Thanks for that Spot!

I'll have a look at it tomorrow...

Neil

Fred,
Thought someone would have answered by now. I just built an AMD X2 4400 dual core machine that really screams. Got all of the parts from New Egg. Here's a link to my wish list: https://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/MySavedWishDetail.asp?ID=1766378. It's a shared list under Randy's New Computer. Hope this helps.
Randy

Does anyone know if it is possible to assign or add realtime effects to Vegas tracks?

Let me explain my question another way:

I want to use Vegas to record multiple audio tracks for video from a mixer.

Is it possible for me to apply some of the plug-ins to the individual tracks so that the tracks are recorded with the effect of the plug-in applied in realtime i.e. not after the fact or in post?

I am thinking particularly of the compressor / limiter plug-ins specifically to compress / limit incoming audio in realtime or on-the-fly - to serve as a double check against clipping and the like of the original recordings.

Regards,

Dale.

Sort of. Vegas NEVER messes with the original anything, unless you tell it to.
You can insert comps, etc to the track, but it's only MONITORING with those, it's not destructively processing on input from the original. So, you can hear what specific plugs will do when you process, and it's real-time, etc. However, it's not actually affecting the original audio. This means you can always go back and modify the settings later.
If that's what you wanna do, right click the trackhead and choose "Enable input monitor". If you don't see it there, go to your prefs/audio device/advanced and select "Enable input monitoring." Then right click the track head again and enable input monitoring for that track.
Now you'll hear all the FX settings.

as DSE said u can route your audio through vegas... and u can even record these inputs onto the Vegas TL if u really were that way inclined...
With the right soundcard, you can use a nice console mixer and input each individual channel from that mixer into your soundcard, then from that soundcard, route each input to a track in vegas and throw down some filters...

really REALLY cool stuff.. i know afew performers whove ditched rackloads full of kit in favour of Vegas6 and a Yahama O1v mixer.. basically taking care of all their outboard FX needs...

Thanks for the replies.

By the way Douglas - my 'Instant Surround Sound' by Jeffrey P. Fisher finally arrived so I am working my way through this (although much of the stuff seems to have been covered by my questions and the replies thereto on this message board as well as, of course, by trial and error).

Thanks for the input on the realtime effects or plug-ins. I understand what you both are saying i.e. sort of like having an 'effects send and return'. I just thought there might be a way of actually recording the tracks with the plug-in applied without having to follow the route that you both described.

The main problem really is that the inputs and controls (gain controls especially) on my Alesis mixer are EXTREMELY sensitive and as this is being used for live (speech, vocal) recordings (did my first one with this setup last week) I noticed that it was really difficult to set and maintain the levels for 6 different mics - you don't know what type of voice and at what level the individual presenters are going to deliver their goods - so I thought of adding a compressor / limiter to each track in an attempt to make these adjustments less 'critical' as it were i.e. if one speaker was slightly 'softer' then the track would get a slight 'boost' and if another was slightly 'louder' then the track would get a slight 'limiting' and at the end of the day you should have individual tracks that were more or less at the same levels.

I have been able to achieve all of this in post production but it really did take some time to fix 6 mono tracks of about 3 hours each and then still had to play around with them some more in Vegas as only when I was finished removing DC offsets, normalizing entire tracks, and then normalizing individual speeches within those tracks, did I realise that once all of this was mixed down to stereo for the video the track the audio data is combined i.e. after ensuring that each track had a peak of -3.0dB when mixed to stereo - clipping was occuring when there was an overlap of sounds on each track (like applause for example). The applause was not clipped on the individual tracks but the combination of the applause on all six tracks when downmixed to stereo caused clipping at those points).

Any thoughts or input?

Aside from all of this (and the audio / video synch problem described in a another thread) I think I have finally found a top notch quality solution for the type of audio that I need to capture for video.

Regards,

Dale.

I just build one with John Rofrano's specs and I love it. ASUS mobo - duel core AMD. VERY VERY Quiet and very very fast. 2 gigs of ram. I'm not into Hi def yet so I can't really say about that but I will be shooting some in a couple of weeks so I can report back then.

Milt

So I have a bunch of tapes with misc. segments. Usually I capture with sclive and it' automatically saves tapes into seperate files. but sometimes I don't or I'm in the middle of an edit and I realize that I want to save a piece as a seperate file.

Is there another way that I'm not aware of - of saving things seperately - other than saving what's on the time line as a "SAVE AS - checking copy and trim"

or is there another program that will do it a little easier. I have't checked SClive on this - just curious how others are handling this.

thanks,
Milt Lee

Well, I'm not that familiar with subclips (might be worth investigating though), and not sure what sclive does.

But there's a VERY handy script that comes with Vegas 5 and later called batch render. If you go into it you'll find settings to choose any existing render templates, including custom templates you might have saved.

