I use auto levels from time to time. My concerns with it are that in VERY low light, the levels add a ton of noise that some folks don't like and has a tendancy to flicker when lighting changes even a little.

That said, I had a reception where the lighting was pretty much candles only and had to use to auto levels just to bring out the speeches and didn't get any complaints.

NICE....
VERY nice.. just what we needed in Vegas too

thank you so much youve saved me ALOT of time :)

Veggie Toolkit Version 2.0 (http://www.peachrock.com/software/veggie-toolkit.html) is now available for download and purchase.

Version 2.0 features extensive enhancements to MultiRender, making it the most extensive and flexible batch rendering and media conversion tool available for Vegas. Media Manager (was Clip Logger) adds additional clip import and media pool export functions and media file management tools. The new Relinker tool quickly searchs and replaces offline media without unnecessary prompting.

New MultiRender features include:

- Search multiple folders for projects or media files (including wildcards)
- Batch conversion of media files
- Save and restore settings via presets
- Use any marker type as the selection to render
- Select multiple selections in a project
- Select multiple render templates per source
- Render fixed length segments for web delivery
- Add leader/trailer using generated media or media files at render time
- Add master video effects at render time
- Incremental rendering of long form projects
- Render history with status and elapsed render time
- Drag and drop support
- Import/Export of presets including merging presets
- Add jobs to queue while background rendering

Try the free, 15 day, fully functional trial version to see how the Veggie Toolkit can save you time and effort.

Randall Campbell
www.peachrock.com

Adi,

maybe this? (a am not vegas expert)

did you checked the frame rate? is the frame rate of this animation same as in project?

Hello !

In Vegas you can select to use Vegas DV codec or Microsoft DV Codec ( The one included in DirectX )

Which one would you suggest to use ?

Below are XL2 color bar captures:

Vegas DV Codec:
http://home.comcast.net/~chalbers/vegas_color.png

MS DV Codec:
http://home.comcast.net/~chalbers/ms_color.png

From looking at it I would say Vegas is better, but I'd like some input with reasons on which one to use.

Thanks !

From the color bar captures, it looks like Vegas is handling 7.5IRE setup correctly while the combination of Vegas + MS DV codec is not. If you want to use the MS DV codec (why?), then I think there's a fix for it.

2- Why the MS bars are wrong:
Look at the three tall dark rectangular boxes to the bottom right. They are the pluge bars.

On a computer monitor, you should see three bars.
On a television, you should see just the bar to the right. The other two bars should be black with no discernable line between them.

So Vegas codec it is then ! :-)

To be specific, when you do a Firewire capture, you are merely transferring data from the camcorder to the hard drive. There is NO codec involved in the transfer process. The video has already been encoded to DV format in the camcorder before it's written to tape. Technically, it is probably more accurate to call it a transfer instead of a capture.

Now, a DV codec is involved for decoding the steam off the hard drive for playback and displayed on the preview window on the computer monitor. It's also used for encoding whenever the original footage is modified in any way, like adding a title, filter or a transition. This requires that the original footage is decoded, modified and encoded back to DV. The Vegas DV codec is the best looking DV codec I have ever tested and the Microsoft DV codec is about the worst. There is absolutely NO reason to use the Microsoft DV codec in Vegas. EVER.

John

Ok, so if I have 25p from PAL footage and want to convert to 24p I can just slow the footage down inside Vegas or FCP.

But then it is still in PAL format, right?

What is the actual workflow from PAL footage to 24p and then delivering on DVD to an NTSC market?

I have performed a search and read all the posts but still do not understand this concept.

Please help, thanks.

Love the Excalibur plugin, but -- how can I make the blue tally light box that surrounds each pip smaller (by default)? It's too thick and takes up too much space within the frame...

Thanks --

Although the Microsoft DV codec was the worst and looked bad,
it has gotten significantly better with newer versions of Windows
and Service Packs. On my system it looks as good as others.

HOWEVER, I would still advice you to use the default "Vegas" one
(actually it is the MainConcept DV codec). Stick with that. It
produces good results and it is the preferred choice.

No, you don't need to slow it down, you need to re-interpret the
footage. Here is how you do it:

1. make sure you have your movie (both video + sound) outputted as a PAL AVI file (may be DV in format), make sure your pixel aspect ratio + interlaced/progressive settings are correct

2. go to www.doom9.org, go to the download sections and download Avifrate 1.10 under AVI Editing tools section. Extract the program from the ZIP file, run it and open the AVI file from point 1 above. The frame rate should say 25.0. Change the framerate to 23.976 and click Apply. Close the program.

