Using Cineform's HDLink, you can digitize, then import into Vegas.

<<<-- Originally posted by Brent Marks : Why doesn't Vegas just capture it on its own??


thanks -->>>

An excellent question that I've been asking for a while... without any truly valid response.

It's a shame, because such a glaring oversight - considering the perception that Vegas IS also a Sony product, will not help the Vegas cause against any competing NLE that gives FX-1/Z1 users direct capture capabilities.

You can capture directly to Vegas if you set the cam to DV downconvert.... but why when HDV is what people bought the camera for?!!

I bet more is available after NAB...be patient grasshopper. : )

<<<-- Originally posted by Sean M Lee : I bet more is available after NAB...be patient grasshopper. : ) -->>>

Oh I can wait.... that's what I've had to do up until now, so a little more isn't going to destroy me :)

It's just a shame that as a Vegas user, I feel compelled to be honest enough when the question is asked "what NLE would you advise for use with the FX-1?", that I have to say "I use Vegas, but you will need to consider a 3rd party codec to capture from the cam".

You know a potential user of what could be the most elegant HDV solution available, may be lost to this one 'Achilles Heel'... And that isn't my loss, if they don't end up using Vegas, but it doesn't make me feel any better either...

Steve,

Being the first is nice, being accurate is better. Avid won't have their HDV capture active untill after NAB either. I use Avid, and I can wait. Don't worry about it.

I thought I'd share this.
I was trying to boost colors/brightness of short video shot in pretty dark environment. So I applied ColorCurves and Saturation effects in Vegas. Resulting video was acceptable except that low-light noise was boosted as well. I tried free plug-ins Smart Smooth and Dynamic Noise Reduction to get rid of that but to my eyes they just make everything too digitized/squarish. Then I found that some people recommended to use soft blur filter which removes some details from the image.
Had nothing else to do, I tried Chroma Blur with max settings and voila... Colored noise became what looks like film grain and image detail wasn't destroyed.

Anybody has some tricks on color restoration of dark videos?

Select the graphic you want to replace. In the properties window (on the left side of the DVDA layout), under "Graphics" there is an option for "Thumbnail". Choose that and you can select any still or motion graphic you want (for motion, remember to select "animated" next to the "style" option). As long as you don't change your destination, I think that should do what you want it to.

Hello all,
Does anyone here have any personal experience using Particleillusion with Vegas?
Do they "play nice" with each other?
Can you render out alpha channels in Particleillusion?

I have read about some import/exporting issues as far as AVI's & native DV footage at the Wondertouch website.

Thanks in advance.

I'm new to posting here but have been around the forums alot over the past year or so. Thanks to input from many of you I am the proud owner of a GL2 which I picked up this past December to go with Vegas 5 which I've been running with for the past year or so.

All of a sudden, I can't capture with Vegas. Actually I can capture some clips but not all of what I need or want from a days shooting. No problem last week capturing about 15 minutes of my daughter's basketball game all in one shot (clips), but today, I can't do anything with my son's rugby game. The program keeps crashing! Sometimes after 1 or 2 minutes...sometimes just before I capture all of it. Most of the time the program freezes and I lose everything yet other times I seem to be able to save some of the clips.

I've tried re-installing Vegas but to no avail! I can't seem to find anything in my searches here that points me in the right direction.

I'd appreciate any suggestions/pointers any of you might be able to provide.

I'm running XP PRO, Intel 3.0 and 1 Gig ram and have had excellent render times to mpeg2/DVD. Now I can't even get the footage into the machine reliably!

All I can say is great site here with excellent contributors. I've learned lots here...

Thanks!

I've moved your thread to our Vegas forum.

Vegas also has color correction tools (secondary CC?) that can
work on ranges like mid or highlights etc. So this should allow
you to do just some correction to those areas and leave the
dark stuff alone.

If not there should be ways with two tracks with the same footage
to merge and seperate the effects to control what you are
changing.

Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to check for
myself how this could work etc., so hopefully others will chime
in. If not I'll see if I can dig into Vegas myself at a later time to
see what is possible.

Usually you really need to combine a lot of effects to get the
look you want (that is what most professional do). Don't expect
one or two filters to be so flexible it can create exactly what you
want. Also check out this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38499

It talks about noise reduction futher down as well.

Unfortunately, you haven't really given us a whole lot of information to go on. How about a small test - can you capture using Scenalyzer Live?

