One additional heads up Michael,
On the V5 disc, there are additional programs including Boris Graffitti LTD. It requires a SN. The SN is on a post card in the box. Don't throw it away....

I am so glad I asked.....

Are we stuck using the program (V5) on just one computer?

Robert,

Kinda wish the Boris LTD card would have slipped out, fallen on the floor and under my massive desk without me noticing. Trying to learn the Boris interface was a non-starter; there's eight hours of my life I'll never get back.

Vegas 5 has the same license as 4 and 3 in this regard. You can install it on multiple machines as long as you do not edit on multiple machines at once. In fact, you can install it on two additional machines to use as network rendering nodes.

I'll answer you in reverse. Yes, I tried a reboot. The common link between the black frames is the frequency. And, the source is a video camera which, as it turns out, is also the culprit. Upon very close inspection - zoomed all the way in on the timeline - and moving slowly, frame by frame, I found the black frames. Now to figure out why my video camera is generating them. It's an MPEG4 camera. Any ideas?

How are you getting the video into the computer?

MPEG is NOT a great editing format.

Any of you experience momentary freezes when scrubbing the time line with the JKL keys or the Contour Pro. Its becoming an annoyance

I am editing a two hour project. I have the Matrox card acceleration turned down, I am DMA, I have defragged the SATA drive, I turn off all system resources etc. In other words I've been doing this for awhile---

Any body experiencing the same??

I'm assembling a short video for a Farewell party and have some footage shot on an inexpensive DV cam in a medium sized live room. The clip volume is low since the built-in mic was all they used to acquire audio.

I've normalized the clip and applied the Distortion AudioFX with some improvement resulting (love that it creates a Take whcih you can then switch back and forth between to see if what you did is better or worse).

I need to know if there is a standard set of Audio FX that I should start with in the FX chain in order to improve this audio. There are so many available, I could play with them all for a month of Sundays before I stumble on a good chain of FX for what must be a common audio situation.

Any specific recommendations will be greatly appreciated.

How can you adjust the black level of a picture in Vegas? I noticed that xl's carry this control but my gl2 does not, and i would like to experiment with this if you have any advice

In another thread someone listed a Sony Walkman in place of a DV tapedeck.

<< One of this sites sponsers, EVS, has a new Sony miniDV walkman for under $1100... Would that work for you?
http://www.evsonline.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=GVD1000 >>

I looked at this and based on the description thought it might fill three purposes:
1. Save wear and tear on camera heads by performing DV-to-computer input via 1394.
2. Provide Vegas Video External Monitor preview which requires 1394 output.
3. Perform simultaneous DV tape record during a live shoot for redundancy.

Item number two is particularly attractive to me, will it work?

i just bought a Canon Optura 20, and Vegas 5, and i have it all hooked up, i can control my camera and everything throgugh my computer via firewire....but when i capture it says it is, but when i stop the capture it says capture complete and then list nothing and no clip is saved! and one time i acutally got it to get something...let it got for about 5 minutes for this test...and got about1-2 seconds, what am i doing wrong, step by step how do you catpure, so frustrated.

The black level can be adjusted from the Color Corrector using the Offset slider.

Keep your eye on the waveform monitor when using this to make sure you don't go below 0 IRE.

Gary

Paul,

With the Sony Video Capture tool active, select its Options menu then Preferences. Select the Advanced Capture tab and increase the pre-roll to at least 5. Then select the Capture tab and ensure that the second item in the box is unchecked (Stop capture on dropped frames).

Does the network rendering performance scale linearly as you add nodes or is there a point of diminishing returns?

I'll carry my own thread since no one is online now to help...

I removed the distortion FX and normilize effect I had previously put in. Then added at the track level (only these talking head narrations were on this audio track):
- Parametric EQ with the default settings
- Reverb with the Warm Ambience setting
- Volume with a 4dB boost
- Then had to selectively add a 2-3 dB boost to individual events where the speaker was quite soft.