3. start Vegas and load one of the 24(p) NTSC templates. Go to File -> Import Media and select the AVI file. Make sure the framerate says 23.976 in the information section below, before opening the file

4. drag the file to the timeline. You should see that the audio and video are of different lengths. Right-click on the audio track and select Group -> Remove From

5. zoom in on the end of the movie and stretch out the audio to the exact same length of the video WHILE HOLDING THE CTRL key. This stretches the audio.

6. right-click on the video and choose properties, make sure the framerate is still 23.976 for the video

7. check to see if you audio and video are still in sync over the duration of the movie

8. export to MPEG-2 in the 24p format.

This should produce the result you are looking for

Rob,

The DV codec in Vegas was written 100% by the Sonic Foundry (now Sony) Vegas team. It is not the Main Concept DV codec. The MPEG2 encoder IS Main Concept's, but the DV codec is not.

John

So when do people have to do an actual PAL to NTSC convertion?

You are saying that all I have to do is slow the video and audio down a bit and the render out to MPEG2?

In what sisuation do people hat to actually do a convertions of PAL to NTSCE? I always hear it is difficlut and degrades quality.

What you are telling me to do is not actually a real PAL to NTSE conversion. Right?

4. drag the file to the timeline. You should see that the audio and video are of different lengths. Right-click on the audio track and select Group -> Remove From

Alternately, you could click on the audio and press "U" or turn on the "Ignore Event Grouping" button on the toolbar.

ALWAYS stick with the Vegas DV codec (unless you run into some unique situation that calls for something different). The Vegas DV codec (and, no, it is NOT an version of the MainConcept DV codec) and been tested through over 50 render generations to show virtually NO loss. If you do a search here I'm sure the tests were posted here.

It's using the default "Border" fx (Translucent Blue Border). I suppose you could change that border FX and it would use the revised version.

The next version will handle the tally differently and you will be able to do this task more easily (assuming you don't mind editing an image in your photo editor.)

Has anyone tried to capture Time Interval footage shot with XL2 using Vegas ?

All I get is a small 1 second snipped part of the footage and that's all.

I had to capture it using a very old copy of MediaStudio 6.0 .

Anyone knows what to do so Vegas captures it correctly ?

Here is the clip I finally made:

http://home.comcast.net/~chalbers/fast.wmvx

Just take out the x at the end when downloaded

Thanks !

Frank

Hello all,

Well, here's the thing; not a big problem but curious and annoying.

Some few, not all, clips on track #1 will appear in the output viewer window to *incompletely* cover the underlying clip in track #2. Likewise for track 2 overlaying track 3.

A vertical black bar appears down the right or left side of the screen and the underlying clip is seen behind the track 1 clip.

This does not happen all the time. In one case I deleted the event (clip) on track 1 and then re-inserted at exactly the same place and it was fine, 100% coverage. I don't even think it occurs upon insertion but as the result of some later operation.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fade or fx on the event, or the clip properties. Split screen is off and I've tried several different settings for the viewer (draft-full, preview-auto). It even renders out this way; to .avi.

My guess is that I'm doing something wrong or have some option set that I don't know about.


many thanks,
Lorraine

thanks for your reply filip, but it isn't a frame rate issue. both avi file and project are at 25 fps. i think it really may be the fact that vegas doesn't "officially" support dvix, as edward pointed out. if i happen to run into anything simillar when using a vegas supported media, i'll let you guys know.

Will someone give us the steps by the numbers. Not allot of discussion, let's not lose focus by talking about outher stuff.

For those of us with a Sony FX1E or Z1U who shoots their project in CF25 mode and will like to use Sony Vegas 5.0d to edit and convert their project to a 24P DVD....how do you do it?

I'll start it off....

Scenario: You are an indie filmmaker and want the so-called 'film-look' that is wonderfully shot in the DVX100a and XL2. However instead of buying those cameras you have purchased a Sony HDV camera because you want the bragging rights of telling people that your stuff is in High-Definition rather then SD and to 'future-proof' your work for the days when you can finally afford to have every room in your house outfitted with a 42" plasma and a HD-DVD player! *smile* You have read everywhere on the WWW to shoot your project in CF25 mode for many reasons we won't get into. You agree to do it. Your pre/production workflow is to Shoot in HDV so that your MiniDV tapes will have the footage in HiDef (so in the event you wish to deliver your movie in high def you can, by onlining it later). You don't have a Super-Computer, so you have decided to 'cut' your project in SD by capturing your footage, not in HDV, but rather in DV format so you can cut it like normal. To do this, you tell the camera to do an 'in-camera' downconversion via firewire. You have now reached post production. What are your steps????

1. Shoot your project in CF25 mode with your Sony HDV camera.

2. Downconvert the CF25 HDV footage to your computer via Firewire.

3. Open up your Sony Vegas 5.0d program

now what?

