http://www.headbands.com/gspot/download.html ('http://www.headbands.com/gspot/download.html')

I had the same problems with avi's created by digital still cameras using the MJPEG codec until I installed an MJPEG codec.

Yes it "knows" what to do. Drop the music into an audio track and drop the images into their track, let it know which is the audio track per the instructions, select the transitions, and voila, insta-montage!

I'm not at my Vegas machine right now so I can't remember the exact instructions, but it's a very intuitive process.

It looks to me that I am only shrinking the video image a little, that way nothing is cut off during TV overscan. I am right?

Making it smaller to not cut off the overscan is NOT desirable. If you then render to a web format, it will be too small to fit the full screen. Just make sure to shoot FOR the safe areas.

You can turn on the safe area overlay - it looks like a # above the preview screen. The outside line is your "Action" safe area. The inside line is your "Title" safe area.

Shoot for that and don't try to make the video "smaller" to fit your TV. Besides, what fits your TV may be too small on my TV. Then again, it may need to be even SMALLER to fit on another TV (I have on at home that cuts off titles on several channels). So which one would you render for? As has been mentioned, they're ALL different.

My advice, don't shrink the image!

Oh, this is to good to be true........

Thanks for your replies

To me it looks that in the worse case senario (on any TV) you will notice a very small black frame around the video image. I feel that this is acceptable, as long as the picture still is of high quality. Am I wrong? The small trials look quite good, on my vegas preview screen it is just filling the outer safe area.

I agree, I have to shoot in a wider angle and a little further away to avoid too much close-ups.

Thanks
Everard

Everard

a) No, I don't think you're doing the right thing, unless you've already shot and you ABSOLUTELY, MUST, WITHOUT A DOUBT see something in the frame that's current cut off cause of tv overscan.

b) Yes. Either shoot normal and make sure you allow for the underscan portion when shooting so you dno't put important elements in that area. You can, if you must PAN using Vegas, sort of like a small PAN and scan. That will save image quality and should get most of what you want.

c) Yes, cause you're scaled the frame.

d) Don't think so.

Greeting also from New Zealand :)
Aaron

There should only be ONE firewire jack on the camera. Plug it in the same place you do for capture.

Can you print to tape with this camera? Is there a menu setting that has to be changed to allow firewire INPUT?

My miniDV camera is JVC GR DVL520A and it is better than many other cameras in this class, really. In the manual is written that I can connect another videocam to my videocam so that the 1st acts as DV OUT and the 2nd /my dvcam/ is DV IN. This means that my dvcam CAN be used as a monitor. It has S-VIDEO jack, i.e. there wouldn't be any problem to send the video signal to TV. I have not tried to use my DVcam for tape printing yet.
So, it seems that I am doing all the rules, but still nothing... Any suggestions more?

Oh poop.

I was hoping that Photo Montage would adjust my video clips to start and stop on the beat of the music.

I knew it was to good to be true. Are there any solutions out there to mark an audio timeline/sample/clip with beats, for those of us musically handicapped?

Jim

Scripting cannot "see" the "beats". You have to determine those manually.

It is no problem if the CPU is at 100% as long as the job gets done. Vegas
(like any video application) is a demanding one resource wise. However, if
it didn't work like that before it may indeed be wise to do a re-install.

Something may have been messed up in the driver area or perhaps you have
a virus etc.

I've moved your thread to the Vegas forum since it has nothing to do with
the GL2 (except that no DV camera can record slow motion).

Vegas is usually accepted as being pretty good at doing slow motion. However,
remember that it creates frames from thin air where nothing exists. In other
words it will never look as good as true slow motion.

I also did a search for you (search -> advanced -> restrict to just the vegas
forum and entered slow motion for the keywords) and found these:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=33074
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=29601
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=27289

If you need/want to look at external products I believe "Twixtor" was a good
product to do slow motion (try a demo first).

