I use Vegas all the time to read in CD tracks. Haven't seen a problem with it. Not sure what could be causing your problem. Can you do it with something like FreeRip?

Hi Ed...I'm just learning this program..What's freerip?

How do you overlay text on the video as opposed to text against a solid background?

I've figured out pan and zoom but I want to transition from a overview map to a blow up map. When I transition I want to have a flashing square in the part of the map that I will zoom to (which will use a different more zoomed detailed image file.) What's the best way to flash the square?

Last I would like to draw an animated line that will follow my pan on the map.

Hope this is understandable...

-Jonathan

Add a generated text event on a track above the video. By default the background will be transparent and the text solid white. The video shows through all but the text.

If you add a square instead of text (A dot in the default font Arial is a square, just set the point size bigger) you can outline it by making both it and the background transparent. Then you select Outline and set the thickness where you like it. Choose a colour for the outline - white will probably be good in this case. Even if you set the thickness to zero, there will be a very thin outline on your video.

You can blink it with keyframes or by copying very short instances of the event at intervals down the timeline.

The animated line drawn on a map (which is overkill in my opinion - I'd rather have just a moving dot or figure) can be done with Bezier curves in Vegas 5 I think, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet so I'm not sure.

Which burner are you using? Sounds like your burner is not fully
compatible with DVDA (try clearing it in something like Nero) or
the media is not fully compatible with your burner.

Do a search on google. It's a program that will rip songs from CDs.

No no. It seems that it is Windows itself. For some reason when I eject a disc and put a new one in, or I eject a disc, use it in another computer and then bring it back to my editing machine, Windows doesn't seem to learn that a new disc has been put in.

It's really strange. It seems that because the disc I put in before the DVD was a normal CD, Windows was refusing to accept that a new (DVD) disc had been inserted no matter how many times I told it to refresh, or ejected and reinserted the disc. I keep having this problem and it's really becoming a pain in the backside!

Thanks Edward...

The text must be placed on a track ABOVE the video track. If you make sure you use one of the presets with a checkboard background, the background will be transparent and the video on track 2 will show through behind the text on track 1.

There are multiple ways to create a flashing dot. Tors method will work fine. Another method would be to add a solid color (whatever color you want the dot) on a track above the map, use the cookie cutter to limit the size and position of the dot, and then you could alter the transparency of the dot to make it flash OR change the size of the cookie cutter so that it grows and shrinks.

Getting the line to slowly appear will, somewhat, depend on the path of the line. If it's fairly straight left to right, for instance, you might be able to simply use a transition to get it to appear. If it doesn't, then you may need to use the Bezier tools as suggested by Tors or some other means of masking.

What operating system? Perhaps time for a reinstall?

Hello,

This is maybe the most ridiclulous post I have ever made.. But somehow in Vegas 5 I have lost my video preview window and have not been able to get it back !! I understand docking of windows and have done so many time, but for some reason I cannot get this sucker back..I have even gone into the view pulldown and turned video preview on and off..but no go..
I have even gone in the view menu, and turned everthing off, and then turned on the video preview, but nothing..
Any help anyone..?? This is a problem that i would think SHOULD NOT happen..

Mike M.

I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy), it goes after maximum quality when ripping.

Hi Rob...Where can I get EAC?...It's a software or a machine?

I doubt it. It's a fairly newly built system. Windows XP SP1. It's got no internet access, as it's purely for editing. So the only software I have on it is what I need for editing and nothing else. It's about 3 months old.

The DVD burner is a Philips DVD+RW 824.

Apart from that the system runs as smooth as a babies bottom.

Quick answer: hold down CTRL-SHIFT and open Vegas. This will reset EVERYTHING back to default (including any preferences you have changed) but will get the preview window back to where it belongs.

Longer answer: Odds are that you have moved it OFF the screen somewhere. Here's how you can find it:
1) Change your screen to a higher resolution.
2) Look in the areas outside your normal screen size
3) Find the preview screen and move it back into the normal screen size
4) Change your screen back to your standard resolution

Thanks Edward, you saved me a lot of hassle..I believe i must have moved the Video Preview window off the scrren like you said..

Thanks again !!

Mike M.

Hi again. Who knows what mean " An error occurred while opening one or more files.?
{error 0x800a0026. message missing). This is the only thing what I get each time I tried to extract audio from CD..Any explanation will be very welcome....

