Day for night in Vegas..... worth trying?
 

Hey all. I did a search for shooting day for night but the majority was the route of putting filters on like blues, and stopping down light with ND's. No one really said if doing this in post was a good idea or not. It seems to me that after fooling around with VEGAS's night filter on daylight shots at around 2pm, the results are fairly good but am I missing something? I have a shoot coming up with my DVX100a and the night time shots are going to be in a car.

Any tips or tricks for keeping the realism factor in there? Should I not attempt this effect in post?

Bill had some good pointers at the end of this thread.
Also see this thread where I'm linking to a whole
bunch of other threads on the subject. Yes, they are talking
a lot about filters, but also how to record to sell the effect in
post.

I'm suspecting something on Bill's list in the first thread is
probably going "wrong" on your test. Can you post some before
and after pictures? That would help to see where it goes "wrong"

And ofcourse it is always worth trying!

Well, thought I follow-up and let everyone know how it went...

Not so good.

I produced the standard 4:3 DVD some days ago, and it was pretty good, as usual. Even on the widescreen "stretched", it looked good.

But going thru the cropping process, and creating a DVD using DVD Architect via the widescreen mode, the result was OK on regular TV, but real widescreen TV, even a small one (around 30"), it was a bit blurr.

I was optimistic at first, since it looked decent in widescreen mode on my PC DVD player. But I guess the 30" screen has higher demand or something.

Back to wondering whether to get a PDX10...

Take a look at these threads:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=21041
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=19671
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=14825
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=12688

Rob - my problem was that the test I ran seemed to go quite well, but I wasn't sure if I was just unaware that my look was in fact too artificial etc. to be pulled off as an actual night time shot.

Here is a few examples, though mine will be shot from inside a car, these are some landscape pics before and after night mode....

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~berobert/Image0.png
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~berobert/Image1.png
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~berobert/Image2.png
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~berobert/Image3.png
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~berobert/Image4.png
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~berobert/Image5.png

I thought these fairly convincing enough, or displayed that with some tweaking a convincing night mood could be set in a car during the day......

They are looking pretty decent, but I think they might work a bit
better with a blue cast added? Also the sky left in picture 3 is
not really convincing. It looks more like dawn now or something
(if that's the look you want, that's okay, ofcourse).

Funny, on my monitor they look very blue. I thought the whole function of the night filter was that it made the picture very dark and heightened the blue? I see what you're saying about the dawn look, it's like the sun is just starting to come up, I guess I'll have to avoid sky shots in the day for night shooting as I've read in many posts.

Night
 

Did you apply color curves, the night preset and tweak the blue channel to your liking?

Renders black screen.
 

This is probably because I'm using the demo, but I was hoping someone would be kind enough to confirm for me this before I buy and realize I have a problem.
Sony's site about the demo says this

"watermarks both the video and audio of all rendered files
has a two minute maximum for play/record
does not allow batch capturing "

But what I'm seeing is two things: Every five to ten seconds the screen goes black with a red x on it. After that the render will freeze motion for a second. I'm wondering if this is the "watermark" they are euphimistically reffering to?

Also I am using hundreds of stills to render time lapse... I thought I had bad jpegs at first but that's not the case. I'm about to buy Vegas I just want to make sure that's what the problem is, the "watermark", and not a bug of some sort.
So if anyone knows this through experience with the demo, tha would definitely put my mind at ease.
Thanks.



Edit: Found it is indeed the watermark at Sony's Vegas forums.

It should be the watermark indeed. I've never seen it happen
in the full version myself.

I'm not sure why the motion would freeze but I'm sure the red X is the watermark.

Vasst
 

Anyone going to the Acid or Surround Sound VASST classes in Atlanta?

VASST Training Tours

Sorry to take so long to reply. Undersampling worked great. Thanks again.

HD1080-24p DVD?
 

Well, I am thinking pretty sound, we are going to have to go widescreen.

HD720-24p maybe? 720x1280 24p, probably look really good on today's widescreen TV.

(Vegas has setting for up to HD1080-24p, 1080x1920)

But then in the DVD Architecture side, it only have 480x720 30fps, the standard DV in widescreen. What gives?

Surely the modern widescreen TV can display more than 480x720? Why.. my DV converted to widescreen looked bad, hence it must at least take 720x1280 to use it, and perhaps even up to 1080x1920.

I guess we need a 2nd version of the Architecture to burn better widescreen DVD.

OK, ok, I need to go dig around and read up...

Good to hear. I thought that would help in your situation.

Let us know what you discover!

The funny thing is, that Boris is kinda like after effects, but Vegas is nothing like premier at all.

Boris is powerful so when you apply an effect to Vegas, Vegas sometimes cannot preview that section in real-time, especially if it's really complicated. You can watch it in Boris, slowly, like in After Effects, but yea, it's cool to work with Boris. You always have to manually set the length of how long you want the effect to go on for, which is dumb. It should be as long as the clip you are applying it to but it doesn't exactly integrate into Vegas how the Vegas plug-ins do. You launch Boris, then when you have your desired effect you close down Boris and hit save as you exit. Then it's setting is imported into Vegas. Took me awhile just to figure that out.

Thanks for the help, gentlemen.