Welcome aboard DVInfo.net Ken!

Make sure you are also running the latest patch for your version of Vegas.

Thanks Edward...where can I find Scenalyzer?

Thanks Rob...I'll check for updates but am running right now with V5d. Are there patches as well somewhere in addition to this update?

As I mentioned...I can capture some clips during each attempt to transfer but the system eventually crashes/freezes - sometimes a minute or two in,sometimes ten minutes in. In some cases I have managed to save to the HD others not. The preview window actually freezes on a frame but the camera keeps on playing the footage.

It almost seems like a hardware issue where the HD isn't able to keep up to the camera. I am recording via firewire to seperate (from the Vegas drive)paired (RAID0) sata 200 gig hard drives 85% empty.

I'll keep at it and will try different firewires and plugins...my system has one in the front one in the back.

Thanks again

Other noise reduction tricks I know of:

Temporal/time-based noise reduction
The filter looks at changes from frame to frame. If there's little change in the pixels, then it'll assume the change is from noise and it will reduce things.

You can use filters for Virtualdub to do this I believe. Virtualdub works outside vegas.

Frame-based noise reduction
The filter looks at a pixel and compares it to its neighbours. If there's little difference then it'll assume the change is from noise and it will try to reduce it.

I think the median filter is like this? (I wouldn't use it though, it's really, really slow)

The dynamic noise reduction filter does one or both of the above, I haven't really investigated it.

Diffusion effects:
Duplicate the video onto itself.
Top layer, add gaussian blur.
On the bottom track, add unsharp mask to gain back (perceived) sharpness.

This is great for hiding artifacts.

I outline another method in the post Rob linked to, involving the overlay transfer mode. That works great, although it creates it own look. See the bottom of the first page at
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38499

Luminosity blending mode:
In programs like Photoshop and After Effects, there's a luminosity blending mode which takes the luminance/brightness information from one layer and applies it to the layer below. So one layer provides the luminance information, and the other layer the color information.

What you can do is to use channel blend so you use the color channels (usually red and green) with the least noise to use at the luminance information. This should affect the look of your image and reduce noise a little. If you want to get fancier, you could use color curves on the luminosity layer and crush the shadows/blacks in the blue color channel, then turn the image into black and white. *(haven't tried that)

Color curves:
You can crush the shadows/blacks to hide noise. Draw the curve so that the bottom quarter is concave up. You'll likely need to compensate for the darker image so you'll probably need to make everything else concave down.

Overall this will increase contrast in the picture.


And there's always the reshoot filter. ;) (Ok maybe not.)

I don't know if this script has yet been invented but would be the best script I could imagine.
I feel like I spend a great deal of time watching the pc render a project before I can move on to something else. Rendering slows the machine so much I can read e-mail but I certainly can't continue editing by running a second version of Vegas.

I do my wedding videos as separate projects for each sections, one would be "preparations", "ceremony" etc. What I would like to do is be able to have a half dozen projects rendered while I sleep. I can run two instances of Vegas and start them rendering but a third won't cut it. Certainly I can't do this with six.

I know of the script that will permit us to render to .avi, then .wmv, and others but I know of no script that will let me plug in the names of the projects that I would like to render.

Does this exist? If not I imagine this might prove useful to a lot of people.

Yep, this exists.

Check out the MultiRender (http://www.peachrock.com/software/veggie-toolkit.html) tool which is part of the Veggie Toolkit. You can batch up as many renders as you want, start them up and go to sleep.

Randall

It was a bad cable! Funny how the simple things tend to get overlooked when one is in near panic mode. Never had one of these fail before though. Thanks

Yes, a bad cable can definitely cause that problem. As for Scenalyzer, you can find it at http://www.scenalyzer.com

Thanks Edward...I'll check it out for future reference. Thanks for taking the time!

Hi Shane,

I have a very little experience and the best success I enjoyed was to use a green background in PI and key it out in Vegas. I've had quite acceptable results with fires and steam.

So, this is kind of random, but I'm going to be in a High School talent show and I wanted to do an Acapella version of Africa by Totu. I almost have all of the parts recorded of myself into vegas, but I am not a very capable audio mixer or recorder. Does anyone have any hints or better yet, would anyone be interested in taking on a funny side project of mixing these files so they sound good by Thursday? It would be helpful, because I really don't know how to mix well... Thanks.