I found the solution.With freerip, I fix it...Thanks Edward.....
Thanks Rob too....

Hey Guys/Gals,
I am shooting my first commercial to be aired as a 30 sec. spot on Comcast cable. The commercial is an ad for a stage play that will be presented at a local theatre. I have captured the footage and I am editing it on Vegas 5. I have quite a few questions:

1. Do most station require a color bar with tone followed by 10 sec. lead? Or does it vary from station to station?

2. Currently I have my main audio to peak at -6 db using a soft limiter? Is this a good setting for tv?

3. I have my background music peaking around -10 db, is this good? Is there a general rule for the ratio of main to background music?

4. The director of the play like the film-look. Should I apply the Magic Bullet film-look to the master track? At what setting (if any) is standard?

5. Also, I want to make sure all my colors are legal. I plan to use the broadcast clamp on the master track. Should I this be the first in the chain of Track Fx followed by the film fx?

6. To go with the theme of this production, I used a white text with a red outline on top pf a black background. (Text appear in blakc bands created at top and bottom of screen). Will I have problems with this since red can be a tricky color? Should I apply a broadcast clamp to these tracks?

7. How risky is it to have a portion of the text between the safe area lines (overlay)?

8. What is the font size (using ARIAL) that can be easily viewed by most tv's?

I guess that's enough for now. Definitely more to come.

Thanks of all your help.

Sincerely,

Albert Rodgers

I am working on a project I filmed in 24pa using squeeze mode on the dvx100a (F6). When I preview on an external 4x3 television through firewire, I want to see the material in 16x9 aspect ratio with the black bars on the top and bottom. I have set the project properties to NTSC DV Widescreen and tried the different options in the event pan/crop menu with no luck. Also, my video device is set to NTSC DV Widescreen in the video preferences page. I have tried on two different 4x3 TVs with no luck, so I ruled out a TV problem. Is there a setting in Vegas 5 or on the DVX100a I'm missing? Any suggestions on achieving the 16x9 preview?

Thanks in advance.

I got it working. Here is what Dan at DVXuser.com helped me with:

Lie to it while looking.

Set the project type to regular 4:3 instead of widescreen, and it will be letterboxed on the TV.

I'd suggest just doing this while color-correcting and such, then resetting it to what it should be immediately afterward so you don't forget.

Dan

(At least this works on my setup. Running the preview out via firewire to a cam, then S-Video from the cam out to the TV.)

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Jefferson : u could always try Maestro if u have a spare 30 grand .. :)

what im tryin to do is set up a clip action after a button is pressed and before the chapter begins..

still having issues with that after al this time.. lol -->>>

I'm sorta with you on this one. DVDA2 is very challenging when trying to create some of the more advance menus. I've always wanted an animation or a small video clip right before the menu where the animation or video clip becomes the menu. This works if your animation already has the buttons but there is no way to fade out the buttons and fade them in at some point of the menu animation or video clip.

The only alternative is just to use a separate video as the beginning sequence and for it to start before it goes into the menu then fade to black and then the menu comes up.

Forgive me if this has been covered before. I did run a few searches, but couldn't turn up anything that solved my problem.

I'm new to Vegas. I have experince using Premiere, but that was years ago (back in the 1998/99/2000 timeframe), and when I put together my video equiment recently I decided to give Vegas a try since it was cheaper and the demo seemed to do everything I needed just fine. However, now I'm having a bit of an issue.

I just got a used Canon XL1 on Wednesday. The camera is fantastic and is working great. However, the original XL1 does not (unfortunately) have true SMTPE color bars. So to have something to calibrate the viewfinder and/or external monitors to, I decided to feed over color bars from Vegas and record a few minutes worth to the beginning of a tape.

So I created a Vegas project that used the Vegas "Generated->Test Patterns->SMTPE Color Bars (NTSC)" plugin to create a color bar clip. No problem. Looks great in the preview pane, so I render it out to an AVI using the DV codec.

It looks HORRIBLE. The breaks between the color bars are smeared badly, especially the vertical lines. I run this out to my tape but its barely useable. The compression artifacts are horrendous. And worst of all, the gray bar in the lower left that's supposed to be barely visible (12.5 IRE if I remember correctly) isn't visible at all, and it's not because the camera's incorrectly calibrated. It's just that the compression is that bad.

So I try again, setting the quality level to 100%, setting the keyframe to every 1 frames, etc. I can't tell a difference. It still looks just as bad.

