Yes, it *could* be caused by the Roxio encoding. I don't know anything about what Roxio uses for encoding. If it will accept MPEG2 files, you might try encoding in Vegas instead.

Vince,

Email me at vegasediting@aol.com and I'll get you on the list for the colorado Vegas users group. We haven't met in a while, but it may start up again soon.

Gary

cool

SVCD is 480x480 pixels with a maximum data rate of about 2500k/second. The horizontal resolution and the limited data rate is simply not enough to produce high quality video.

John

until today i have had no problem rendering projects to mpeg2.
but today i tried rendereing a project and the mpeg file would not play on either winamp or microsoft mediaplayer.

winamp would just not play the mpeg. the microsoft media player would collapse and say: catastrphic error.

why is this happening?

i have done nothing different than in the earlier renders which were fine.

i render to mpeg2 and use the PAS DVD template.

i tried rendering to mpeg1. same results.

i tried playing a different mpeg file, not rendered with vegas. played perfectly.

i double checked all the parameters. i tried rendering again. but with no success.

finally i DID manage to play the mpeg files on a friends computer with Sonic CinePlayer. but other players reject it.

any ideas?

Have you loaded any new software on your machine?

Have you done a virus scan lately?

Good luck.

Dennis Vogel

i do virus checks daily. and yes, i did add new software. buy why should this have any effect on vegas' rendering process?

could uninstalling vegas and reinstalling it help?

this is beginning to worry me.

adi

i rendered the project to .avi
this seems to work fine with all mediaplayers. but i noticed that the quality is really bad. i DID use multiple effects on the video, such as color curves, film effect and color correction, which could explain loss in quality, but the image is pixelated. i can actually see pixels moving on the screen (especially in bright areas). this is really wierd. i'll do some more testing. but if you have any suggestions or ideas, i'd be really happy to hear them. i have a video project i to screen on a large screen in one week and what i have now is no good.

thank you,
adi

Try reinstalling Vegas to see if it can straighten out whatever your other install changed.

try to do a pre-render (shift+B)

the stutters should not show in the final render, maybe your resources aren't enough to display.

may also want to up the RAM avail for pre-render
options/preferences/video

Hey Guys,

I have a friend who is a vocalist. He is wondering can I change the key of some of his musical tracks. How can I do this in Vegas?
Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Al

Open the help file, do a search on "Pitch", and then select "Editing Event Properties" from the found list. The third item down is: Time-Stretch or Pitch-Shift an audio event and explains the proper keypresses to perform this function.

Just found that some of my footage has dust on the lens, and the light is catching it showing it up. This is with a 16:9 lens BTW, typical of it's sort.

Now I realise that some of you may just tell me to clean the lens before I shoot. I just want to clarify that I do. But it seems there is some dust actually inside the element. With a matte box or some other way of shading the lens such things never show up. But these were Glidecam shots and I had no way at the time of shading it.

Anyway regardless of solutions at the time of shooting it's too late now. Does anyone know of any filters that might be able to remove such smudges and marks from footage?

Scott will announce the plug-in update very soon in the Sony forums. I'll let you know when it's up. He has just made a last minute modification for the user to adjust the amount of the effect they want, much like the adjustment in the Magic Bullet Opticals suite, so the release was delayed for a few days while he added it.

It's there now!

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=301397&Replies=2&Page=0

Excellent. Enjoy!

OK, a search through the manual and these archives brought up nothing. Surely there is a way to lock the markers to the event/clip in the timeline. W/o that ability, any notes I make at exact points will shift around as I build the edit. I have noticed that I can do it in the trimmer, and then they don't move when the event/clip is moved about on the timeline, but you can't read those notes at a glance once you've cut it into the timeline, which is unacceptable.

Anybody?

Is the "Lock Envelopes to Events" button on the toolbar turned on?

Yep. First thing I tried, though a marker isn't really an "envelope," is it? (I confess I still get thrown sometimes by what Vegas calls things.)

Didn't help anyway. Other thoughts?

