The Credit Roll is one of the articles in the next issue of the newsletter. It's now nearing completion. There's multiple ways of getting information into the credit roll and I tell about what I consider the easiest method. In your case, the easiest was definitely to select the line (the header of the line, not the text itself) where you wanted the new line to be and press Insert. However, you could also have copied a line a pasted it there as well.

OK - running network rendering on a single machine solved that problem!

I rendered 5 jobs last night without a problem. I was doing a final edit "fix up" pass on a play I was hired to tape. Edited each reel, saved the changes, queued them up to the network render (after I figured out how to start it - not hard). And watched it start the first one.

Went to bed, came back this morning with a cup of coffee and the world is a beautiful place.

Hi there,

Just started with Vegas a few days ago....

Will post some questions in the near future :) so please be patient ;)

Also want to say that first of all I searched the web (thus founded this forum) and then searched the forums....
And think that this question was not covered.... If it was accept my appologyes maybe didn´t selected the right search keywords...


Now my question...
I would like to make the "Clone" effect (me against me)
But somewhere I can´t get it to work..

For testing I :
1. I shooted my Living room without any characters
2. I shooted myself at the right of the living room (no blue screen)
3. I shooted myself at the left of the living room (no blue screen)


Can you guys point me the steps of such effect ?

Cheers!
Jose Luis

Sounds great. Glad it all worked.

All,
VASST just released their new tool called Ultimate S that has an incredible array of mega-time saver customizeable scripts in one template-saveable application. You set up the parameters and hit one button and the tool does all the work. WOW! Get a free 14 day trial download here: http://www.vasst.com/ultimate.htm. This is a must have for any Vegas editor!
Randy

Hmm. I am not sure about the solution to the problem, and I don't mean any disrespect here, it's just my personal preference, I think that your before shots look more natural. I think perhaps the after shots have been overdone a little.

Hehe, but then I might just have a badly adjusted monitor.

Which THX test did you do? Hopefully not the one that comes on DVDs, as that one is setup for the film DVD on which it comes rather than being a definitive test setup (I'm not assuming that you have, but just in case I thought I'd mention it).

Pipe dream? Hmm, depends. By the time HD becomes the must have format and all HD prices are down to the prices all SD equipment in their various categories are at the moment, the FX1 will have been superceded. But your footage will be slightly well future proofed.

With a straight deinterlace you will be getting effectively 540 lines, not 720, less than the res of a SD 24p camera..

I think the FX1 would be better thought of as a tool in it's own right rather than the saviour of the low budget filmmaker. It's a forerunner. Not the solution. Perhaps you should exploit it for what it can do rather than what it can't.

Although I use progressive all the time and love the look, I do actually lkike the smoothness that interlacing brings sometimes.

Problem with HD on a prosumer camera is the lenses. I would bet that half of the FX1's potential is being eliminated by consumer/prosumer grade glass.

Does anyone know of a website where they might have generic clips for free download, such as a countdown or a screen of video noise (snow)?

If you want to generate your own test tones, consider the following:

http://www.soft411.com/company/Timo-Esser/Test-Tone-Generator.htm
http://www.nch.com.au/tonegen/
http://www.download.com/SigJenny/3000-2169_4-10309432.html?tag=lst-0-3

Try this?

http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php

I was lucky enough to have this shown to me by DSE himself -- and it looks great! I think I'm gonna jump ship and switch to Vegas!

Are you serious Chris?! What NLE are you on now?

I have an aging Canopus DV Rex RT.

It's either going to be Edius or Vegas for me.

Chris,
You won't be sorry. Vegas rocks! Ultimate S is fabulous and I'm thinking there will be many more great products following suit. The future looks bright for sure.
Randy

I believe that the movie film THX test is the same test regardless of the movie DVD. I have tried the test along with the special color test with blue glasses on several of the DVDs that I own and the settings did not change from one movie to the other in my experience.

The color is not as severe of a change on the TV as it is on computer monitors. I adjusted while watching it on my TV screen and not on the monitor.

The brightness setting has got me confused as it is whole lot more than the factory default settings of a TV or computer monitor. This makes these pictures a whole lot more darker than what I had made them. After talking to a person in the know on commercial DVD's tonight, I have decided to start from scratch and redo the brightness so that it looks best at the midway point on TV screen and monitor. For me this would be 31 or 32 for brightness on my TV screen that adjusts from 0-63 and 50 on the monitor screen that adjusts from 0-100.