Up until this point (last night), I'm using the demo version of Vegas. So I wonder if it's just an issue with the demo version and wait. Today, my full copy of Vegas came in the mail from B&H, so I eagerly installed it and tried it out. No dice. It's still giving me the same cruddy result.

Now, I hit upon a few workarounds. For one, I can "preview it on an external monitor", ie, run it through my camera and record it to tape from the preview. Works flawlessly. My XL1's hardware compresses it beautifully. There are still a few compression artifacts, but they're only there if you're really looking for them.

Option two is to render to an uncompressed AVI file and then print that AVI out to the camera. Same result - it looks awesome.

These work great for my current problem (getting color bars on the tape). The problem is, in the long term neither of these is a viable solution to me. I can't just render everything from my preview window. I need to be able to archive off files onto DVD-ROMs, transfer them to other machines, move them all around, etc. And when I get into complex effects that can't render in realtime anymore, this just won't work.

But I can't use uncompressed AVIs, either, because I just don't have the disk space for it, and can't possibly afford them. And they're too big to trade back and forth, to back up easily, etc.

I can't help but think I'm doing something entirely wrong here. Vegas's DV codec can't possibly be this bad or there wouldn't be this many users. And I like Vegas just fine. I'm not used to it yet, the way I was with Premiere once upon a time, but it does everything I need - except for this compression issue.

Somebody please help and tell me what I've screwed up, because if I can't make this work then Vegas is completely useless to me, and that's $500 completely down the tubes. Over the long term, I absolutely need an editor with an acceptable DV codec compressor. I'll be adding too many effects, titles, and rendered 3D graphics to my video projects to not have this. Right now, I don't even need speed - I just need it to work.

Please help!

Thanks guys, highly appreciated.

Barend

To what format are you really rendering? What settings did you change in preferences? Sounds like you are NOT rendering to DV-AVI is you're changing the "quality level" and "keyframe" settings.

First of all, just to make sure, hold down CTRL-SHIFT while starting Vegas. This will reset all settings back to defailt.

Now, add the color bars to the timeline. At this point all you need to do is Tools - Print Video to DV Tape. This will give you the exact same pristene color bars you are seeing in preview.

Vegas' DV Codec is widely considered one of the BEST DV codecs around and is TREMENDOUSLY better than Microsofts (which is what Premiere used until just recently)

Is there a way to split the screen into four, with a different clip playing in each? I was going to try using the pan/crop tool in four different video tracks, would that work? Is there an easier way to accomplish this?

Use track motion.

Can you elaborate as to how I would go about doing this?

I agree that Track Motion is the easiest way. You need FOUR tracks, one for each video. Then you use track motion on each track to position the clips in the proper size and position.

Now if you want one button and you're done, take a look at Tsunami (link under my name). Specifically, take a look at the Video Wall tool.

thanks edward- looks like i'll be purchasing tsunami

Now, add the color bars to the timeline. At this point all you need to do is Tools - Print Video to DV Tape. This will give you the exact same pristene color bars you are seeing in preview.

This is basically what I finally did, as I stated in my initial post:


Now, I hit upon a few workarounds. For one, I can "preview it on an external monitor", ie, run it through my camera and record it to tape from the preview. Works flawlessly. My XL1's hardware compresses it beautifully. There are still a few compression artifacts, but they're only there if you're really looking for them.

However, in the long term, this is entirely untenable. I can't use this for any project that requires heavy rendering of effects, because I don't have nearly a fast enough CPU for it (and upgrading my computer isn't an option at this point in time).

What format am I really rendering? I rendered to AVI and selected the DV codec. I've also rendered to various other formats (WMV, MPEG 2) and had results that looked fine. Maybe this means that I'm actually using the Microsoft codec, which is the one you lambast so much (and I've heard others say much the same about). I don't know.

As I said in my previous post, I haven't done any serious kind of video editing in almost five years. The DV codec basically didn't exist then - at least, it wasn't common. Everything I did at that job was M-JPEG based using an outdated (even then) Intergraph VE-100 workstation.

I am most definitely NOT trying to start up a flame war regarding Vegas vs. Premiere here. I'm quite certain that there's a way to do exactly what I want do do, which is to render this to a video file that's already compressed with a DV format codec so that I can transfer videos around in raw digital form. I'm equally certain that it's my own newness to the software that's preventing me from doing this correctly, which is why I'm asking for help. I desperately want Vegas to have one of the best codecs around, because as of right now it's the one I'm stuck with regardless. I simply don't have $600 to shell out on another video editing package.