AND, most importantly, a render-by-regions setting, which will render each region into separate output files.

I could wish that there were more flexible file naming arrangements, like to include the region name in the filename, but this is a very handy script.

What's the trick for moving regions from one VEG to another? Here's what I did - I created 2 subclips - then I opened a second Vegas, then I dragged one of the subclips into the new unnamed VEG. Went fine, BUT the sound did not appear to go with it. The message on the time line is - (media offline) and that continues through out the timeline.

Suggestions?
Milt

I am having the hardest time previewing clips in Vegas on a AMD X2 4800+, 2 GB RAM, RAID.

I get about 2-5 fps on draft preview. Now, watching the clips in Quicktime in fullscreen does not even tickle the computer, so I am assuming that maybe a codec is not properly working in Vegas?

So far, search on this forum only yielded tah it works quite well, but no fps indication.

For example, opening a 12 min HD-1 project almost takes 20 minutes, renering it, however, is quite fast.

The Movie Factory software is very fast on the same machine...

So I'm getting ready to burn a DVD. I already rendered the video for DVDA - now I want to render the audio. I go to what I've always used ac-3 and it tells me I need to buy it first. What gives?

One more piece of information. I recently moved my copy of Vegas from my old computer to my new computer. Is this what's causing the issue? Everything else works just fine. It re-registered the software when I went to do the DVD render. But doesn't want to let me do the audio.

Thanks,
Milt

No, that's not happening with me.

I'm trying to think of what other stuff I have installed.

Power DVD 6 which has some codecs. VLC player. Real Player. divx6. Nero 7. Probably some stuff I don't know about. I'm not being very helpful here, sorry.

I have a Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66GHz, Processor Speed is 2.59 GHz, Memory (RAM) 768 MB, XPSP2 Operating System Version 5.1.2600.

I also have a Radeon 9700 card.

I think Vegas would probably be more demanding than Movie Factory.

The AC3 encoder needs a seperate license key, which you get when you
buy the package of Vegas + DVD Architect (if I remember correctly). If you
just bought Vegas you did not buy a license to use the AC3 encoder.

So you either need to get that license or re-find your license key.

Can't seem to find any answers on this. Basically will Vegas Video edit the HD files coming from the new Panasonic HVX200?

Try to convert with MP4CAM2AVI and install FFDSHOW codec

I believe you may need Raylight.

(Sorry, haven't used it.)

Properly registering DVD Architect should fully unlock AC-3. If you have DVDA installed AND registered and you are still seeing this error, you may need to contact tech support to let them help straighten it out.

I may be incredibly dense about this, but I'm really confused. My company bought the Vegas+DVD bundle, and I assumed that the DVD Architect included was the full version. However, there are a lot of grayed out features on the timeline of the DVD Architect that I have, such as Import Subtitles and Add Markers for example.

I've registered, and I've updated to DVD Architect 3.0c, but the items are still grayed out. I noticed that in the sample page on Sony that the items are also grayed out. Is this normal? I've emailed tech support, but have yet to hear from them. What am I missing?

Can't seem to find any answers on this. Basically will Vegas Video edit the HD files coming from the new Panasonic HVX200?

You'll need Raylight to accomplish this.
Tutorial:
http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?id=f176d261-c15c-451a-bdfa-d07e5bbc018f

Some items will be grayed out IF the proper things aren't selected. For example, you can't add a menu button if you're not on a menu. Perhaps you just don't have the proper thing selected.

Some items will be grayed out IF the proper things aren't selected. For example, you can't add a menu button if you're not on a menu. Perhaps you just don't have the proper thing selected.I'm an idiot! I went back and tried that -- and followed directions in the help file -- and voila, it appeared.

I think I just have a case of the Mondays.

Yup, both answers were correct. I called support this morning. They gave me my license # and pointed out that I needed to activate DVD arch. and it would automatically unlock the encoder. I guess the encoder comes with DVDA. And sure enough it worked great.

Also - they pointed me to VASST for their wonderful tutorials. Which I knew about but it was all good.
Very cool.
Milt

Hi,

Using Studio Platinum (Vegas 6.0 +DVD from B&H arriving tomorrow).

I am playing around with audio, and inserting a voice track with microphone. I found the track EQ, COMP, and Gate functions, really, really cool! Audio tech ministry in our church has made me familiar with this stuff. I had no idea it was in this program. What a bonus.

It seems that my added audio track includes the audio track of my video clip as well as my voiceover. I found that soloing the voiceover track while recording stops that problem. Is that the correct configuration for that goal?

Also, I seem to be getting a lot of noise in the new track, whine...high freq hum, hiss, etc... I don't get this when using Windows sound recorder, a slight hiss only from my cheap Sony hand held. I can EQ some of this excessive noise out, but it is pretty much not usable.