PI wont accept Vegas DV Avis, u have to render out as RAW DV then import as a abackground image within PI

PI does support transparencys and Vegas does feed off them.. but for the actual composite work, its actually ALOT faster to render in PI

umm..

what else did u want to know??

PI3 is awsome.. prolly one of the best tools ive had the pleasure to use.

oh and when u export the movie, i jsut export as raw. THe blockers a re a great addition as well ...

Annoyingly confusing title I know, I apologise!

What I'm trying to ask is, anyone know if its more Premiere users going across to Vegas or more Vegas users going across to Premiere these days?

As much as I want to learn Premiere, deep down I think a lot of it is because of the "recognition" of being able to edit in it ("the consumer standard" pretty much) as Vegas is still nowhere near as known as Prem. I think Vegas is a wonderful tool, and will definitely continue to use it... I don't think I could ever fully migrate to Premiere unless things change a lot.

Does it really matter? If you want to work with a tool that gets
acceptance in the industry you should not use either, probably.
Avid and FCP are the two tools that are most used in the
"professional" world of editing. Premiere is indeed much more
known, but not really used by the big boys, it seems.

Indeed, doesn't matter one bit.. its all down to curiosity. I know Premiere isn't used by the big boys (and I hate macs so won't move over to that system) but obviously Avid is out most of our leagues.. but I will train myself on it bit by bit anyway. I'm just intrigued as to how many people are moving between systems these days, I remember back in the day of V3 a lot of premiere users were switching over after being impressed.. now PremPro 1.5 is out, I'm wondering if people are switching back or if even more are moving over.

I personally want to get to grips with as many "proper" PC based editing suites as I can, but I know a lot of people would rather stick to one.

Why do you say that Avid is out of most of our leagues? There is
a free version of Avid out and I believe that the Express DV version
is not that expensive either. They say if you know your way around
Avid it doesn't really matter which version of Avid it is.

Kinda forgot what board I'm on here, Avid is way under half of our leagues here, but a bit out of mine ;) I've toyed with Avid DV Xpress (from memory) and on one monitor with its default layout scared the hell out of me :) Albeit this was a while ago now, so would probably feel more at home with it now I'm sure, but I think I'll work my way up to it slowly. I think I'd be far more comfortable working within Vegas for a while whilst learning Premiere on the side.. I believe a friend of mine says she'll show me around Avid properly one day which'd be nice.

If I shoot a medium shot and in post decide it really should have been a tight shot is it reasonable to do the zoom in post?

How much futzing can I do before I need to worry about image degredation?

Thanks,

KIM

You can zoom a little without any noticable loss but I probably wouldn't go more than about 10%. The farther you zoom, the softer the image will become.

James, I don't know if anyone knows the real answer to your question. I DO know that in the forums I have seen many premiere users migrating to Vegas. Those same users indicate the Premiere forums do NOT show as much of a migration from Vegas to Premiere. However, as Rob said, does it really matter?

Hi all,


Well I tried to search first but only came up with my own posts in the results.


Ok so I drop a velocity enveloppe and 00:27:17 , completely stop the event and and hold on to that frame. So far so good.

Now I want to cut at that frame and put a flash transition , when the effect is done the same still image appear in B&W

The problem is that when I cut the event the next event start at the other frame even though I stopped it with the enveloppe. The new segment still has that enveloppe set to 0 so I am really not sure then why it still jumps to the next frame

Any ideas is of course greatly appreciated.

Phil

Here is the segment I am talking about.

it is a 13 meg uncompress file so nobody should have any problem viewing it.

If you go frame by frame you will clearly see what am talking about.

thanks again

http://s7.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=273C41QO91RT61U13J9H0ZZMBL

I just had to do this today to eliminate some heads in the front row of the audience that had been captured in the view from an unattended camera. (who let those people sit up there anyhow?)

I'm not sure how to relate to percentages, but I imagine I cropped about 10% or so of the picture. The result was an apparent loss in resolution as expected.

Following some advice seen on one of the Vegas forums, I duplicated the track, then selected sharpening in the convolution filter for the lower track. Reducing the opacity of the upper track to about 50% looked pretty good.

It's certainly not as good as the original uncropped clip, but it's useful for occasional cut-aways from the main track.

BTW, Edward, the multicam wizard in Excalibur has restored my sanity on this three camera capture of an amateur play.

Ralph

I did not look at your sample, but lets see if I understand what you said.