I will go get my exact settings off my other computer and post them momentarily (yes, I know - I should have done that in the original post). I will also try and post a couple of frame grabs this afternoon to demonstrate how bad the problem is.

At this point I would recommend this:

1) Hold down the CTRL & Shift keys and start Vegas. This will reset all setting back to factory default. Yes, you will probably want to change some back but this will get you back to standard. Make sure you do NOT change: "Ignore 3rd party codecs" and "Use Microsoft DV codec".

2) Add the color bar to the timeline

3) Go to File - Render As, pick AVI as the format and NTSC-DV as the type.

That should give you a good render.

I have tried this, and ended up with pretty much the same results. However, I have done some further testing and expanded my knowledge a little bit.

First of all, I was mistaken with the quality I was getting off of my camcorder. It appeared to do better in the viewfinder, but after recapturing the video, it seems to be an almost identical compression.

Second, after I used Vegas to render a 3D logo I've been working on into DV-AVI, it looked fine. Very nice on my monitor, the viewfinder, and my television.

My conclusion is that this is a limitation of the DV format itself. I had known that DV (much like MPEG and most all discrete cosine transformation compression schemes) didn't handle high contrast solid edges very well. Also, I'd known that DV's 4:1:1 sampling would have an effect on this. It appears that this is simply far worse than I thought it would be.

However, this isn't the end of the world that I thought it was because my other computer generated footage (which doesn't have lots of high contrast straight lines) compresses just fine.

I have found a solution to my problem. I have created my own set of color bars using Photoshop. My new image uses the same colors and the same patterns as Vegas' SMTPE Bars test, but I've precisely placed them to defeat the shortcomings of the DV compression algorithm. My new color bars compress beautifully and look great, and are now completely useable. In fact, after compression they now look almost but not quite like the Vegas bars look before compression. To elaborate, Vegas adds a very thin (one pixel wide) "blend line" (my own term) between each of the color bars. I took out the blend line, but the DV codec adds it back in for me as a compression artifact, so it ends up looking quite good.

Basically, my logic was to place the borders on precise multiples of four pixels, since DV only samples the color values every four pixels. The Vegas supplied bars were spaced somewhat irregularly, and this resulted in the bad color blending artifacts that I was seeing. By replacing them, the color change now occurs on a pixel that is actually being color sampled, so there is very minimal blending as a result, and the final version looks fantastic on my television set. Very, very slight compression artifacts are still visible, but I haven't seen a codec yet that I couldn't spot the artifacts on, so I'm happy now.

I'd post my "RussBars" for all to use, but since they're based pretty heavily on the SMTPE Bars, I'm not at all sure of the legality of that.

Edward, thanks for your help. I really appreciate you taking your time on it.

i think you need to talk to the local station you will be playinbg the spot....they should have the answers to majority of these questions. other people have asked similar stuff before and the answer is usually talk to the locals and find out what they need/want. it varies quite a bit from station to station.

2. Currently I have my main audio to peak at -6 db using a soft limiter? Is this a good setting for tv?
If your master is on mini-DV, then yes. You will need to set bars and tone appropriately. The station should have guidelines for this but generally the tone should be at -12dB.

3. I have my background music peaking around -10 db, is this good? Is there a general rule for the ratio of main to background music?
You should listen with your ears on accurate monitors/speakers in as good a room as possible when mixing. You can start with numbers as a guideline, but you need to use your ears as meters do not approximate human hearing too well.

Also make sure the music isn't over 12dB on average as you will get a little distortion.

4. The director of the play like the film-look. Should I apply the Magic Bullet film-look to the master track? At what setting (if any) is standard?
DSE's film look article is a good starting place.
http://www.digitalproducer.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=22424
*It does not guarantee your video will look like Hollywood.

Magic Bullet takes longer to render, but has some advantages. The main ones are black/white diffusion (this takes lots of button pushing to do in Vegas) and a library of preset looks so you can pick and choose a look if you want something stylized.

5. Also, I want to make sure all my colors are legal. I plan to use the broadcast clamp on the master track. Should I this be the first in the chain of Track Fx followed by the film fx?
It should be last. I would use curves instead and look at your histogram (everything should be between 16 and 235). You'll also need to check that colors aren't too saturated.