That increased the intelligibility of the speaker and took out some of the ring from the live room it was recorded in. Its still missing something though (this is like making spaghetti sauce, its missing something, but I don't know what). May be the best I can get starting with poor input. Guess I should have stayed awake during those Vegas tutorials on the Audio aspects of the tool.

DSE, Ed T, Gary K, Glen, Ken, or others, any ideas?

Have you tried boosting the audio at the 8K point by 6 db or so?

BTW, pet the boll weevil statue for me the next time you are by there.

8k being the standard voice range, right? I guess I should use a band-pass filter centered on 8K. Now I wonder where in the chain it would go, before or after the Reverb and Volume FX. So many options!

Not many folks outside the Wiregrass know we have a monument to a bug. You must have red clay under your boots.

Each machine will be assigned jobs as previous jobs are finished. Once all pieces have been rendered, the one machine must "stitch" all of the pieces together. So, the video is rendered faster but there is a final step that slows it down.

Network rendering can be used in a variety of ways, though. For example, if you had a few projects that needed rendering while you still worked on additional projects, you could assign a couple of them to two separate machines while editing on the third. Or if you are on a multiprocessor machine, use network rendering on the same machine (might even want to try it on a single processor just to see how it works).

Remember also that each copy of Vegas only allows two additional nodes. But I believe the basic answer to your question is genereally yes.

Turn OFF the "Minimum Clip Length" option in the capture preferences.

No... 8k is a little on the high end. You have all sorts of harmonics up there but not much that contributes to intelligibility.

IMO, what you should do:

1- Get a better mic. A camcorder is generally the worst place you could put a mic, but is the only place for it for run and gun situations. A shotgun mic on the camcorder is generally the best compromise.

The audio forum has lots of posts on this, but a better mic with a shockmount (and windscreen if necessary) is usually a good step up from the built-in mic on your camcorder (generally crap). If you have a 1CCD consumer cam, then a lot of the posts there may not apply. You might want to look at something on the level of the Sennheiser MKE300, which could be a huge improvement over your cam's on-board mics (a lot of them are really bad). Anything more expensive/better may not be appropriate for what you want to do.

Getting good sound in the first place is a much better idea than fixing sound in post (which is rarely effective... time, money or quality-wise).

2- Don't add reverb or distortion. I don't see the point.

3- DSE has written an good article on noise reduction.

http://digitalproducer.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=25455

You are looking at using the track EQ to get rid of everything but voice frequencies. Set them to be sharp and play around with them unless you hear the voice get distorted, then back off. You may need to apply multiple EQs to get them sharper.

The parametric EQ does the same thing and may or may not give better results (theoretically it has a very small advantage). I haven't tried it for some reason.

If there are specific noises in the background that are in a narrow range of frequencies then you can do some additional tricks as pointed out in DSE's articles.

More information on this:
http://www.dv.com/news/news_item.jhtml?LookupId=/xml/feature/2003/rose0903_feature

4- To make the sound less boomy, you could tune a few parametric EQ filters to handle the room modes (where the resonance of the room boosts certain frequencies).

To do this, work in reverse:
Set the parametric EQ to make a narrow bandwidth of sound louder. In Vegas, set the bandwidth to 0.1 octave (the lowest it'll go). Start the frequency at 100hz or thereabouts, and scan through 0-300hz (these numbers are not very good). The goal here is the find the fundamental frequency of one of the room modes.

As you scan around, listen to the sound to see where the volume peaks. This is where one of the room modes are. There are usually extra room modes at multiples of the fundamental frequency (2x, 3x, 4x, etc.). Don't worry about everything over 600hz.

If the room is rectangular, there will be 3 room modes and harmonics of them.

4- To save time with volume envolpes, you could apply a compressor instead. A compressor can bring down the volume on loud sounds and will typically have a control for makeup gain.

I don't think I can explain how to use a compressor very well. Perhaps there is a good link somewhere?

It might more sense to get a cheap camcorder.

