Thanks Scott;

I will try this when I get back in front of my computer and let you know if it works.

And I agree, this is the most useful forum I have found.


Thanks again.

Hey Aaron. Hope that works out for you. What I meant about the best place to find info.. essentialy a virtual handbook for Vegas is the Sony forum website
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/default.asp
it will have alot more info. Hope that helps.. : )

Take a look at my newsletters at http://www.jetdv.com/tts where I discuss this and many other topics.

T.V. Safe Zone
 

I have worked this out for DVD, but have the following queries.

1) On a Video Tape, is there a safe zone also?

If you want to see EVERYTHING on DVD you need to shrink the size of the output via pan crop to the safe zone and render that way. Is this the same for Video?

2) Do the users on this forum do this, or merely let the material outside the safe area go unseen?

Cheers,

Andy

1. Yes

2. I just let it go outside.

SMPTE in NYC
 

Vegas will be having a strong presence at the SMPTE show in NYC next week at the Marriott Marquis hotel, Tuesday from 2:30 to (I think) 9:00 p.m.. Check out one of the most professional-oriented events in NYC. Usually a very cool show.
http://www.smpteny.com/smpteny
My understanding is that Vegas will be presented to the FCP users group there like it was in LA.

i do alot of handheld work, so these gaps come in handy.. panning and croppign always requires resampling, which in turn degrades quality.. ive rerendered an avi 4 times and u DO notice degredation...
3 times rendering is the most i can get without noticable loss..

as for shrinkin the vid outut to be in the action safe area, the picture will actually look alot nice if u do this, as the pixels are compressed alil more than usual..

Another way to look at it in lamens terms..
think of it as a 5mp still image.. now u run it standard its 5mp pic.. print it up in its native size (for arguments sake we'll say a3, and its 5mp in pixel and resolution . now the pixels all retain theyre specific size and resolution doesnt change....

now from a3, u wan to print 4x6...
what kind of quality would you get?? Better or worse or the same??
Considerably better actually as your pixels are compacted into a tighter space.. therefore the pixels are physically smaller..

Resolution wont change, only size... BUT pixelation will be almost non existant..
How many pixels are in an image depends on what camera you use.. and resolution is dependant on ur location, and filmin preferences....

FYI Digital Zoom work the exact opposite..

SAfe Areas? .. . Hmmm...
 

This is truly a timely Post. I'll repeat what I posted over on the Sony site . . but I think I'll need to reduce the whole movie to fit into the safe areas .. here's the issue:-

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Okay, last year I shot and edited a Community Project. All went well, client happy. I got paid.

I saved this to miniDVD tape. Fine. It plays fine. It loads back into V5 fine .. and plays beautifully.

Now I want to make a DVD from it. So I load it into V5 and create a MPEG. This MPEG2 I use in DVDA2. The previous, rock-solid no-problem white on black credit roll produces nasty artifacts and really silly things in the final DVD. I can preview the MPEG2 and I can't see any problem. I've even got "other" credit rolls, albeit light colours and little contrast . . this is silly . . .I can't be thinking this is what it is .. . black and white creates problems? It's a finished movie? I'm only creating an MPEG2 from a capture 28 mins of DV-AVI?"

+++++++++++++++++++++

OKAY, the troublesome Credit roll is just on the edge of the right Safe Area. Once past this bit the video plays flawlessly & faultlessly.

Here's the thing! - Why why why when I still have stuff outside the safe area does the DVD play well? Why is it only on this black and white text rolling text? After all - surely - this rolling text is no longer rolling text IT IS JUST a piece of movie? It has come from a miniDV .. . it gets MPEGed within V5 . .. gets imported into DVDA2 . . plays well in preview . .It just produces these artifacts, when rendered/burnt to DVD .. and JUST on this rolling credit ..

I'm gonna do the total reduction in "size" thing to have ALL within the safe areas and see what happens. I really can't/wont believe that this IS the problem .. it just doesn't sit correctly with what I know now about video ..

Any ideas?

