Sorry Edward, I was making the suggestion rather than asking how - I didn't want you to think I was being curt!

But while on the subject of ways to make the binoculars mask look more realistic, I think that keyframing varying degrees of blur on the lower track (ie what is being seen through the binoculars) would nicely simulate the viewer focusing on the target.

Sorry Ian. I mistook it as more of a question instead of a statement.

I posted in the filmlook forum about software that would convert 30fps to 24fps (XL-1s footage shot on framemode) and someone said Vegas would do it. How in vegas would I go about doing this? Would it just slow down the footage or actually convert it to 24?

No worries! My grammar I suspect, rather than your interpretation.

By the way, I wanted to say how much I enjoyed looking at your most recent newsletter. When I get home I'll be sure to subscribe and to trawl through the archives.

Assuming you don't plan on slowing the footage down or haphazardly excising frames, this is going to require some temporal interpolation, of which there are different varieties, none of which isn't going to cause distracting artifacting in the scenario you describe. How important is it to convert to this particular frame rate?

It's preferable to shoot in 60i when you intend to convert to 24 fps.

You can also whap the camera on the side during taping or playback.

In Vegas, simply choose File - Render As and pick one of the 24p templates.

LOL!!

There's also an interesting article related to this at:

http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/tutorials/filmlook.htm

We get it when someone kicks the tripod!

Thank you, both.

Thanks for your replys guys. Stretching the audio doesnt seem like the effect im going for. I'm going for the "deep and slow" voice effect or the opposite, which is the "chipmunk" voice effect

er . . Guys . .did I read somewhere that one can set the "pitch" to go or not go with a VeloEnv? Or am I again having a "young" senior moment?!?!

Grazie

Well, the velocity envelope does not come into play because it does not affect audio. But, yes, you CAN adjust the pitch of clips whether or not you stretch or shrink them via a CTRL-Drag.

It worked with the demo so I ordered a copy today. Stand by for a rash of newbie questions.

Eric

Questions? We can handle questions!

Right click on the audio event and change the default so that the pitch changes with lenght. By default it's set to maintain pitch.

I would love to see in Vegas 5 the option of creating our "own shapes" in cookie cutter instead of the presets.....

or at least the ability to vary the shape other than size and position.

ooooooo yes.......!

I just started playing with the Chromakey in Vegas 4.0+DVD.

Is there a softspot filter? By that I mean center of the screen staying sharp, but going outwards (from the center) the picture gets softer and softer. This will be a great filter for weddings.

I did a search and can't find anything.

Try the propertional filters under Radial Blur. That should do a lot
like what you want. Otherwise there might be a way by duplicating
your footage to a second track, blurring that footage and merging
the two with a circle alpha picture that changes from fully transparent
in the inner section to fully opaque in the outer rings. This should
be possible to draw with most paint programs.

But see if that filter does your thing. I got some good results
by using the Strong Proportional one and then changing the
strength parameter.

Hey THANKS.

Proportional radial blurr works! The keyword there is "proportional". I had tried it w/o it.

you could duplicate the clip so it's on Video track 1 and 2 ( perfect alignment ) ..

SOLO video track 1 - apply a cookie cutter to the top track ..use either circle or oval on side - adjust size of oval to your liking ... use the feather to soften the edges .. turn OFF SOLO

on track 2 apply gasuuian blur or whatever blur slightly/heavy ...

You can also use a cookie cutter with lots of feather, depending on what's beneath, a gradient with a parent or simple blur to the edge if you want to have blacked edges like a lot of wedding vids seem to have, plus myriad other methods of accomplishing this. Problem often is in Vegas, is that there are so darn many ways to do most things.

if you use the chroma key FX on the white ( of white/black mask) then you can use the BLUR to soften the edges to your liking .. so it is adjustable RT VS. having to take mask back into photoshop to adjust soft edges ...

YOu can also use 2 cookie cutters on a generated background to create the bino-mask, or a single with repeat set to 2, turned horizontally. The feathering will create the blur you want, or you could simply drop the blur on as suggested in another post.

Not seeing the problem there, Spot. :) I find it entertaining on threads like these seeing how many different ways people do something. Of course, occationally I hits me like a brick that I didn't need to do something the hard way. I just didn't see the cool shortcut.

"The 99 page manual is more of a "quick start guide"."

But not, it would seem, a quick fade out guide. :-)

Tors, very good . . .

I see the slideshow idea, but what I want to do is run the frames at full rate video. So essentially as an animated cartoon.

I haven't tried your suggestion yet, but does "load image sequence" actually load the series of frames as a video stream or do you have to do something special to get that effect?

Thanks!

- GLupien

Animation is nothing but a fast slideshow.

Load Image Sequence should load each image as one frame,
thus creating what you call "a video stream".

With the other option you are creating stills that last longer
then one frame.

<<<-- Originally posted by Gordon Lupien Jr. : does "load image sequence" actually load the series of frames as a video stream or do you have to do something special to get that effect?-->>>

Yes. It will load them essentially as a "video" where each of the images you have will become one frame each. You can also do this manually but using the load image sequence option is the easiest/fastest way.

Very cool! Thanks!

- GLupien

Just released: Neon – A plugin for Vegas

The minds that brought you Excalibur have done it again. Neon features 14 new Wizards that will make your editing easier and faster than ever before.

Here is a quick overview:

Save VEG Wizard: saves your project in several places and automatically names each successive save. No more hunting for your VEG directory!

Asset Collector Wizard handles all the rendering and still capture you need to create DVDs: Mpegs, AC3, AVIs and Still Frames....all in one operation!