Vegas does great slow motion. By default, it is already very smooth. However, you may need to do more if slowing down a LOT (remember, it has to make the information for all the "New" frames). You might want to do a search in the help file for "Supersampling".

hmm.. slow mo..

quick and easy solution..

go to ur project properties.. and set the motion blur to gausian with a deinterlacing method using interpolation..

now in ur slow mo trac, make sure the video bus is active and set ur supersampling to 8 (as high as it goes)
Also after watching it, u might notice the image is a lil soft, so it might be an idea to run a sharpness filter on the clip as well..

Vegas 5 usually doesn't usually peg the CPU to 100% with a single processor hyperthreading CPU (which is seen in Windows as two CPUs... two graphs will show up in task manager). On a non-hyperthreading processor, I forget if 100% is right.

Hopefully you met your deadline Chris...!

2- One thing I can think of:
It might be that your hard drive is in PIO mode. When your hard drive gets errors (which is not good) Windows will drop its transfer speed down.

If your hard drive is in PIO mode, Windows will take a long time to boot and your computer will be slow.

I plan to step up to vegas 6. I am currently using a lap top. Specs are pentium 4 HT 2.8Hz 80gb HDD 512MB DDR. I know I will need a seperate drive to store video. I was thinking of Gtech 160. How many storage drives do I need? Will this one be enough? I normally work with one project at a time then its deleted once I author it. My videos are family videos and are about and hour long or so.

Thanks

I can capture to the C drive on my laptop. It also has a D drive I also capture to. External firewire drives also work fine. Not knowing all the specs of the particular laptop I can't guarantee it will work but haven't had any problems on two different laptops.

Fred: I would advice you to get a drive that at least has an USB2 connections,
if you want it can also have firewire (but I would not get a drive with JUST
a firewire connection!). I've had problems in past with firewire connecting
a drive. USB seems to more of a "PC" connection.

1 hour of video is 13 GB. If you don't use your laptop for anything else you
can store at least 5 hours of footage on it probably. If that is enough depends
on the amount of footage you shoot for a 1 hour production and how you
like to work. Don't forget you may need music for things like music, pictures
and DVD authoring (if you are gonna do that, at least 9 GB for a single layer
disc and 18 GB for a dual layer one to be safe).

I've successfullt used three computers for "distributed rendering" and then stiched a project together, here are some of my experiences...

1. As i understand it you can not use distributed network rendering to MPEG-2. When rendering to uncompressed AVI or DV (which works with network rendering) vegas will create chunks/segments of your project, and then tell the other clients to render the segments, and then use a "stitch host" to put all the segments together.

2. We use a gigabit hub from D-link to connect the render stations, which are all fitted with gigabit network cards.

3. The renderhosts need to have unique ID's in the TCP/IP tabs "DNS-suffix", this is described in the manual/whitepaper. Then reboot all computers and restart hubs and routers, just to be sure...

4. All files and folders (source files/folders and render output folder) needs to be shared and available with full access to all render stations. This is what I had the most problem with..

Overall this is very good - instead of a two hour render we were down to 30 minutes, and then approx 30 minutes for MPEG-2 encoding.

Another very good use is to have a single "render station" (not distributed) which does the rendering, which does not lock up the editing station.

Good luck,
Magnus

For a stage productions I tend to run both of my two camcorders with the incandescent lighting preset for white balance. On the last shoot, my son, running the second cam, forgot and ran with auto white balance. As a result, his footage is uniformly yellowish compared to mine.

I'll guess I'll have to poke arround with the color corrector and see what kind of improvement I can get, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

How can I find out more about the PIO mode?

And here is a crazy update on the situation....

Considering the time it was taking to render, I knew that I would not be able to complete on time given the performance. So I ran an app called Norton Ghost (which basically is a backup utility) to an exteral Lacie drive, making a complete backup.

I then reformatted my machine, installed 2000 instead of XP. Just seems a bit more stable in my opinion. I installed only what I needed to get running, video drivers, directx, etc. Then Vegas.

I opened up the file from another interal hdd, and kicked off a render. The CPU immediatly maxed out to 100%. My heart dropped.

JUST before posting this to this forum, I had an idea. I selected all of the data in the timeline, then copied it into a new, blank veg file. Renamed it, and rendered, and it flew the way I had grown to love.