Is there any way to get clean audio into Vegas from a pc soundcard? Rather, from a "typical" soundcard vs a "high end" card if such exists.

Thanks in advance,

Jamie

As I preview my stills on the timeline, as it gets to one that is a large .tif file, the preview becomes jumpy, not showing every frame. Is this because the program is having a tough time previewing such a large graphics file? And if so, will this still be a problem after it is rendered?

Thanks again,

Jim

Welcome to DVinfo Jim. I think you'll need to give us a hint as to what kind of computer and what software you're using before anyone can help you out with this! If you let me know then I'll move your post to the appropriate forum where you should get more responses.

Thanks Boyd.

I'm using a Dell Latitude D800 with 512 memory and Vegas 6. I answered part of my own question. Once rendered, there was no jumpiness (it that's a word).

So I guess my next question would be...how much image quality will I lose if I convert to JPG from TIF? I assume that depends on how large the final screening medium is (from tiny browser window or theater projection screen)

I know these questions are very basic, but that is where I am right now.

Thanks again,

Jim

Hey Jim; I moved this thread to our (standard definition) Vegas forum which is the best place to ask questions like these. We also have another Vegas forum dedicated to high definition. I use Macs so I can't really help, but I'm sure others can.

yeah dude, from memory i think TIFF are running through a QT shell (i might be wrong here) and QT itelf is rather slow on the Veggie timeline, as are most stills anyway...

reason is is that these stills are being converted to DV on the fly for your preview monitoring..
rendering is always full frame unless ur harddrive fails during the render.. ive never known vegas to drop a frame at render... i could be wrong, but in my years of using it, ive never had an issue

if your ever in doubt of how a frame moves etc just highlight the area and hold cntl, and tab B, this will give u a ram render of the highlights bits and u can play that back in realtime at full frame without having to render out..

IMO with vegas as it has some issues rescaling certain images (ie if ur still image is like 4000x6000 @300 dpi) id recommend you rezize it to maybe double or triple that of your project resolution (ie average 3000x2000) and use a lower DPI as with video u only need 72dpiif u have a batch of images, u can batch convert with photoshop or pretty much any app thats out there these days...

Downconverting ur pics for the project will also speed up rendering and as u only have 512mb ram, you pagefile wont bog down. The vegas 6 pagefile management is totaly different to V5, but with 6, as soon as u start using non video files, it eats up your pagefile like pacman

As Peter alluded to, .tif files aren't all that great for editing in Vegas, because .tif files require Quicktime, so it's being translated and scaled at the same time. Batch convert your pix to .png or .tga for best results.

I'm using MM2.1 - came with ACID Pro6 - does your PUSH pin option work on the Properties Pane fly out? I don't even HAVE a push pin?

Grazie

GRR
More fiddling about.. this is ONE thing i hate about HDV and DVCPRoHD is that you gotta convert to intermediate to get anything done efficiently.. apart from using proxies... or a Mac.... BLASPHEMY!

I recently copied a number of .dv files onto a DVD for a friend to edit using Vegas 4. However, he's unable to open all of them; the larger files (1 GB or more) seem to work OK, but the smaller ones won't open.

Some files transfer smooth/easy; others just choke, and we get a “cyclic redundancy error” message over and over

This is footage I've already transferred to my iMac using either iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Is there something I should be doing that I'm not?

Leigh

We are using Sony Studio + DVD maker and we want to pull still frames from the edited video. We do not need to make still frames in the video only to select a frame and copy it as a single frame and then save the frame to a file outside of the editing program.

These still frames would then be imported into a graphics program and converted to JPEG.

The help program in the editing software has the basics of how to copy the single frame, but not how to put it into a file outside of the edit program.

I need to do that so that the frame(s) could be copied to a file in the hard drive so I can copy them to a CD and then take the stills to a different computer for use as still images.

Any help would be appreciated.

Place the cursor over the frame you want to make a freeze frame. Change the PREVIEW to BEST FULL click on the little DISC ICON to the RIGHT TOP on the preview screen SAVE AS either JPEG or PNG direct it to where you want to save it hit SAVE and you're done.

Don

Hi Daniel,

I just instaled Vegas 6d and am having the same issue. I haven't changed and preferences or made changes to the stock install but when I drag an mp4 file from the HD1 into the timeline and then play it, I get a slow stuttering playback rate in the preview window in the bottom right.

Playback of these files in Quicktime is smooth even on full screen on a 24 incher. Can't be hardware, just built the box with AMD dual core X2 CPU with WD Raptor drives and 2GB of OCZ Ram.

I think using external applications to do conversions, etc. defeats the purpose of Vegas. Ideally, I'd like a complete workflow within this application.