PBS Wizard instantly turns your boring photo project into a TV-style montage with gentle zooms on all selected images.

Storyboard Wizard gives you a whole new way for you and your clients to see the flow of your project

Overlap Wizard finally gives you a way to quickly overlap events with a specific duration. You also get a stand-alone version so you can overlap with one keystroke!

Radio Fade Wizard is perfect for montages. It takes any set of audio events and realigns them with great sounding cross fades.

Also included are Desquiggle Wizard, Frame Fix Wizard, Goto First/Last Marker Wizard, Find Unused Wizard, Apply Effects Wizard, Tilt Wizard, Four Points Wizard.

For more information go to www.VegasTrainingAndTools.com:

A free demo is available for download. You will be able to look over the manual and use the program 15 times.

Well, I tried to figure out how keyframing works, or what it is in the first place.

Don't seems to have a keyframing explanation in this forum (did a search) and the manual not helping any.

Just a little quick explanation would really get me going. Thanks.

Let's look at a specific example:


What if you have a 10 second clip that you want to apply an effect to that changes over time. Let's say you want to go from a black & white look and have it slowly go toward full color. Maybe you want the B&W footage to play for about 5 seconds before the color starts to show up. Go to the beginning of the clip and apply a b&W effect with the setting at 100% B&W. A small diamond (keyframe) will appear below the clip on the timeline. Right click on that diamond and choose "copy". Go to 5 seconds into the clip and choose "paste". Then go to the end of the clip and adjust the B&W to 0%. It will automatically create another keyframe there. So what you've just done is let a clip play in B&W for 5 seconds and then, for the next five seconds, it slowly transitioned to full color.

Keyframes just allow you to animate the settings of effects or movement by graphics and such. It's a very useful thing to get the hang of. I hope my ramblings make sense.

THANKS. This is great.

If you start building keyframes from the beginning, you don't have to copy and paste to make the same keyframe down the line. All you have to do is go to that point and hit the plus button to add another keyframe with the current settings. Does the same thing, but it much faster.

If, however, you already have keyframes further down the timeline, you must copy and paste to get the exact same settings.

I am using VV3 and trying to render my project to a .mov file. The rendering has frozen on me twice. It stopped at 26% both times. I've had no problem rendering .mpeg files. What could be causing the freezing when I try to render to a .mov file?

Thanks

I've had a similar occasional problem when rendering to wmv. Just seems to hang (at the same point, every time. Although the freeze point differs from project to project, it's always at the same time). I tried to find something on the timeline that may have been causing the problem but it was all quite tame.

I wondered about it being a lack of disk space (but that wasn't it). Changing the settings (audio/video etc) seemed to cure the problem and let me render OK.

For one project that I really wanted to render as wmv at specific settings, I rendered to avi first then created a new project, put the avi on the timeline and rendered that to the desired settings.

Not an explanation for why it's happening, I know.

Someone here (Rob, I think) suggested I reinstall Vegas. I've done that now and I haven't had the same problem (although it was only very occasionally in the first place, so I don't know if it's cured).

Maybe give that a shot, Dennis? Good luck.

I've put three years into Premiere, and I'm not a young man anymore:( I hear great things about +DVD but don't want to learn Vegas from scratch. Could I import MPEG-2 from the Main Concept encoder into +DVD? Could I feed +DVD either MS AVI or Canopus AVI and have it do the encoding? I assume there'd be some codec conversion involved but it might be worth the time to me. I'm not ready to go to XP from win2kpro and that lets out Encore, which doesn't sound quite ready for prime time yet.

David Hurdon

Vegas uses the Main Concept encoder as well- so that won't be a problem. The thing that strikes me as odd is that you can only get DVD Architect if you buy Vegas. If you have Vegas you my as well learn it- heck, you paid for it. Trust me you'll be glad you did.

What version of Premiere are you coming from?

DVD Architect will use any DVD legal MPEG2 file. It will NOT accept elementary streams, however. So, make sure there is an audio channel of some sort even if you intend to use a separately created AC-3 file for the audio.

One thing you may want to try is to render to a single DV-AVI file first, load that new file on the timeline of a new project, and then render that to whatever format you are wanting.

Glen, I am most recently a 6.5 user, having moved from 5.1 through 6.02. I have no quarrel with the software but I'm aware of some of its shortcomings, perhaps particularly in the ease of colour correction. I have stand-alone assistance in this and other areas thanks to Canopus add-ons, but it's always preferable to have access within the NLE.

David Hurdon

Color correction has been an absolute pleasure to work with in Vegas. I even prefer it to Final Cut Pro's color correction tools. Plus with realtime preview (via IEEE) you can "see" the affects of your edits immediatly on an external source (the only way to view your results accuratly).

Ed, you mean to say DVDA doesn't accept mp2's that have separate audio files. It has to be part of the same file? Or is that system stream?
I ask because when I encode from the Vegas timeline I choose the DVDA template which only does video stream. I have to go back and do the audio separately.

The "video only" files you are producing from Vegas are MPG2 files that HAVE an audio stream - it's just silent.

Neither Vegas or DVDA accept elementary stream files.

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to get my home studio set up. I am using Vegas+DVD NLE software and have a single LCD. I have a geforce 3 graphics card.
Here's my question(s):
I would like to(additionaly) hook up a Sony Trinitron 19" to view my video preview in Vegas. Assuming that my card is a dual head, would the Sony be OK for this?
Could anyone suggest a good card to purchase in case the Nvidia won't work?
Thanks for ANY information!