I had hoped that Douglas Spotted Eagle would have responded here as he made no mention on his training DVD's (vegas 4 and 5) on the brightness settings to use in vegas on his training DVDs. He did mention on using the color bars to adjust the color but have no idea how to use this for adjusting the brightness. Is there not a standard broadcast standard for brightness? Is this the factory default setting on TV's, which would be the half way point on the TV settings? Is the midway brightness settings on TV's the same for all of them? I am basically looking to make the brightness of the video footage at a point where anyone can stick the DVD in their player and not have to adjust their settings for viewing the footage.

It was not my decision to change the colors but the people that I am working the footage for wanted the footage to have warmer skin tones than what the original footage showed. My preference to this is not a concern as I am basically giving the people who are paying for the footage what they want. It is my opinion that cooler skin tones always look better than warmer skin tones as I have a preference to the blue side over the red.

Chris, it was indeed a pleasure having you be the first non-beta tester to see Ultimate S. It was an even larger pleasure to watch about 15 mins of your mustang video before hitting bed this morning. You and Kelli did an amazing job!
You know that if you go the Vegas route you'll be stuck with this motley crew of users, dontcha? :-)
We'd love to have you on board.
Thanks for the extremely good time at dinner last night. The Sony and Canon guys got along, and I think everyone had a great time.

1. Lock down cam/tripod, mark imaginary line to never cross.
2. Shoot left "you"
3. Shoot right "you"
4. put both on separate tracks in Vegas, use Bezier masking to divide the picture to reveal both sides of room. If you have tripod locked down, all furniture, lighting, objects will perfectly match.

Marcia,
There are several 1K tones at various levels on the VASST site, couple those with one of the half dozen custom countdowns...
you'll be good to go.

. . . Chris, see yah over on the veggie Forum! . . . Make the leap . . we are waiting . . promise!

Graham Bernard

Prior to my purchase of a DVX100, I spent a inordinate amount of time trying to find a way to make the JVC HD cams work for me. I could not.

However, I had an opportunity to view the work of some talented ad agency personnel who produced a faux commercial with the HD10u and worked through some of the limitations, and the result to my eyes was stunning.

My interest lies in finding ways to create full length features on a zero budget, using digital as a low cost alternative to film. There are always going to be losses from the codec, the minidv format, the lenses, etc., but the potential....

I am just looking to confirm that the approach I described is workable.

Brian

<<<-- Originally posted by Chris Hurd : I was lucky enough to have this shown to me by DSE himself -- and it looks great! I think I'm gonna jump ship and switch to Vegas! -->>>

C'mon Chris- join the brotherhood....

I realize that a VHS output, when compared to DVD, is going to look disappointing in comparison, but some festivals won't take DVD screeners. That said, does anybody want to offer any sugestions for a step by step to insure a Vegas to VHS layoff that will give me the best picture possible?

What I'm currently doing (that looks like crap, IMO):

Vegas/PC (Print to tape from timeline) to Dazzle bridge (via firewire) to VHS recorder (via... ughh... composite or S-Video)

But I'm wondering if it's possible to rig up my external Pioneer DVD recorder to record from DVD into the VHS player, bypassing the stupid Dazzle converter which seems to make for such a poor layoff. Not sure I can or even if it will make any difference, though.

Or should I punt and just take a DVD to a pro facility? Would they have the tools to make it look better, or is any VHS layoff just gonna look this bad?

It's just so sad to see it look like this. Even after compressing the mpeg (4.2) to fit the project onto a DVD (wish I didn't have to... but DVDA was reading 5.6 gigs) the 24pA footage looks so much better than I expected... and now so horrid now on VHS.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Marcia

C'mon Chris... Everyone's doing it, you should too... ;)

Also, I just got the email yesterday about Ultimate S, and I'd like to be the first to go on record and say... VASST Rocks!

Have you tried a different convertor? Or maybe your camera?

Marcia,
You don't say what Piioneer you have, but most would have the ability to output composite and s-video. If you have a VCR that can take and s-video input, use it; if not feeding your VCR from the composite video oputput should still give a pretty good output.

I have used my Pioneer Elite 7000 to make VHS dubs and they are pretty good. It also hads the ability to make some adjustments to the video output.