So maybe the file was corrupted?

Now it seems to render most of the time quickly, however, on occasion it will creep again and max out the cpu. If I repeat the above process however, it works. What is up with that? When its rendering at what I would consider 'normal' speed, the cpu toggles around the 85%-95% usage. But never peaks out.

Also, I had pulled a few files off the lacie drice since the install, yet now when I try and access it, its not showing up. I can go to the computer management in control panel, and it shows up as an unallocated drive. Where is my data!!! Very crucial backup exists somewhere on there!

So I dont know what to do. Guess I will be calling Lacie tomorrow and see what they suggest.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!

Chris

Does anyone know if I can transfer video from Vegas to my JVC SR-VS3OU deck through a firewire? I can't seem to get Vegas to recognize the deck in the preferences. In fact, I don't even know if the record function on the JVC works backwards through the firewire port. Anyone know?

Moved to Vegas forum from The Long Black Line. Cross-posts removed.

Grasping at straws here... the information below may not be that helpful.

Hey Chris, if you re-installed Windows then PIO mode is not your problem. If you want to double check, go
control panel
system
hardware (tab?)
hardware or device manager
expand the branch for IDE/ATA controllers
right click the first entry
get properties
click advanced tab
read what mode the window says the interface is using

rinse and repeat for secondary controller

2- Totally esoteric and probably not your problem:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=pentium+denormal&btnG=Search&meta=
Certain older models of Pentiums can be very slow when it deals with a de-normal mode. You may encounter them if you do audio work that deals with small floating-point numbers (i.e. reverbs).

Check by muting audio or something, or making a .veg copy and deleting audio tracks.

3- There are a few bugs in Windows that can cause slow performance. You can try updating your machine to fix that (windows update).

4- Maybe some of your software is corrupt???

5-
Also, I had pulled a few files off the lacie drice since the install, yet now when I try and access it, its not showing up. I can go to the computer management in control panel, and it shows up as an unallocated drive. Where is my data!!! Very crucial backup exists somewhere on there!
Apparently certain Lacie drives have a high failure rate (this is from reading the Sony forum). It's an un-fun possibility that the drive overheated.

Data recovery should be possible as long as there is no physical damage to the hard drive platter (which is likely the case). That's expensive though. If Lacie is just going to replace your unit but you want your data, you may want to look at a data recovery service.

It could be something else though. But if it used to worked and now has stopped working, then it probably has a failure of some sort :/

One thing you could try is to mount the drive internally. If it's just one drive, you can do it. Don't do this if the Lacie enclosure/drive has two physical hard drives inside.
Watch out for static, find instructions on disassembling it (not sure if this is possible), make sure you select the right jumper setting on the drive by moving the jumper (cable select should work... otherwise master/slave both drives, or cable select both).
If the drive spins up, you are in luck. WIndows should be able to read the data off it. If it has formatting problems, take a peek at the drive with Active Undelete demo. It will show if the data is recoverable.
I really wouldn't do all that though... call Lacie first and ask them what gives.

6- Workaround:
If you really need to get this done, perhaps you could edit your material on another computer.

Borrow a computer from a friend.
(Possibly unethical) Buy a computer from a store with a good refund policy (check for restocking fees).
Use a lesser specced computer?
Early upgrade... get yourself a new computer.

In one of the sticky threads in this forum (the one with mouse gestures in
the title) has a link to Vegas color correction tutorials:

http://www.wideopenwest.com/~wvg/tutorial-menu.htm

The following two tutorials should help you white balance / match the camera's:

http://www.wideopenwest.com/~wvg/tutorial-9.htm
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~wvg/tutorial-13.htm

I don't know anything about that particular deck but my FIRST question would be: Does WINDOWS recogize the deck when you turn it on? If not, you'll need to get it recognized there before Vegas can use it.

Does anyone know if I can transfer video from Vegas to my JVC SR-VS3OU deck through a firewire? I can't seem to get Vegas to recognize the deck in the preferences. In fact, I don't even know if the record function on the JVC works backwards through the firewire port. Anyone know?