Did you find resolution to your issue?

Thanks for the guidance.

We will try it tomorrow.

Hi Konrad-

yes, I still have the problems. I tried to disable the "Ignore 3rd party plugins", "Use Microsoft DV codec" options but to no avail.

Then, I stumbled accross a possible explanation for the sluggishness:

Right-click on the MPEG4 file in media explorer and check properties.

It should say something like "qt5.dll", located in the Vegas plug-in directory.

This is an old Quicktime codec from 2002 (?) and most likely the root-cause.

Anyway, I am currently using Jacky Yew's suggestion and it works like a charm.

Just do a batch convert of all the files, and you'll be dealing with AVI files from there on. Works like a charm and the batch conversion only takes a minute or so...

Hi Daniel,

I just instaled Vegas 6d and am having the same issue. I haven't changed and preferences or made changes to the stock install but when I drag an mp4 file from the HD1 into the timeline and then play it, I get a slow stuttering playback rate in the preview window in the bottom right.

Playback of these files in Quicktime is smooth even on full screen on a 24 incher. Can't be hardware, just built the box with AMD dual core X2 CPU with WD Raptor drives and 2GB of OCZ Ram.

I think using external applications to do conversions, etc. defeats the purpose of Vegas. Ideally, I'd like a complete workflow within this application.

Did you find resolution to your issue?

Just curious, are we losing anything (quality/info/versatilty/etc.) by converting to AVI?

I thought the benefit of Vegas was that we could work directly on the mp4 files.

I am wondering why Graham and others are not finding this issue despite the slower hardware.

MP4CAM2AVI just re-package to MPEG4 format AVI, no recompression. But AAC audio in AVI is not common, you're recommanded to convert it to PCM.

Seems this issue only affect AMD processor.

while playback in QT was fine. Go figure...


MP4CAM2AVI just re-package to MPEG4 format AVI, no recompression. But AAC audio in AVI is not common, you're recommanded to convert it to PCM.

Seems this issue only affect AMD processor.

Yes, Quicktime is definitely processing the .tif on the fly...no fun. So, if I am reading all your advice correctly...

I will convert my existing .tifs to pngs and since I will be zooming, I will only downsize as needed to maybe 3 x project resolution and leave the dpi alone (which is 300 - 600 depending on the still). The file sizes will still be anywhere from a 1Mb to 25Mb in size with PNG (much larger than if I went the JPG route), but 3 to 4 times smaller than TIF and do not have to worry about image quality loss if editing or waiting for Quicktime to process in preview.

Does that sound about right?

Thanks again guys,

Jim

I have a series of amost 500 clips that I wish to put onto a variety of DVDs. Rather than rendering out all the individual clips, I'm proposing to line up all the veggie files on the timeline in an order that corresponds to the contents of that particular DVD.

In each case I'll render this out in the MPEG-2 format with the AC-3 audio file, though I don't recall whether to 'Render As' or 'Render to New Track'?

I assume to successfully load the orange markers from Vegas6d into DVDA3c I ensure the 'Save project markers in media file' is selected?

The reason I ask is because it'll save me a lot of time having to re-create all the markers in DVDA.

TIA
Neil

Is this right? If I have a Flash cartoon-like animation, I cannot bring that into Vegas? I was reading both on this site and Sony's that they only support Flash for text. If that is correct, how is anyone bringing in cartoon-like animation (or whatever the correct term for this is)?

Thanks again,

Jim

Jim,
On Page 44 of the Vegas manual there is a table of file types that Vegas supports in a project. Shockwave Flash .SWF files are a type that is supported. FLV files are not listed so probably aren't supported.

png or tga are your best options, always, in Vegas, and you'll see the system run significantly faster.

Render As

and Yes - make sure the option to save markers is CHECKED.

Ok so I know how to key out the green pretty well in Vegas although it is not quite as easy as Ultra2 it seems. But generally ok. Now, can any of you recommend a way in Vegas to create shadows so the item you're keying looks like it's where you've placed it?

Ok so I know how to key out the green pretty well in Vegas although it is not quite as easy as Ultra2 it seems. But generally ok. Now, can any of you recommend a way in Vegas to create shadows so the item you're keying looks like it's where you've placed it?


Open Track Motion and select the "Add Shadow" box. That'll fix you up.

Do you mean casting a shadow on the floor which matches other shadows in the room?

That can be done, but there's some work involved. You'd basically take the keyed clip, duplicate it (but put it on a track under the keyed clip you want to keep), blacken out the image (contrast, brightness, something), lower the opacity (so that it can be seen through, amount dependent on how much you want), then use 3D track motion to place it. Not quite as slick as AE or Commotion which have shadow generators, but pretty much a manual version of the same thing.