You're confusing 720x480 (DVD resolution), with 1280x720 (HDTV resolution). DVD Architect can't by definition support more than 720x480.

Edward, are you being facetious? :)

Vegas/Parhelia on XP - do not change primary display, vegas freezes randomly
 

The Matrox parhelia 128 card can make any of the three possible displays "primary". I've spent three days (and nights) to find out that on my system changing "primary display" from the default to another display (using properties/settings/advanced/"Make this display primary") will freeze vegas randomly at program launch.

Vegas shows up in the task manager as a process utilizing 50% CPU, but will not launch beyond the splash screen.

Can anyone with a parhelia card reproduce this? No fear - changing the default display back to "primary" will resolve the problem, and you can kill the vegas40.exe process from the task manager.

/magnus

Fading between two tracks
 

I am trying to fade between two different video tracks. I can simulate what I want to do by pulling down and pushing up the opacity line while the video is playing on the top track. How do I get this to do the fade where I want when I want?

Paul,
You can "pull the corners" of the clips or events on the tracks to adjust the opacity of the events so they will fade in and/or out.
Don

Naturally, it's easiest if you put them both on the same track and then overlap them. However, it they MUST be on different tracks, just fade out the ending one while fading in the beginning one. As Don said, just move the mouse to the upper outer corner (beginning or ending depending on which clip) until you get the quarter moon icon. Then click and drag toward the center of the clip.

Actually you should fade out the topmost media and don't worry about fading in on the lower one.

Gary

If you want to resume the upper track i.e. letting the other track just fade in and out again, you can split the upper track. (Select the event, place the cursor and hit the key s. You may want to click "Ignore event grouping" before you do that. Otherwise you'll split all video and audio events currently grouped with the one you're fading.) To get the new edges exactly where you want your fades to end/begin, just click-drag them.

B&W to color over time?
 

This is probably the simplest question to ever hit the board, but im baffled.


I want to do a transition from black&white footage to color footage smoothly over the time line.

Any help?


Thanks,

John

Yup Peter is right, movie DVD's are not HD.

Or you could however save the footage as a data DVD and do it that way, You could watch it on a PC.

One simple way to do it would be to have the media on two tracks - one colour, one B&W above, then fade the upper down to reveal the lower.

However (having finally bothered to check it out) the simplest is to use the keyframes in the B&W FX.

Thanks Tor,

Ill have to try these out, The keyframes is something im ignorant to as well, so I guess ive got some studying to do!

Ah ha, that was easy. Keyframes that is, 2 minutes to figure out how to do...2 months I waited to ask how to do it!

Thanks for all the information. I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.

Keyframes: One of the most important concepts to learn to take editing to the next level.

First keyframe at the beginning: B&W. Second keyframe at the end: color.

However, this WON'T work in ALL cases. For example, if you wanted to go from plain to embossed, there's an embossed option you can pick. However, the transition between the two goes through some really strange steps. In this case you need to render an embossed version and then use a standard fade to go between the two.

<<<-- Originally posted by Gary Kleiner : Actually you should fade out the topmost media and don't worry about fading in on the lower one.

Gary -->>>


The ONLY time this has NOT worked for me is if the upper clip has transparancy (usually a title in my case) or the clip does not fill the full screen. So, there ARE times when the lower one need to be set to fade in.

Thanks, good to know DVD cannot support beyond 480x720.

I guess there is really no point then to shoot in HD, 480x720 widescreen is the furthest to go.

Is there some kind of HD DVD coming soon? Presumably in a few years, every one would have HDTV.

DVD-HD is under development. There are two camps in this. One is using blue laser for more data storage per disc and the other MPEG-4 with existing discs. Neither are standards yet.

That said, using Vegas to size down your HD to 728x480 out to still look really good. And possibly save it to data DVDs as HD Windows Media to play on the computer.

You can output to Windows Media 9 HD, this doesn't require DVD architect btw. You can then burn a dvd-r or +r disk. Maybe even get a master for distribution. The encoding tools (directshow drivers, interfaces...) are free from Microsoft. There is actually an Windows Media HD version of Terminator 2 available in both 720p and 1080p.

There are several DVD/Windows Media HD players coming out, per press releases at this years CES.

Also, these same new players have dvi out and technology to uprez and convert standard DVD to 720p. All of them seem to be going for less than 300.00 US.

If you can shoot in HD with a good camera (not the JVC HD10), then you should, and downconvert to 720x480 (btw, in resolutions usually the horizontal is put first). That will look better than if you shot in 720x480 (DV) to begin with.

The thing about the HD WM9 players is there's no standard for format or software, so we don't know yet how to make disks that will play in these players natively. Maybe they will just search the disk for WMV files, but I think there's probably more to it than that. But you can always save the HD version for the future.

I am happy to report that all went well. Thanks Edward, Tor, Gary, and Don for the help!

Problem with VCD MPG1 output
 

Whenever I make clips to be shown online/computer I use the VCD templates for MPG1. Oddly enough during pans I'm exhibiting a bizzar squiggly effect I never noticed before?! What could be the problem?
The original footage is 60i, made a simple selection and chose render as, switched it to NTSC VCD. Made no other changes.

Example:
http://www.msprotege.com/members/Laz...5/squiggle.mpg