, F & G) and 2 CD/DVD players (D & E) you'll have
a "problem".

This is the only point in which I'll slightly disagree with Rob. While I agree that it is BEST if the drive letter can be the same, in the presented case it should still work. When opening the project, it would unsuccessfully look for the info on Drive E, not find it, and then simply ask for the new location (such as Drive H...). It will be a very small "problem".

I meant it in the way Edward slight disagrees <g> Ofcourse you
can still open the files if they are in another place. It will just not
open seamlessly anymore. That's why problem was in quotes
as well... The semantics of writing! Thanks for making me clarify
it a bit Edward!

Thanks, Sean.

Ok let me see if I get this all...

First off my workflow doesn't usually include true prerenders...oddly enough I never found a use for it. All I usually do is do a ram render to see a small portion to make sure the effect looks good, etc. So having the prerenders available on the removable drive that my project resides may be a non-issue.

You guys have, however, brought up a good point regarding the drive letter. Now if I first configure my external drive on my laptop and manually assign it a separate letter (for example: M)...once I unattach it and connect it to my desktop will it hold that letter, or will XP reassign a new letter for it?

Also, if for the sake of argument I don't change the drive letter and simply let XP assign whatever letter it chooses how will that affect me. If the .Veg file resides on the external hd, as does the media associated with it...wouldn't that be a non-issue as well?
A good example are the new project example files for V5. You simply copy the .Veg files to whatever drive- double click the drive and the project loads with all the media. I didn't think the drive letter affected that. What does the .Veg file do exactly anyway? I know it 1.Stores all info on edits of events and 2.Stores location of media that fill the events.
I'd have to assume the .Veg file only looks for the folders names for which the media is located for the project. Reason being I can move the sample project files over to my drive D and they load all the same. Correct?

Though I might be missing the point completly...and drive lettering is only for keeping continuity for prerender/temp file placement.


Anyway I really wouldn't want to make the external drive my default drive for housing all my Vegas prerenders and temp files (regardless of how little I used them). Reason being is I want the ability to use my desktop for editing various projects as well *without* the use of the external on most occasions. I'd use the external for projects I'd be working on, on the go....for the versatility to bring them to my desktop machine for audio editing (laptop speakers stink).

That was one of my questions I wasn't sure about. When you go through Vegas and assign all the areas to hold prerenders, temp files, and captured media....is that global or can that be done individually for each project. In other words can I have project A have all my media and prerenders on drive M (for example) on my desktop computer. And project B have it's media and prerenders on drive X. In other words can VEG files save the configuration info where various assets are located from project to project ...if they differ?

*Sorry for the long-winded response...I'm trying my best to convey my questions*


PS If prerenders are the product of Shift+M, what are "Temp files"?

When you hook the drive to each machine, the drive letter will have to be configured separately.

If you DON'T use the same drive letter, when you open the VEG file it will simply ask you where the files reside. Point Vegas to the new location and all will be fine.

Thank you for the replies guys.

Duncan: I've never looked at this type of application before, so in this case the sarcasm was appreciated.

Rob and Edward, thanks once again for your help.

Andy

You know how some people should just do gardening and stuff like that? I think I'm one of 'em. I've been reading threads on the subject of out-of-sync audio, plus Edward Troxel's "Editing Multi-Cam Events." Now I'm so frustrated I can't think straight (not that that's anything new). Here are a few of the problems:

1. I've tried fine-tuning the alignment on two audio tracks by using the 1 and 3 keys on my numberpad. They don't "nudge" the audio (amazingly, I could do that in Premiere)--they just move the cursor down the timeline. What am I doing wrong?

2. I've got Excalibur 1.5 so tried to run Sync Wizard by following the written instructions. Nothing happens. Can someone please walk me through the process, as I must be missing steps?

3. Even with no effects, when I try to watch footage on an external monitor it's out of sync. (Runs through camera and VCR to tv.) After reading something around here I noticed that the information in the media pool shows the audio at 32,000 Hz, and the project properties shows 44,100. Is that a bad thing?

4. On an earlier attempt, I switched between cameras by using a composite envelope on the top video track. Watching the finished video on tape I realized that at each dissolve the audio is out of sync. What's up with that?

I'm sure this all sounds as dumb as I feel, but I'd really appreciate any help. Thanks.

A fellow moderator says:

" The TRV 27 has firewire and analogue in and out as for the others I’m not too sure "

So in theory it should work with the TRV 27. Have you checked
the manuals to see if it has anything in there about pass-through?

Anyone else knows if this will work for these camera's?

Does your audio playback too fast? If it doesn't sound normal, it's due to the sampling rate mismatch you mentioned.

To the best of my knowledge all those preference settings are
GLOBAL settings in Vegas and not project specific!

As Edward pointed out a driver letter assignment is only valid
for a particular machine you do it on. So if you set the drive to
M on your laptop it will not by default be M on your desktop. Just
change it to M there as well and since each machine will remember
the setting itself it will work on both machines from that point on.

Temp files are pre-renders plus renders Vegas does when needed
I think.