TIA,

From a perplexed,

Grazie

mate ur getting mixed up...

teh artefacts ur seeing are teh bitrates ur using.. ur proll using VBR at startin at about 8000 and droping down to 192..

try to render the mpg with a constant of 6000 to 8000 the duration WILL fit onto one dvd with these settings..

what ur experiencing has NOTHING to do with action safe areas..
unless ur titles are being chopped and unviewable...

action safe doesnt affect resolution or pixels the manner in which u describe (artefcat on titles), but from the sounds of it you using default settings within VEgas to produce a DVD which COULD be upped in bitrate due to the short duration..

Your titles look distorted due to the low bitrate of the default Variable preset your using.

Spot, thanks for letting us know.

I happen to be passing through NYC next week so I may well attend. Do you (or anyone else) know if these are seminar style presentations from manufacturers or just an exhibition.

Thanks . . . Ian . . .

" mate ur getting mixed up... " - most likely!

"teh artefacts ur seeing are teh bitrates ur using.. ur proll using VBR at startin at about 8000 and droping down to 192.. " So, would it be that the processing has to deal with this "Variable Bit rates" and things start to go silly?

"try to render the mpg with a constant of 6000 to 8000 the duration WILL fit onto one dvd with these settings.. " YES I will .. thank you!

"what ur experiencing has NOTHING to do with action safe areas.. unless ur titles are being chopped and unviewable... " . . Yes I agree that it couldn't be, but I'm still learning, I as needing some more knowledgable individual to come across - as you have. And YES the text was very very close to the edge if nor over the Safe Area. How would this make a difference?

"action safe doesnt affect resolution or pixels the manner in which u describe (artefcat on titles), but from the sounds of it you using default settings within VEgas to produce a DVD which COULD be upped in bitrate due to the short duration.. " I tink you have the nub of it here . . So, I choose the bitrate appropriate for the duration available to be PUT on a single DVD platter - arrgghh! Got it!

"Your titles look distorted due to the low bitrate of the default Variable preset your using "

Tell me why this happens? Can't be anything else other than the "amount" of contrast - black then white then black then white from the scrolling text - that creates such a demanding need for a "higher" bitrate AND that it is sustained by forcing this from the outset by electing CBR .. is that it? I suppose it is too much to ask for that this MPEG process to be able to demand CBR when it needs it and VBR where it doesn't matter .. see my point here? . .Is there such a mechanism?

Look Peter, thank you .. You've cleared up some major misunderstandings for me.

If you have the time, please try and answer my further points above?

TIA

Grazie

Short video delivery via email
 

My client has asked for a number of videos I have created for them (mixed animated/live action business to business 'messages') to be made available in a format that will make them easily emailable.

They are very much into the concept of viral marketing and at a trade show in the UK this week (where the videos were shown) many visitors requested copies.

My question, therefore, is could someone give me an indication as to what might be the best format, ie a combination of low file size against quality of video/audio. Also, which format would be recommended for maximum user-compatibility?

The videos are each around 5 mins long and file sizes are roughly 1 gig as AVI.

I could play around with the formats myself to experiment, but I thought I could ask the question of someone who has already gone through the experience.

I was hoping to get them down to around 2mb. Of greatest importance is audio quality - I believe people will forgive poor pictures but will soon give up if the audio is dire.

All suggestions or pointers to other resources much appreciated.

Thanks . . . Ian . . .

Hi ian, i use sorenson squeeze to make all my files for the internet/email. you may want to consider it. its really great at optimizing the sorenson 3 compressor.

how to selectively manage media files?
 

is there a way to delete ONLY media files that are NOT currently being used in a vegas project?
the situation is this:i'm working on project A, which is not finished yet. meanwhile i have to begin project B which is more urgent than A. the problem is that the media files i have been using for project A are taking up most of my hard drive space. BUT, i know for a fact that only a small portion of those files are actually being used at the moment by project A.
so what i want to do is to delete all media files except for those being used at the moment (on the timeline) by project A. this will clear up space for project B. after i finish project B i will then continue with A and capture additional media files again if i have to.

is this possible?

thanks

5 minutes is too long for an e-mail unless you agree with post
stamp size video. What I see companies do more often is just
link to the video and put that up on a webserver. A lot of these
are done in flash today.