You may want to look into getting an S-VHS VCR. Yes, I know, you only want to record VHS, but my experience has been that S-VHS VCRs record far, far better VHS tapes than regular VHS VCRs do. A large part of this, however, is that S-VHS decks almost always have an S-Video input, whereas VHS decks almost always don't. The better signal coming in in the first place means you get a better signal to noise ratio, even though you're still recording on the same (cruddy) VHS medium.

Also, if you're using a standard consumer level VHS VCR, you definitely will get a better picture quality from a different deck. Almost all of the consumer decks have gone to smaller recording heads. This is because of differences in how a tape is recorded at SP vs. SLP speeds. At SP speeds, a larger portion of the tape is used for each "frame" of the signal. So, for instance, your tape would have something like this:

|-----|-----|-----|-----|

(where each "|" is a division between "frames")

On an SLP recording, however, the same information is recorded using a much smaller percentage of the tape, so that more "frames" can be recorded, and hence the tape can record a longer program. So the same space on the tape may look like this:

|----|----|----|----|----|

Notice that the same amount of tape (20 -'s) now records five "frames" instead of four.

In the old days, the recording heads on VCRs were sized to match the SP tapes, for best quality. But when you record on SLP tapes, which most consumers do (they want to make their tapes last), the heads are bigger than the area of the tape they record to, so they bleed over onto adjacent "frames", distorting the signal. So modern consumer VCRs have heads sized to fit the smaller "frames" of SLP recordings. This prevents the bleedover, and results in higher quality SLP recordings. But now the heads are too small to do a full SP recording, so SP quality suffers. For most consumers, it doesn't matter - they use the SLP settings anyway. But if you're trying to master a professional tape at SP settings, it matters big time.

Oh yeah, and through all of this I've assumed that you're using SP settings on your VCR. If you're not, that should be the first thing you check. It will give you vastly superior results, even on a consumer VCR.

Most SVHS decks, on the other hand (even consumer level ones) use the larger heads, because anybody buying SVHS over VHS wants the quality. Frankly, only quality freaks like me buy SVHS (in the consumer arena) anyway.

Still, you can actually find a VHS deck that has both S-Video input and larger recording heads. I don't know if that will actually be cheaper than an SVHS deck or not, but you can look into it. Those two things will help you tremendously.

* Note: I'm fully aware that my use of the term "frame" is simplistic and, as it stands, technically wrong. It's just a simpler way to explain the concept without turning this post into a doctoral dissertation - it's long enough already.

"Yeah, c'mon Chris....make you feel GOOD...Good...good" *insert echo sound effect*

Hmm, I'm not so sure about that THX test. I can't remember the link off hand, but I do remember that there was an article elsewhere on the web describing the limitations of that test. It would be better to set up your TV using the colour bars from your NLE or camera. That could be one reason you are getting a less than satisfactory result?

Colour adjustment is one hell of a pain in the backside, and a lot of people do watch on very badly adjusted screens. You will never satisfy all of the people all of the time.

Though I understand what you are saying about brightness. http://www.wideopenwest.com/~wvg/color%20bar.htm

If you are using Vegas it has all sorts of colour/test bar generators.

Dumb question... what is a 1kHz sound used for?

Gang, we're moving the VASST/Sundance sharing site to a new location with a bigger and better server, and the site will be down most of the night/morning. Just wanted to inform you so that you'll know what's going on.

Remember the VASST contest that's happening, there aren't too many entries yet, but the clock is ticking down...

Not dumb at all. I need it for a (hoped for) hand off of my project to a sound house/sound guy. Specs vary widely in terms of length and order, but as a general rule they ask for black, (color) bars and tone (the "tone" part being what I was searching for) and a countdown of some sort (often 1 sec that reads "Picture start" followed by 1 sec each of numbers 8 to 2, with a pop/beep at the two, to verify/sync up picture. After the 2 pop there's usually another 1 sec of black, after which FFOP (first frame of picture) comes up at TC 01:00:08:00. I've also made the highest track on the timeline a timecode track, "burned in" for ease of onscreen verification. And I'll give them an EDL that went from Vegas to EDL Convert Pro, which can turn it into an OMF or ProTools EDL. Of course, as Spot mentioned, if I could find a good local Sound Forge guy that I could just give a veg file to, none of this would be necessary. But the only people I know though use ProTools.