Your three purposes:
1- Yes.
2- Yes, if you get one iwth analog-digital passthrough.
3- Yes. (not sure where the simultaneous part fits in)

I'm not exactly sure why'd you go for the walkman decks... it's smaller, but that wouldn't make a big difference to me. It is not bottom loading like most camcorders out there, but that wouldn't make a big difference to me when I'm saving lots of money.

Not many folks outside the Wiregrass know we have a monument to a bug. You must have red clay under your boots. Yep, raised in Ashford (east of Dothan) and lived there for about 30 years.

Sometimes a bandpass preset in EQ with rolloff on the low and high ends works. Set it in the 4th slot. You can also select one of the lower frequency settings and drag them up or down to boost or notch at that point.

Glenn,

#3 - The simultaneous part being recording to the tape in the camera and passing the same data stream out via firewire to the Walkman deck and recording to its tape. Though now that I say this, for the same money I could get a Laird direct-to-disc setup.

#3- One of the Sony camcorders I tried was able to do this too.

Video mixer hooked up to the camera via analog. The camera was recording onto tape, and converting on the fly to a Mac (which was also recording it). It saved the day- I didn't know that capture now was limited to 30 minutes in Final Cut (didn't know to adjust that setting).

Gary on any of your training DVDs do you cover doing color corrections in conjunction with the waveform monitor?

Glen,
Billy Boy has some info on scopes and color correction on his website (http://www.wideopenwest.com/%7ewvg/tutorial-menu.htm) in tutorials 8 and 9.

Now this just doesn't make sense to me. I needed to slow a portion of a clip in order to have it appear on screen longer. The clip is acceptable to me playing in slow motion on the timeline. I find if I render it to .avi or to a new track it becomes jerky. The process does not improve the smoothness but, in fact, makes it worse. I saw this on a finished DVD and I can not figure why it looks fine on the monitor when playing from the timeline at approximately 21 fps.

If I RAM Render it, it plays then at 29 frames and also is jerky.

Has anyone seen this before and have you any suggestions for me as to what I can do to try to make this work?

What I am doing is a wedding video and the the time each bridesmaid appears onscreen varies. The cameraman followed the first bridesmaid down the aisle to where she ended up standing then when he realized the next bridesmaid had already come halfway down the aisle the camera went to her, very briefly. I decided if I put all bridesmaids in slow motion I could have them appear for equal amounts of time. I did slow this one more than the others so that might add to the problem but it appears if I could play it a 21 fps it would work.

thanks in advance

After my project done what do I choose as a rendering process to get this back to a CU VH1 or DVHS deck, I cant seem to find anything with TS , do I just use MPEG2 ? Do you guys/gals have your properties in your projects set to 720P 30 fps or something else?

Thank you

Isn't it 7.5IRE?

(Threads with 7.5IRE in them never turn out very conclusive...)

You have to change the MPEG2 Rendering Template.

1. Choose File-->Render As, and select MainConcept MPEG-2 for the format.

2. Choose the HD 720 - 30p Template and click the Custom button to the right.

3. At the top of the Custom Template window change the Template name to something you would like, such as HDV 720p.

4. Click the Video tab. At the bottom change it to "Constant bit rate" and enter 15,000,000.

5. Click the Audio tab. Change the "Bit rate" to 384.

6. Click the System tab. Change "Stream type" to Transport. For "System bit rate" uncheck the "Auto-Calculate" box and enter in 19,400,000. Immediately click the Save Template button at the top of the window to save your new template. If you click anything else after changing the "System bit-rate" then the number may jump to a different value.

You can now use the template you made to save out files compatible with your HDV camera. If you require files to have the .m2t extension, then you will need to manually change the extension from .mpg to .m2t.

Thanks Mark ,
You are my hero, seriously!

Nope, Digital video doesn't have any IRE, and IRE does not make sense for digital video as IRE is an analogue measurement.

Digital video is often measured in a percentage (like in FCP), where 0% is black and 100% is full white. These percentages would therefore correspond to 16 and 235 in the digital 8-bit levels terms.