You really do not want to go over 500 KB or 1 MB attachment.
A LOT of people are still on dialup and that will even take them
minutes to download. You just cannot get a video into that
amount and still be able to see anything. Especially if it is 5
minutes in length.

In my opinion what your client want is just not doable. Again
I would put the video up on a webserver and just put a link
in the e-mail like : click here to watch the video.

Personally I have a broadband connection at home. But if the
mailing lists I subscribe to would send attachments I would
remove my self from that list.

A medium ground solution would be to embed the video into
the HTML mail and have the file on the server. I'm not sure it
would actually play in the e-mail client or not.

Keep in mind also that more and more people get scared by
virusses and leaks in IE/Outlook (express) and therefor a lot
of them are running anti virus software or other protection
software that usually disallows embedding stuff in e-mail or
they might even have turned of HTML e-mail alltogether.

I'll certainly look at Squeeze and see if that gets me to what I want, thanks Rich.

Rob, I tend to agree with you, however this is purely business to business email and is intended to be emailed internally within an organisation so the assumption has to be that they will be working off an email server. It's aimed at the major players in the retail industry.

I think a 2 to 3mb attachment would be workable and they are comfortable with 160 x 120 size.

Thanks for the rapid replies, gentlemen!

Ian . . .

You can delete all unused footage from the media bin, but I don't
think you can actually delete unused footage from the harddisk.

I thought about that a bit and thought it might be possible to do
in a script, but then I reconsidered.

How would Vegas or a script know WHICH footage belongs TO
the project but is NOT used. Basically it can't. It might be possible
to write a script that lets you select a directory and it will delete
all files (or a selected pattern?) that are in that directory and not
used in the project.

Why not simply do it by hand? I know it is tedious, but it can't
take more than 15 minutes or so. Go to View -> Edit Details
and select Events from the Show dropdown. This will get you a
list of all the events in your project that are used (do a Remove
All Unused Media From Project under the media pool first to be
sure it only contains what you use) including the full file path.

If you only have a couple of events this will probably be easy
enough for you to delete the rest. If you want to print this out
(and this works best if you have Microsoft Excel running) hit the
corner between the word Track and the number 1 (upper most
left corner with no text in it on the sheet) and it will select the
whole sheet. Now hit CTRL+C (copy) and go into Excel or Word
or Notepad etc. and hit paste there.

Now you have the full list in there. If you don't want all of the
fields you can also select just the filenames. This is a bit more
tricky. You can't select the filename column header since it will
change the sorting of the list. You can however select the whole
list. Go to the first empty filename slot at the end of the list and
click with your left mouse button and hold it. Then move up through
the list and thus select the whole list. Now hit CTRL+C and
paste in whatever you want again.

With any of these methods you can then print the list for example
to know which files not to delete.

That's the best I can do...

Done the "Reduce to fit in Frame" thingy - better much better but still "sticky" but less artifacts . .Doing the 8000 CBR as I type .. .

G

Thanks Peter!
 

Peter that did it . . 8000 CBR beautiful scrolling text on a DVD+RW . . off to play with DVDA2 ansd create a Menu etc etc etc ..

Grazie

Ian,

You could set up the same type of arrangement on a corporate Intranet and just e-mail the links. We do this a lot with things like company standards and ISO 9000 documentations. You could e-mail a link to a file located on the company's internal server.

Again, good advice. Thank you.

I'll be forwarding these suggestions to the client.

Interestingly, the client has another company in its group that specialises in ISO9000 management software called Achiever Plus. Just wondered if you ever came across it?

Ian . . .

When you're going for ISO certification it's important that there be only 1 "official" document. the easiest way is to keep it securely on a server somewhere and allow access to it. In my company the documentation control person generated an internal web page referencing locations on the server. THat way, everything is located in 1 place. A lot easier to manage when there's only 1 version of something. Being on a corporate intranet, you won't have the bandwidth issues as you would have hosting on the internet.

I would render to WMV (or whatever format they desired), put it on the web somewhere, and just e-mail them the link. That way, even if you have a 10 to 20 meg file, the e-mail will still be very small. If they want, they could just right-click and download the file directly to their computer OR just play it from the net.