P.S. I wandered by your site for the first time in months, Edward. Looking good!

Thanks Marcia. I've put a lot of work in on it. Try this for your problem:

1) Turn on Auto Ripple
2) Click on the drop down beside the auto ripple button and choose "All tracks, markers, and regions"
3) Now try moving your clip - everything should transfer with it.

Okay, I see what I did now. I'd tried that because I was SURE that I did it that way before I left for production, but you have to let go of the clip on the timeline for the marker to reset, or "catch up." I was sliding it while holding the button down, expecting the marker would travel with it. It doesn't, but it gets there a nanosecond after you release the button. Phew! Thanks Edward. Again.

my PRERENERED file has about 4 GB of prerendered files in it. i have never used the prerender function. only FILES > Render as... and so on. one time i DID print to tape (and that is over and done with). could these files be leftover from the print to tape i did a while ago? what are these files? i want to get rid of these 4GB if they are unnecessary.

also i noticed that when i reverse a video event, a new clip appears in the media pool as the reversed clip. for example if i reverse the video event of clip 003 then "clip 003 (reversed)" shows up in the media pool. is this a prerendered file as well? if i erase clip 003 will it's reversed twin be erased as well?

is there anything i should save or note down before uninstalling vegas 5 and reinstalling it?

i'm in the middle of editing a project and strange problems regarding rendering to mpeg have been bugging me. i want to try reinstalling vegas, but i'm a bit panicy regarding the unfinished project. i don't want to stupidly lose any vital information, etc.

for example: are custom set effect prefixes saved somewhere? can't really think of anything else at the moment.

To take one step back, I assume it isn't normal to have such
"dust" **inside** a lens (attachment)?

Yes, when you to a Print To Tape, it will render anything that needs rendering. This process will create the "Prerendered" files and place them where you've specified for your prerender folder. This is normal. There is even an option in preferences that will allow you to optionally save or not save these pre-rendered files on PTT.

When you reverse a clip, it is creating a SUBCLIP which is what you are seeing in the Media Pool. It is NOT a pre-rendered file. If you try to remove the original (non-reversed) media, it will tell you it is in use. Just leave both there.

If you simply uninstall and reinstall - without deleting anything else in the folders or registry - your settings should be preserved. What you might want to try first is a "Repair Install".

No, it's not. Well not if the lens was made well. It's actually quite hard to see looking at the lens until the camera is facing vaguely into the light in which case it shows on screen. I have heard of some people with the Panasonic adaptor having this problem too.

With a good sunshade the dirt cannot normally be seen. Problem is the cost of matte boxes, and having someone flag the lens while using the Glidecam isn't very practical.

If you still have warranty I would send it back if it had dust inside
the lens. Otherwise I don't know what you could do to fix it,
otherwise to try some post production tools for dust removal and
such things.

I saved a couple .veg files that I spent hours on. when I went to open them Vegas got stuck in the "building peaks" mode. It got to 11% and never went further. I see the previously saved version also is giving me this problem.

Is the .veg file salvageable? Might the problem be coming from a file that Vegas is trying to access? Is there some workaround for this. I hate to think I have lost all this work since my backup files for these veggies are behaving the same way.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Building peaks should happen AFTER the file is open. A few questions:

1) Is there free space where these AVI files are stored?
2) Can you load these files (AVI files - NOT the veg files) into a blank timeline? Do the peaks build then?

After you get it to build the peaks correctly, the VEG file should open.

I tried this experient once, shooting in 60i and converting to 24p. That was before Edward Troxel was onboard, and Vegas became as widely used as it is now.

When I tried it, most shots looked okay, but on ones with fast motion, during the fast motion frames, the moving parts of the image would become a pixelly mess. I noticed this on other shots as well, where there was little or no movement, and was never able to figure it out. I followed the 24p conversion steps I found on here, or perhaps somewhere else, and it still came out this way, so I justed to know if this is just how it is, if you don't either shoot 24p to begin with, or use Magic Bullet, or someone's done a sucessful conversion.