Barry,

The Vegas Hardware Support (http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/products/showproduct.asp?PID=965&FeatureID=8195) website does not list that particular deck. But I don't think that necessarily means it won't work, just that it hasn't been tested.

thanks for the reply. contacting lacie today to see what they think.

did a few more renders last night, and seemed to be working fine.

perhaps the second time that it happened was just a fluke.

/knocking on wood.






Grasping at straws here... the information below may not be that helpful.

Hey Chris, if you re-installed Windows then PIO mode is not your problem. If you want to double check, go
control panel
system
hardware (tab?)
hardware or device manager
expand the branch for IDE/ATA controllers
right click the first entry
get properties
click advanced tab
read what mode the window says the interface is using

rinse and repeat for secondary controller

2- Totally esoteric and probably not your problem:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=pentium+denormal&btnG=Search&meta=
Certain older models of Pentiums can be very slow when it deals with a de-normal mode. You may encounter them if you do audio work that deals with small floating-point numbers (i.e. reverbs).

Check by muting audio or something, or making a .veg copy and deleting audio tracks.

3- There are a few bugs in Windows that can cause slow performance. You can try updating your machine to fix that (windows update).

4- Maybe some of your software is corrupt???

5-
Apparently certain Lacie drives have a high failure rate (this is from reading the Sony forum). It's an un-fun possibility that the drive overheated.

Data recovery should be possible as long as there is no physical damage to the hard drive platter (which is likely the case). That's expensive though. If Lacie is just going to replace your unit but you want your data, you may want to look at a data recovery service.

It could be something else though. But if it used to worked and now has stopped working, then it probably has a failure of some sort :/

One thing you could try is to mount the drive internally. If it's just one drive, you can do it. Don't do this if the Lacie enclosure/drive has two physical hard drives inside.
Watch out for static, find instructions on disassembling it (not sure if this is possible), make sure you select the right jumper setting on the drive by moving the jumper (cable select should work... otherwise master/slave both drives, or cable select both).
If the drive spins up, you are in luck. WIndows should be able to read the data off it. If it has formatting problems, take a peek at the drive with Active Undelete demo. It will show if the data is recoverable.
I really wouldn't do all that though... call Lacie first and ask them what gives.

6- Workaround:
If you really need to get this done, perhaps you could edit your material on another computer.

Borrow a computer from a friend.
(Possibly unethical) Buy a computer from a store with a good refund policy (check for restocking fees).
Use a lesser specced computer?
Early upgrade... get yourself a new computer.

I recorded a "commentary" voiceover audio track in Vegas that I will use as an alternative audio track on a DVD.

I haven't rendered it to AC3 yet. Is there any way to automate the "turn down the background, turn up the commentary" and vice versa? What would be great is if I could make a single audio bus that makes the commentary louder and regular audio quieter if I pull the curve one way, then does the opposite if I push it the other way.

Is there an easy way to do this, or should I route all the background audio tracks to one bus and the voiceover track to another, then adjust the output of the two busses in parallel? It seems like there should be an easier way to do it, since I'll be adjusting one's output at exactly the same time as the other and by exactly the same amount, just in the opposite direction. I hope that makes sense ;-).

Excalibur to the rescue with Voice-Over Wizard! It does excactly what you want. www.VegasTrainingAndTools.com

Ultimate S also has a tool along these lines.

Gary

yes, windows does recognize the deck, and Vegas also recognizes it if I'm capturing FROM the deck. The problem occurs when I try "Print to Tape" from Vegas to the JVC deck. Vegas does not recognize the deck. Any ideas?

Have you tried it with a different firewire cable? Sometimes you can develop a problem in the cable and it only works one way.

Does External preview work?

Can you PTT to another device with the same cable?

Can you PTT with your current setup from another program?

Hi,

I have a problem with "SMRT Capture" and I am wondering if you have any insight into this. I have a Sony VAIO and I am using Vegas 4.0 for video editing. When I attempt to capture video from an analog source (my old camcorder, pluged in to the computer RCA jacks), as soon as I clik "capture video", I get this message: "The device SMRT Capture could not be opened. Please make sure that it is turned on and is not being used by another application or user."