One thing a script COULD do, go through the media pool and delete the files for any items that are not being used. There IS a use count on the media pool items so it could limit itself to only the files that have a use-count of zero.

However, you may then get into the problem of a sub-clip not being used but the base file IS being used. So, it would need to be carefully coded.

I believe there are some sessions there, but I'm not certain. I was originally slated to go, but am unable to break away from the VASST tour as originally planned. I think Tim Duncan will be there showing Vegas at the FCP event.
There's a lot more info on the site I linked to.

>How would Vegas or a script know WHICH footage belongs TO
the project but is NOT used. Basically it can't.<

The Find Unused Wizard in Neon does exactly that.

Gary

there are file storage websites out there and for a nominal fee allow gigs of storage to be xfered.

I have numerous corporate clients, with offices in NY and London and being here in Oz allows me to work on the Australian element of the presentation, then uplaod and they can do as they wish after that ;)

;)

on larger text u can get away with lower bitates..., u can maybe even run a second track with a softness filter on it.. this may smooth out the lines as well..

glad it worked for u mate :)

Clipstream in Email
 

Ian, I work for a company that has provided the technology for many many video in email campaigns. It is streaming video so is light on the bandwidth and does not require emailing a huge attachment. Please take a look at our demos here:

http://www.clipstream.com/

From one of our partners

Our own email demo

Feel free to contact me by email if you have any questions.

video card
 

I'm looking for suggestions. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm running Vegas 5 and want to use an external video monitor as well as have analog capture and output. What video cards would work best.

I'm currently using a NVIDIA Ge-Force FX 5200.

Thanks

well, i have no idea what a script is or how to make one. so i'll stick with rob's advice of just going over the media files manually, one by one, and delete the ones not on my timeline.
thanks.

You're missing out on one of the greatest features in Vegas, then. You really need to take a look at scripting. You don't have to write them as there are already many out there available (some free, some for a small cost). They really are a timesaver.

video card doesn't make any difference. All that you mentioned should be done via a firewire card. External preview goes out firewire, to a camera/convertor/deck, to the monitor.

For analog capture, I do the same thing: Analog source to camera/convertor/deck to the computer via firewire. This will give you your best results.

True to that Edward. For the Lady X episode I handled I wrote
a small script that would open the leader, then present me with
a dialog to open the movie someone sent in and then it would
present me with loading the credit roll movie and it would load
the music underneath that itself. It all crossfaded this and the
only thing I needed to do was make sure the crossfades where
good etc. It also added cropping to get it to widescreen size.

Then all I had to do was hit export and load my quicktime preset
I had made and I was done. Pretty neat.

Edward: do you know if we can group events through scripting
in version 5 now? That was the only thing I could not do and had
to do manually when moving the credit roll around.

i'm still learning. eventually, i imagine i will get around to working with scripts. thanks

Thanks Edward,

do you mean just run it through my XM2 and use this as a convertor? Will this degrade the camera in any way?

Rich

Can't Capture to Ext. HD
 

Hello everyone,

Everytime I try to add my Lacie 250 GB ext. hard drive to the disk management file under capture I get this message from windows "Windows-Delayed Write failed"

I currently have the camcorder and the ext. hd connected to my laptop via 2 port firewire card. I tried the same set-up on my desktop an got the same message. I am using the XP OS.

Isn't it possible to capture footage to an ext. hd ? I thought it was but I am having doubts. Please help.

Al

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Edward: do you know if we can group events through scripting
in version 5 now? That was the only thing I could not do and had
to do manually when moving the credit roll around. -->>>


Grouping events is still not available.

Assuming the XM2 allows passthrough (my XL1 and GL2 do) then, yes, you can just use your camera. As for the camera, it won't be damaged except for the fact that it must be powered on and some people claim the heat from being on can reduce the life of the camera. I have no proof of that but also have no proof to the opposite. Many people use a convertor such as the Canopus ADVC 100.

Yes it is possible to capture to an external hard drive. Your symptoms sound more related to OS/hardware issues to me. Can you do anything at all with the external drive? How are you connecting it? (firewire or usb?)