4. (will someone fill in the blanks)
5. (will someone fill in the blanks)
6. (will someone fill in the blanks)
7. (will someone fill in the blanks)
8. (will someone fill in the blanks)
9. (will someone fill in the blanks)

10. You now have a 24p DVD with a wonderful looking movie that carries the cadence of a Hollywood movie that you can show off to your friends & family and submit to festivals and prospective buyers. You also have the bragging rights of saying you have the same movie in High Definition and can be delivered in HD at anytime.
____________________________________

Will someone fill in those blanks above for us please??

- Shannon W. Rawls

If I could figure out how to do it with a keyboard, I could program my Shuttle, but I always need a mouse!

I want to be able to change focus from one track to another, then move from event edge to event edge.

Using Alt+Shift+Up/down seemingly changes focus, but when I try to move to the next event edge, it still uses the previous track! I have to click on the event to focus on it.

When I enter the Contour Shuttle Device Configuration and select Mouse Click instead of Type Keystroke as the response, I can select whichever event the mouse cursor happens to be stationed over. This is very close, but I want to select the event on the focused track at the current time.

You could write a script to select the event under the cursor on the currently selected track. This could then be assigned to a keypress and, subsequently, assigned to a button on the Shuttle Pro.

Sounds like a winner! Unfortunately, I have never written a script for Vegas before so I do not know what function to call. I am writing this in case someone writes before I find it...

Procedure:

Go through all tracks until you find the first selected track
Go through all events on that track until you find the one under the cursor

Set the "Selected" flag of that event to true.


If you want to make sure it is the ONLY selected event then you need to make sure the Selected flag is set to false on ALL other events in the project.

Click the link under my name for more scripting details OR contact me directly and I can help you out.

Understood.

I presume you determine which event is under the cursor by ensuring that the event starts before the cursor and ends after it (therefore the cursor is in the middle.)

Thank you, sir! I ended up with the following:


import Sony.Vegas;

var i;

var trackEnum = new Enumerator(Vegas.Project.Tracks);
var track : Track = Track(trackEnum.item());

while (!trackEnum.atEnd()) {
for (i=0; i<track.Events.Count-1; i++) {
if (track.Selected &&
track.Events[i].Start < Vegas.Cursor &&
track.Events[i+1].Start > Vegas.Cursor)
track.Events[i].Selected=true;
else
track.Events[i].Selected=false;
}
trackEnum.moveNext();
track=Track(trackEnum.item());
}

The only problem is that I could not disable the beep upon completion of the script.

Not sure why you would be getting a beep. I would change:

track.Events[i+1].Start > Vegas.Cursor)


because it is POSSIBLE that the "next" event starts after the cursor but the "current" event stops BEFORE the cursor.

Instead, use:

(track.Events[i].Start + trackEvents[i].Length) > Vegas.Cursor)

Absolutely right; I fixed it. The beep was due to an incorrect hotkey assignment. I filed it under TrackView instead of Global. Now it is working perfectly...I can hop from event to event with a touch of a button.

Thank you!

Ran some tests on Saturday. Running some more today. One thing I noticed:

If you run Sony Vegas Capture 5.0 and plug your camera up via Firewire (dv downconverted=yes), then In all modes on the Z1U you get to see a live action preview of what the camera is seeing. At any point you can hit the "CAPTURE VIDEO" button and begin capturing that footage to your computer...easy as pie.... My camera was in 1080i HDV mode (as I will always keep it), I had the downconversion ON via firewire, and I tried capturing directly to computer with Sony Vegas Capture in ALL framing modes of the Z1U.

Z1U in HDV/50i downconverted to DV via firewire mode: CAPTURES LIVE FOOTAGE
Z1U in HDV/CF25 downconverted to DV via firewire mode: CAPTURES LIVE FOOTAGE
Z1U in HDV/60i downconverted to DV via firewire mode: CAPTURES LIVE FOOTAGE
Z1U in HDV/CF30 downconverted to DV via firewire mode: CAPTURES LIVE FOOTAGE
Z1U in HDV/CF24 downconverted to DV via firewire mode: DOES NOT CAPTURE ANY LIVE FOOTAGE.

what happens: If I start capturing cf24 live, for say like 20 seconds...no problem, no dropped frames, clock is running fine. As soon as I hit the STOP button.....the pop up window appears that normally shows your clips simply says "No frames captured" and my thumbnail preview is empty!!

Thats not all....

If I start capturing, for say like 40 seconds or longer...HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM! Frames begin to drop as fast as they are captured (100% of them). and then computer begins to freeze up. If I hit STOP in time before letting the system freeze, the same popup window says "No frames captured" same as before for 20 sesconds or less.

So basically, using CF24 and Sony Vegas Capture 5.0...you will NOT be able to capture live footage from a direct preview via firewire.

However, if you capture your HDV footage to tape in CF24 mode, and then put the camera in VCR mode and THEN do a playback/capture, everything is fine.