I am willing to pay for someone to show me how to edit
PAL footage on Vegas (on my laptop).

I live in NYC (CHelsea).

I dont know simple stuff as SETTINGS and how to put to shots together etc...

Voytek

Anyone know how to remove an old 'split' on a clip. It was
accidentally included and done awhile ago.

6. To go with the theme of this production, I used a white text with a red outline on top pf a black background. (Text appear in blakc bands created at top and bottom of screen). Will I have problems with this since red can be a tricky color? Should I apply a broadcast clamp to these tracks?

A lot of reds can be illegal colors depending on which red you pick. You can check the vectorscopes and/or apply the broadcast clamp to your title to see what it looks like when you are using legal colors.

7. How risky is it to have a portion of the text between the safe area lines (overlay)?
Some/most people will not see material at the very edges of a DV frame.

8. What is the font size (using ARIAL) that can be easily viewed by most tv's?

I highly recommend you hook up any TV to your editing system. If you camera/deck supports analog-digital passthrough, set it to convert in the right direction. In Vegas, click on the TV icon. On your TV, set the right input. If you use a S-video connection from camera/deck to TV, also check your footage on the composite connection.

This way you can solve two of your problems and spot other problems before they happen. Play around with text size on your TV to check for flicker, chroma crawl (the moire crap on edges of white text on black backgrounds), and readability. You will also have an idea of what happens to text outside the title safe area.

Glad to hear you found a workable solution!

Well I'm not very close to you but you might want to take a look at my newsletters (link under my name). There are also DVD sets made by Douglas Spotted Eagle and Gary Kleiner that shows how to the basic tasks as well.

I highly recommend you hook up any TV to your editing system. If you camera/deck supports analog-digital passthrough, set it to convert in the right direction. In Vegas, click on the TV icon. On your TV, set the right input. If you use a S-video connection from camera/deck to TV, also check your footage on the composite connection.

Good advice, but I would add one thing to that. In addition to your normal studio monitor set and a general consumer TV, I would find the cruddiest TV set you can get your hands on. This should be pretty easy (and cheap!), but it should help you a good bit. Your commercial is never going to look good on a cruddy TV, and you shouldn't waste time trying for that, but you'll want to at least make sure that you can get your point across on it. You'd be surprised how many really, really bad TV sets are still being watched.

Delete the clip on the right and expand to clip on the left to fill the hole.

Or use the "Unsplit Wizard" in Excalibur.

Just out of curiosity, I've been obsessively zooming in, checking each cut for anything funky, and it dawned on me that I didn't know why, at some cuts, the very small triangles are sometimes dark blue and sometimes light blue. I thought at first that dark blue meant a straight cut, but there are a few light blue ones which are straight cuts as well.

This isn't keeping me up at nights. ;-) I was just wondering.

Marcia

One has a short fade on either side of the cut- the other doesn't.

You might want to install SP2? Perhaps this will fix your problems.
Might also be that some packet writing software is causing
troubles, otherwise I'm out of ideas...

click here for Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/)

I do appreciate your advice thus far.

I set the broadcast clamp on coinservative and the Magic Bullet on the filmy setting. So far so good. The audio sounds great and peaks and has a hard limiter at -6 dB.

I spoke with a Comcast rep. who is not aware of the standard procedure for the leader. All she said was to have 10 sec. of the color bar followed by a count down. Thats all whe knew. She said just use what is industry standard. (of course she didn't know what that is). So.....

Do the following leader sound reasonable:

10 second color bar with -12 dB or is that 1 mhz tone in Vegas

Countdown (is this really necessary)

10 seconds black

***30 sec. commercial****

30 second black.

Reminder- They will be transferring commercial from mini dv to beta.

Thanks again.

Al Rodgers

<<<-- Originally posted by Albert Rodgers :
Countdown (is this really necessary)

10 seconds black

***30 sec. commercial****

-->>>

Wouldn't the 10 seconds black defeat the purpose of having a countdown?

In all honesty, it is really totally up to the station. We have aired commercials on the local ABC station simply by printing to MiniDV, taking our camera there, and playing back from the camer into their equipment. They did not require tone, color bars, or countdowns. However, each station will be different in what they accept.

You might want to check this thread on the Sony Vegas forum...(I asked the same question...)

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=319532

Hope this helps!

Paul.