It may all be a moot point anyway as I'm totally out of money, but I want to have it ready to go at a moments notice if I can find a way to swing this. In all honesty, my audio on this doc is better than a lot of docs already released that I've watched of late, but I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. And the audio on mine makes me crazy. (One clip filmed at a med cntr we dubbed the "Starship Enterprise room"... it really sounds like you're onboard, I swear.) There were just two of us, with very little experience. We did the best we could, but I'd like it to sound a whole lot better. It's such an important story. It deserves the best I can give it.

Take care,
Marcia

I'm not much of a Window Savvy and having problem making the FX1 showing up on Video Capture device. Anyone knows what I might be doing wrong?

Hello, I have a copy of Premiere 6.0 and currently looking for After Effects 5.5 to go along with Premiere.

But I was wondering if I should take the Sony Vegas+DVD 2 (student discount) route and learn that software from scratch....

or

continue using Adobe Premiere 6.0 and purchase a copy of After Effects 5.5.



My main concern is, will Vegas 5 do everything Premiere+AE can do? Or must I purchase a third-party plug-in with Vegas 5 to be equivalent (in terms of motion graphics and visual effects) with Premiere+AE?

Kevin,
I don't know Permiere but I've heard Spot and others, who know this and other applications, say several times that Vegas 5 and DVDA2 is their choice over all other editors. I've seen Spot demonstrate Vegas 5 to other NLE users and I saw jaws drop and heard audible gasps along with "did you see that" verbal outbursts. Give it a try. You won't be disapointed.
Randy

Spot, where is this contest? It was asked in another thread as well:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25358

Can't seem to find it either...

It seems I was wrong in the other thread and Vegas (capture
at least) does not yet support this camera. Which is a bummer.
It sounds like they are working on an update and/or
Vegas5 + CineForm which should be out soon though (from
what I read at their forum).

Vegas will not do everything that Premiere + AE can do. However, it CAN do a large portion of it. Vegas has some great compositing abilities but still not quite as many as AE. There ARE some addons which do raise the abilities up to the same level (i.e. Boris Red for example) and AE can also be used in conjunction with Vegas.

So, I guess the big question would be: what AE abilities do you need? Vegas may do what you need on it's own.

Rob, look here: http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/help/kb/kb_projects.asp

ConnectHD already supports Vegas wiith a capture card. The Sony/Vegas team has thrown their support behind BlackMagic Design however.

i was just reading this month's Sound & Visiong magazine when i noticed the advertisement on p.113. GOOD JOB SONY!!!

and now the rest of the world will gain more respect for vegas. the ad also states that the packages are being sold @best buy , compusa, circuit city.

The product being sold at those outlets is the "Movie Studio" version - not the full version of those products.

but still, @least there is ads on these things! i mean for the longest time vegas was the most under-represented product on the market... now that is about to change.

FYI: Your login process seems to be non functional, i tried a few times yesterday, and today...

I too would like to know of this contest

I wouldn't count on it changing by much. I was reading up on Sony's high-end hidef editing system ... the Xpri I believe it is called. Very impressive system, designed to go head to head with the high end Avid systems. (And costing big bucks.) My guess is that Sony will find itself in the same conundrum as Avid. Why migrate high end aspects of their software down to the low end... when you can sell it at a higher price/profit margin in the high end?

Watch and wait.

Edward has a free vegas 5 plugin or script (I think) for converting to 24 frames in vegas (I believe it also creates a filmic look). Does anyone know what it is called and where I can find it?

Thanks

It's listed in the "Free Scripts" section at the link under my name.

Thanks Edward, I will look it up.

Rob,
I would imagine from what we heard from Sony Pictures about Vegas being "already works", then guessing it IS working, but actually not.
Mark is trying to edit with the files I posted with Vegas 5 and he is saying no problem at least to edit.

ConnectHD is distributed in Japan by a company I know, so I will ask them to provide it for testing.

And Bill, which card is working? Like Bubble fish? We sell a lot of Decklink HD so, if Decklink HD works it would have been super.

http://cineform.com/products/ConnectHD.htm

Hello!

I just finished a project and would like to import it onto my Sony TRV-10. But I have been having trouble getting it to be 24fps, or even, widescreen. I would really appreciate any advice on getting either, or both, effect to work.

Thanks so much!

edit: I'm using Vegas 5.0b