Crazy ain't it?

- ShannonRawls.com

Thanks for typing this post. It saved me the hassle of typing it. :)

Since I have a GL2 I don't have Native 16:9 CCD's so, I obviously have to letterbox the footage in Vegas.

In order to get the footage to properly show up on a 16:9 HD tv as a 16:9 movie what are the proper steps in rendering.

I would think that after you letterbox the final movie's footage, one might want to render the footage say....to DVD NTSC Widescreen right?

So the final footage is in the timeline, render to widescreen dvd, then place footage on dvd, done?

The best thing to do is to letterbox on the last render correct? I've rendered the footage letterboxed and when I import it back into Vegas it looks funny....like squashed.... why is that. The footage properties should be widesceen but it just doesn't look right.

Another thing I wanted to ask is that if I shoot in normal mode, should I run a full pulldown first 3-2 or 3-2-2-3 and then output to 24p or just output to 24p and be done with it?

Another thing, when you output to DVD NTSC do you go progressive or interlaced? I've been going progressive.

Hi folks, just don't know what to call this - so I can't seem to find anyting in my books about it.

BUT - what I want to do is edit a bunch of stuff - shorten some clips to what I want - then import the shortened clips into an old project I'm working on.

Is there a way to do this without having to render each clip?

thanks,
Milt

I just stared editing some footage I shot in Germany, and I'm a bit anxious because it seems creating subtitles ain't so easy.
I'm dealing with a lot of German dialogue that needs subtitling.

If anyone has any thoughts on this (vegas solutions, alternate dvd authoring software, some other type of graphics software, etc.) I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Ok, it turns out there was some wacky application association that suddenly caused this problem, but what threw me was that it only seemed to be on the newest clips. It's a little weird, because my older clips (authored with ms' wme tool) would play properly when clicked, but the new stuff that was rendered with Vegas wouldn't. Or at least it seemed that way - I actually tried some other clips that were done with MS WME (using the progressive download format) and they too were not behaving as they should have, so I checked a few other things. It turns out it was a hijacked file/app association on this end. I fixed that, so everything (including the .wmv files created within Vegas) "streamload" properly now too. Sorry for the false alarm. I fixed it by going into the windows media player options and retoggling the .wmv filetype association.

If you want true DVD sub-titles, you need to upgrade to Vegas 5 + DVDA 2. Subtitles were added in DVDA2.

Alternately, in DVDA2 you can have multiple audio tracks so you could have one in German and one in English, for example.

Here's one way that would work:

Create sub-clips for all the sections you want to keep (Extract Good Clips in Tsunami is a good tool to simplify this task)

Put all of those sub-clips in a specific bin in the media pool

Copy that bin from one project to the other (i.e. Open Vegas twice - once for each project. Make the media pool in each visible, and drag that bin between the two.)

Nobody huh ?

Did you have it set to scene detect? If yes, try turning that off.

Did you have the minimum clip length turned on? If yes, try turning that off.

Hmmm.....copy that bin to the other project. Very cool thought. I never really think about opening multiple copies of Vegas, but why not?

Thanks a bunch!
Milt

Do you think it runs faster? What other bugfixes? Anybody run into problems with it?

Thanks Edward !!

Setting scene detect OFF did the trick ! :-)

Gotta love this forum !

Frank

My favourite so far is the much improved mpg2 encoder

Two pass ROCKS !

Frank

Thanks Edward!

Greg: 24p is *NOT* NTSC. It is a film based emulation. NTSC is
29.97 fps. So if you go to normal NTSC you need to do a temporal
interpolation.

However, you are still going (even in this case) from 720 x 576
to 720 x 480. So you are loosing some resolution in the process.

So you are converting, but it is often said that PAL -> NTSC or
PAL -> film is a far better and easier conversion than the other
way around (at least for NTSC -> PAL).

I would swear it was the MainConcept one, oh well. I trust Edward
much more on this issue then myself. I knew about the MPEG
encoder, for some reason I though the DV encoder was also by
them.

Perhaps my mind mixes up some information every now and then,
heh. Thanks for setting me straight guys!

Which exact version of Vegas are you using?

REEEEEEEEEEALLY NOW...........

i hadnt been bothered with the patch until i finish these projects.. BUT.. now that u got me thinking....

wheres my Ghost disc...

This may be a known issue (which exist with PAL captures when
scene detection is on) that manifests itself with this
downconversion as well. Try the following in the capture utility:

Options -> Preferences -> Capture tab, make sure that the options
before minimum clip length and maximum capture length are NOT
checked (capture start delay is also unchecked here).

That fixes that known issue. Perhaps it also helps in this case
(it looks like the same kind of problem).

Two Pass MPEG was added in 5.0 - it's not new to 5.0d.