I've not tried to create 24p from a 60i (59.97i) source but I've had beautiful results going to 30p. I use a multi-step process:

1. Load up the 60i source on the timeline.
2. Open Vegas Options (Alt+Enter) and choose "Interpolate" from the deinterlace option.
3. Export to a 30p uncompressed DI (digital intermediate) file.
4. Load the 30p DI onto timeline above the original 60i.
5. While comparing the 30p to the 60i (by muting/unmuting the 30p track) add a Sony Sharpen filter to the 30p footage and adjust to taste. I've typically started with a setting of 0.5.
6. Export the sharpened 30p footage to the format of your choice.

For an example of such treatment, check out a short film I shot on a JVC GY-DV500 and deinterlaced to 30p in Vegas, here:

http://michael-morlan.net/pages/production/prod_try.htm

I'm happy to post some full-rez stills if there is interest.

Michael

This is a new one. . .anyone else tried this? I always heard 30p was the WORST thing to try to convert to 24p, and that 60i (29.97 fps, interlaced) was better.

Why exactly do you want to go 24p? Is it for "dramatic effect?" You don't gain any spatial resolution and you lose more than half of the temporal resolution. It sounds like you have some high motion scenes in your video, going from 60 individual images per second to 24 images per second sure isn't going to make the motion look smoother!

John

There was a slight typo in my original post. "30i" should read "30p". I've corrected it now.

Josh, re-read my post. I'm writing of going from 60i to 30p, not 30p to 24p. As you note, that way lies madness. :)

As John Cline notes, why go to 24p from 60i? Just because it's the buzzword of the day? 30p provides the same aesthetic but with a bit more temporal resolution.

Michael

Well, I have 30p (30 psedo p) with my XL1s, but I can still tell the difference between that 24p, and I just want to see if anyone's had good luck with using Vegas to do the 60i to 24p. Just to see. I don't really want to get into the 24p v 30p debate.

One thing to do before a re-install is to delete the appropriate folder under Program files/Sonic Foundry Setup (or probably Sony something setup on newer versions). Otherwise, the re-install might just renew the faults from the previous installation.

i have two shots, which were taken on two different occasions at the same location. one shot is slightly under exposed, the other is significantly over exposed. in editing i need to cut from one to the other and somehow maintain continuity.

i worked mostly on the under exposed shot and tried to match it with the over exposed one. using color curves and color correction plug-ins, i managed to come close enough. but in order to achieve this, i had to cranck the RGB color curves way up so that the handle went clear off the chart and adjusted the Blue color curves as well.
i rendered the sequence to see how it looks. as far as continuity, it looks great. you couldn't tell they weren't shot one right after the other. but the quality of the dark shot i had to brighten up looked really bad. it was blurry, there were pixels noticably moving around and bright blue lining along certain conteurs in the picture. definately not something i want in the movie.

is there some better way to match the two shots without deforming the image quality that much? any tips? reshooting the shot is not an option, unfortunately.

thanks!

thanks. i'll reinstall today.

adi

That's a very tough one. There is very limited information in an
8-bit compressed file and you have run into the limits. If the
second shot is overly bright (in general) you could lower the
brightness a bit so you don't have the crank the first one as
much. Other then that I'm not sure what options you would have.

Hey Michael, went to your site, looks great. BTW, I too lived in Yalova Turkey (and Karamursel too) as a young boy (11 to 13). Those two years had a profound impact on my outlook on life.

Albert,
In case you didn't see it in the other forum where you asked this:

Select the track you wish to shift.
press the hypen [-] key to shift the pitch down by semitones, and press the equal key [=] to shift audio up by semitones. You'll find you have 2 octaves up and 2 octaves down
Hold down the CTRL key for shifting in cents vs semitones.

Michael, even if the cam was the XL2, it's not going to look just like the DVX. 24p is the cadence, and that's easy to achieve in Vegas. Achieving the 'look' is entirely different. I guess that's why some folks like Sony cams, some like Pannies, some like Philips, some like Ikegami, JVC, Canon, etc.
For straight DV, I love the Sony PD 170, it's got great DOF options, but for 24P, I like the new Canon XL2. Course', I've only had a few hours with one so far.