When you cut footage, it cuts between frames. So segment 1 has footage from 0:0:0 to 0:1:12 and the next segment will start at 0:1:13. (example)

It does not cut and duplicate a frame. So if I understand correctly, you need to use two identical segments, trimming one after the freeze frame, and trimming the next one before the freeze frame, making sure the identical frame remains in both segments. You can't just cut one and get what you are looking for.

Does that make sense? Does it sove the problem?

Hi John,


It does make sense unless a more experienced user says otherwise.

I'll give it a shot , I got another segment of the video I am working on that needs the same treatment.

BTW when I am done with this project there will be a nice intro into it , done with Vegas. Since I can't find a guy who's willing to be part of the team I am trying to assembled I decided to learn myself.

Hope your "intro" problems are solved , keep you posted on this velocity thing

Thanks for your time

Phil

hey guys...what is the easiest/best way in vegas5...

to create that quick cut you see in alot of tv shows today where it basically fades to white (usally white) real quick

and sorta looks like a camera flash...


Please help

thanks,
Looking for the most efficient way to do this

Try 3 frames of white with blue tint clip ,sorry, event between them

Well I went back to a really simple intro for now, but just downloaded a trial copy of combustion to play with. Same week my stock fooftage and RF music library shows up (good week on ebay), so I guess I have plenty to play with now.

Thanks Ian & Peter,
Looking at what this program will do has me salivating.
And the price is incredible compared to some other simular programs.

Peter, does PI support dual-screen "window dragging"? Do you think my ATI 9800 XT will run it properly?
Is keyframe animation easy in PI?

Thanks in Advance.

When bringing unprotected VOB files into Vegas, I drag it to the timeline and it creates the video track successfully. How do you get the audio portion of the VOB file onto an audio track?

I had the same problem.
Try the guide from this site:
http://www.videohelp.com/virtualdubaudio.htm
Just paste the wav file below the video layer.

Thanks Johan:

So are you suggesting that the only way to get the audio from the VOB file is by using a program like Virtualdub?

Does anyone know of a way to do it in Vegas or DVD Architect??

come again

<<<-- Originally posted by Ray Sigmond : When bringing unprotected VOB files into Vegas, I drag it to the timeline and it creates the video track successfully. How do you get the audio portion of the VOB file onto an audio track? -->>>

u dont..

u have to extract the audio or demux the vob unless the audio is PCM

a small app like BeSweet works wonders.. even extracts 5.1 stresm into seperate waves.

Your problem is that the DVD contains AC3 audio. Vegas will not import AC3 so you have to convert the audio into something Vegas WILL import.

Why not just use the Flash transition? There's three built-in presets: Hard, Soft, and Yellow

I downloaded BeSweet version 1.5b29 which I found here

http://dspguru.doom9.net/

Johan, I also downloaded VirtualDub 1.5.1 and willtry them both.

http://www.virtualdub.org/


I guess it would be a lot easier if I plugged my external DVD player into the S-Video of my capture card. But then I would of never learned about these apps.

Thanks Guys,

Ray

Hi All,

Great forum and very helpful.

I have a project - 2 1/2 hour dance recital - where I had the audio run into the wide-angle camera at the back of the auditorium. Unfortunately the sound guy was unwilling to boost the level through to the camera so we were maxed on the audio signal... sigh, anyway, I have 16 bit audio going into the right channel. It's nice and clean but low. I have room ambience through the other camera but I was wondering the following.
Is there a script that would take the soundboard audio channel (track 4 in each instance) make it stereo and then boost the levels to something acceptable and apply it to all 49! of my 2.5 minute clips without me doing it all myself one at a time? Dear God, somebody please say yes.

Thanks for listening.

sincerely,


ian

Philippe,
On the last frame that is stopped try saving a "best/full" screen capture of that frame. Either do the B/W effect in an image editor or Vegas. Then drag the image on the timeline and do your flash transition with the velocity clip (there are other ways to create a flash effect). If the velocity envelope is set at 0 at the time of the screen cap you should be able to drag that clip a little further to give you room for the transition. That is how I have done what you have described.

I usually use a camera shutter-sound effect at the "flash" point and sometimes will do about a 10-15 % zoom and a slight rotation on the screen capture after the flash for added effect (depending on the quality of the screen-cap).

Hope this helps.

Shane

How the heck did I miss that Flash transition!

Thanks Edward... that is 99.9% exactly of what I needed!

thanks for your time to post it for me...