You only have to worry about IRE, and in particular North American NTSC's nasty habit of putting black at 7.5IRE when you convert from analogue to digital or digital to analogue, and for quality purposes you should only adjust it at that point (via a proc amp, or a deck that has a correct 7.5IRE switch)

While the digital video is in your camera, or digitally played into your NLE there is no setup - wether it be DV, digiBeta or HD you're shooting.

Graeme

When the preview window is enlarged it tends to slow the
picture/stutter, would this be a function of my computers ram
or is there a setting I can use? Thanks!

Full frame DV playback is very taxing- even more so when there are effects and transitions. I have a 3.0ghz P4 with 1gig of ram and still can't play back footage with effects at full res, full quality at 29.97 fps. I usually edit using Good (auto) and the bottom half of the interface low enough to shrink the video to 1/2 size. I get really good frame rate that way unless I have an abnormal amount of effects or tracks in a composite.

I usually do half size Preview (Auto). I also usually feed an external monitor.

I used to do half-size preview (auto) until I realized in Vegas 5 that slow motion plays back choppy and needs to be kicked up to "good" to smooth it out.

Obviously I missing something here. Create a new project,
capture video from a tape (1), maybe some from another tape (2),
work in project, save and close project. Open a new project capture from tape (?), work in project, want to add some captured
footage from tape (1), where is it? All vegas info is in a certain file, I know the data has to be there, any help? Thanks!

Isn't that what the Build RAM Preview function is for? It builds a non-destructive rendering of the selected event area for smooth preview. I think. I don't use it though I recall DSE mentioning the usefulness in an article he wrote.

Interesting, wonder how long they take to build.

As always, how fast is your confuser, I mean computer? Its a function of how many frames and how many applied effects. Relatively fast though if I remember correctly even on my slow-poke number-cruncher.

My contooter is a P4 2.53, I'm running 512 megs of ram but have
another 512 stick in another box, I'm thinking about putting it in
to see if it makes a difference. You don't get the same 'feel' with
the smaller window, it's nice to enlarge to show someone what
you're doing.

In Vegas you can bring up the vectorscopes which show IRE. I think within Vegas you should have the values between 0 and 100IRE, as that corresponds to 16-235 in the histogram.

RAM Render speed should be close to regular render speed. However, it should NOT take very long because you are only rendering a very SMALL section (i.e. it has to fit within your memory).

Just browse to the folder in which you captured the video using Vegas' Explorer window. Then just drag it to the timeline.

Found em - THANK YOU!!!

ok so i have this 46 minute video, and i speed it up, but it still stays the same length? how is that possible? i was hoping to make it so fast that the whole video would shrink down to like 5 minutes or less, i can take the velocity up to 300% anyway to make it even faster, and to as why the video isn't shrinking in length?

thanks

It should shorten by 1/3. How are you speeding it up?

Dennis Vogel

When you drop in a velocity envelope the time will remain the same until you either shorten or lengthen the clip depending on whether you've gone fast motion or slow motion.

For what you've done you will need to shorten the video to the 1st notch in the upper edge of the clip because what happens is the length of time remains the same but the movement is X times fastr so the clip repeats itself. I hope I made that clearer than it sounds. Open the project, insert your velocity envelope set it tothe speed you want (upto 300%) and then SHORTEN the clip to the first notch. You can make it even faster if you render the clip to an AVI and then bring it back in and use another velocity envelope but remember to shorten the clip to the 1st notch again.
Don B

yeah i didn't think that i would get this fast of a responses awesome, but yeah while i was waiting i was playing around and figured that out...too bad it doesn't auotmatically shorten it or lengthen it...oh well thanks for such fast responses.

You have several options:

1) Use a velocity envelope and then manually resize the clip after applying the new velocity.

2) Hold down the CTRL key and resize the event to the proper size. This will also change the speed of the clip (but you are limited to a single speed change).

3) Use Excalibur's Velocity Wizard which will automatically add a velocity envelope and resize the clip to match the new speed.

p.s. remember you can also combine the velocity envelope and CTRL-Drag technique on a single event.