Doug, can you tell me more about achieving that in Vegas.
Your words are priceless, meaning, what if I spent $20k
on stuff and could have achieved the same in my NLE??

You're probably better off trying to make the XL1 footage look better, as opposed to making it look like the DVX100 (that look may actually be worse for your project). Look at your (artistic) goals and see how you can light and color correct your footage to make things better for your project.

Making video look better:

Lighting: Get a good DOP and give him/her the lights he/she needs. This will make a *huge* difference.

Keep in mind you cannot change lighting in post. Spending money on the right lights can be money well spent.

In post: (I asumme you are using Vegas)

Saturation:
Use the HSL filter and boost saturation that way. You might like the looks you get below better.

Use the saturation adjust filter in Vegas to boost saturation. You might like the look when you make the filter look like a hump with the main portion close to the left side.

Another approach is to use the secondary color corrector. Adjust saturation up in the top controls. In the bottom controls, select the limit luminance box.
Set the minimum something low- maybe from 0 to 8.
Set the maximum to 255.
Set smoothness very high.
This boosts saturation in the dark areas and leaves highlights alone.

You can also do the opposite so that highlights have no or little color in them.

There are many great ideas at http://www.freewebs.com/vegas4/vegas4.htm. I highly recommend you check it out.

"Power windows":
Use the masking tools in Vegas 5 to apply color correction to specific portions of an image. You might want to make faces brighter and not mess with the colors too much so that you get natural flesh tones.

Something else you can do is to add drama to skies. Isolate the sky with a mask and/or the secondary CC. Use curves or a second CC filter so that the sky is a blend of three or more tones. Take a look at the globe at
http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/Welcome
Notice how there are a few different tones in the image:
the hue and saturation changes as it goes from light --> dark.

You can also add a gradient to your skies to get similar results.

Wow, thanks for the info Glenn!

what kind of probs are you having???

my veg5 quit rendering mpegs a little while ago...i posted on it a few weeks back...i tried repair/uninstall but still nogo...so im stuck with letting DVDarch2 do all the work.

when i was rendering my mpeg2s it would start and just stick (on single pass) sometimes only getting a few seconds into the render...other times it would go further but eventially stick

when i did the two pass, it always hung at 50% (when it started the second pass)

im curious to see if your issues are somehow related to mine and maybe I can get mine working...

short of a full uninstall/reinstall im at a loss for now...so DVDarch2 is my fallback.

This makes me nuts: When I burn a CD or VCD, obviously, I have to make an MPG1 file. When I do, the resolution takes a big hit. Okay, I can live with that. But if there's even a moderate pan or any fast moving action, I get stuttering and pixelation.

But I don't when I make a WMV9 file. I get the resolution hit, but things stay nice and even.

One would think the obvious solution is to just make WMV9 files. But unlike MPG1 files, they can't be played on lots of different players.

Any suggestions?

<<<-- Originally posted by Charles Newcomb : This makes me nuts: When I burn a CD or VCD, obviously, I have to make an MPG1 file. When I do, the resolution takes a big hit. Okay, I can live with that. But if there's even a moderate pan or any fast moving action, I get stuttering and pixelation.

But I don't when I make a WMV9 file. I get the resolution hit, but things stay nice and even.

One would think the obvious solution is to just make WMV9 files. But unlike MPG1 files, they can't be played on lots of different players.

Any suggestions? -->>>

Why not try Render as > MPEG2 > SVCD.
Most newer DVD stand-alones will play them and the quality is HEAPS better (very close to DVD) on a standard 80min CD.

It all boils down to three things (in regards to VCD/MPEG1):

1. low resolution (it is HALF of DV/DVD!!)
2. bandwidth (rate you encoded at)
3. quality of your encoder

The first you have to live with. The last two you can change
up to a certain amount. But in the end VCD will look worser,
especially compared to DV or a high quality DVD.

Which encoder are you using with what settings?