I am a novice with this, it is the first time I have attempted to capture video in this way. Any advice of direction you may offer would be appreciated.

Thank you,

- Moon Bear

My recommendation: Hook up the analog source to your camera/convertor/deck and hook that to the computer via firewire. Let the camera convert from analog to digital and capture into a standard DV-AVI file.

Hi all.

Just dreaming about a new Sony Z1.. I was trying to visualize how you would display the output of your Vegas machine on an external LCD dedicated to video.. How does the output wiring look.. Firewire out of computer to camera input and the output of camera(which one) to which input on the LCD ???

What are the possible scenerios ?? (Sorry no DeckLink card here either.. maybe down the road..)

thanks all,
Mike Moncrief

Vegas 6 has the ability to do external preview to a secondary video monitor.

Hi Edward.

Thanks for responding.. I have seen that.. But what hardware connection exactly are used to accomplish this??

Thanks,
Mike Moncrief

Also, in Vegas 6, under PREFERENCES/PRINT DEVICE, be sure to select the proper 1394 bus.

Simply plug it into the a second monitor connection on your video card - just like the first monitor is.

I am curious if anyone knows...

I have purchased Vegas along with the 5 training DVDs since I believe it to be the best and easiest editor to use. However, I see in so many posts about opening audio in Soundforge to edit.

I have nothing against Soundforge, and even bought an express copy years ago with Sonic Foundry, but I've always preferred Adobe Audition (which in my mind is still Cool Edit Pro since I've been using it waaaaaayyyy before Adobe bought it).

Anyway, question is, will Audition do as well with my Vegas files (I've used it many times already to successfully edit .avi's from Windows movie maker) as Soundforge will do - or is there some special things Soundforge can do that the other can't?

They've always seemed very similar, and again, I've always just preferred Audition (cool edit).

Hello,

And if it is a laptop, can you use the external connection for the monitor??

Mike

I'm finalizing my first comercial DVD and just noticed that the masters I send to the replictors are supposed to be on DVD-Rs and can be UDF, UDF BRIDGE, or ISO 9660 but they must be written in DDP2.0, 2.1 or CMF format.

I've searched and found that CMF is short for Cutting Master Format (I think that's what it said) but I can't find mention of either format within the help or manual of DVDA.

The guy at the replication facility makes it sound like any authoring software that's not older than 2 or more years should have it.

I'm worried because we're on a time crunch so I'd rather get it right with the first FedEx.

Can anyone tell me if either of these "standards" of authoring are part of DVDA?

Thanks,
Kevin

p.s. The credits are done and DvInfo.Net is shining proudly in the "Thank You's"

Both are audio editors. Use what you're comfortable with. The main advantage with Sound Forge is that you can send a file from the Vegas timeline to be modified in Sound Forge and, once modified, it will be brought back into Vegas and added as a Take to that event.

Yes, that should also work. I know my laptop can be set up to be two monitors - the main LCD on the laptop and an second signal out the SVGA port.

Ahhhh, thanks Edward

Exactly the kind of thing I was wondering. I guess thru Audition, I'll have to save the audio back to video (which can be rather lengthy) and then re-import back into Vegas. I wonder if that would degrade the quality of the file in any way vs. the Soundforge method?

i havent tried this as i only use Soundforge for editing, however in teh preferences tab, there is an option to select the "default audio editor"

lead it to Audition and it "should" theoretically behave the same way..

Even though the results do not seem to be really desirable but I wonder if there is an easy way to do this kind of stuff with Vegas 5.0.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=93571

I'm not sure that by simply pointing to the other program it will allow it to bring the audio back in as a Take. It would definitely allow STARTING the program, though.

As for saving the file, why not just save it as a WAV file instead of an AVI file? Then add the WAV file as a take on the original timeline.

Very good. I'll try this out as soon as I can. Having to learn Vegas AND a new sound editor would be a bit taxing at the same time.

Thanks!