Very Buggy
 

Has anyone else found Vegas to be buggy? It crashes very frequently, totally at random. Occasionally there's an exception message but not usually - usually it just closes. I'm pressing the save button every 30 seconds out of paranoia. And this is after I downloaded the 5.0a update. Any ideas?

I use my V5a for my business. It wont crash - User error stuff and hwere I've tried to introduce some 3rd party plugin that I've not set up well .. . but nope .. crashes are nornally down t me . .Can you give us an idea of what you are doing when this happens ... or better still do you get an ERROR report? I've sent these off to Sony Support for them to "decipher2 . . .I aint no programmer!

Grazie

I assume you are talking about Vegas 5. I have not noticed it to be overly buggy. I have managed to crash it a time or two but, overall, it has operated very well for me.

Often I get no error report - it just shuts down.

I just realized that the problem may have started when I switched to the Creative ASIO drivers so I can mix in 5.1. I'm going to try updating them and see if that solves it.

The most common problem with applications and crashes in
Windows self is drivers. That is the number 1 problem. The
second problem is usually some component that has failed
(cooling fans or cracks [unvisible] in the mainboard that expand
when they heat up etc.).

I've had 1 crash under Vegas 4 and zero under 5 thusfar. What
you can easily do is switch to a non ASIO driver in Vegas to test
it (if you don't need to do 5.1 mixing).

Right, like I said it may have started when I switched to ASIO. I hadn't been using ASIO until recently when I started some 5.1 mixing. Prior to that I don't recall any crashes. I'm hoping that's it. ;)

I remember 4.0d used to crash a few times but I determined that was because of my firewire hard drive and the 1394 interface. So it may very well be a driver problem, yet again. *sigh*. Can I get no good stable sound card drivers?

Delayed file write errors can be quite ciritical depending on what
the file is. You get this error when Windows has cached some
writes and cannot commit them to disk. It can't connect to the
disk for some reason. This can happen due to faulty cables,
bad drives or conflicts.

What camera are you capturing from? If it is a Canon the camera
is probably hogging the bus. I could not capture to my firewire
drive when my XL1S was connected and I just read someone
else has similar problems with his XM2.

I personally solved this by connecting my external drive through
USB2, but I'm not sure the Lacie has such a connector.

It might be solved if you can get a second firewire card in there
and connect the drive to another card than the drive.

Beta test file
 

Gang, I've uploaded our Beta Testing file for Vegas 5 up to the Sundance site. We used this throughout the various builds of V5 in Beta. It should open fine in your build 134.
http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/help/kb
It's a 5.1 file, using many of the new features found in Vegas 5. You don't NEED 5.1 to test it, but it surely is handy. I also would like to get your feedback on making it a new render test base, because 3D really chokes down the render times. So does motion blur, and this project has all of that and more. Check out the pitched Windows audio in the timeline.
You can also check out the dual monitor setup that I often use for video editing. I'm sure your colors will be different, due to the various themes I use, but you'll get the idea.

I am trying to capture to the external HD via firewire. This Lacie HD just allows you to connect via firewire. I used a Canon GL2 and will be trying a Sony PD 170. I have no troulbe accessing file from the ext. hd until I prepare to use the drive during capture. I am using two separate firewire ports for the cam and the hd. Can some one please help?

Thanks.

Al

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Moore : So it may very well be a driver problem, yet again. *sigh*. Can I get no good stable sound card drivers? -->>>

We use gear from Korean St-audio (now ESI / Ego Systems )
with rock solid ASIO performance - have a look at the "DSP24 MEDIA 7.1" at http://www.staudio.com

/magnus

knock on wood, ive never had a crash, unless ive used the shuttle slider (playback speed duration slider) all teh way and its locked onto my new mouse, then it flies around and crashes, but i know it to be a mouse issue.. not a vegas issue..

apart from that, its rock solid, which is more i can say for any other Video Editing app out there.

Is there a way to switch off 16:9 auto detection?
 

All the footage that we are shooting is in 16:9 (stretched on a GL2) and is automatically imported into the media pool of V5 as widescreen footage. We want to edit it as stretched 4:3 DV so that it plays smooth throughout editing and so that it looks better on our 16:9 NTSC monitor (which can internally convert the footage to widescreen).

V4 did not automatically detect 16:9 footage, and we did not convert it to widescreen until rendering. I would like to know if this is a setting in V5 which can be turned off. The manual is unclear if this is possible.

Brad

Well, knock on wood as well, since I updated to the new SB ASIO drivers haven't had a single crash. Thanks for the tips guys. I should not be so quick to blame the software. :)

Albert,

This sounds exactly like the trouble I've had when using an external hard drive and a GL2 with the same FireWire card. In my case, the drive is a FireWire Direct 200 GB FireWire 800 drive and the card is a FireWire Direct FireWire 800 card with a legacy FireWire 400 6 pin port on it. The solution for me was to add another generic (TI chipset! - stay away from VIA or anything else) FireWire card in the computer. I've had no problems with this setup. The only problem I've had since going to this setup is that a coworker inadvertantly plugged the GL2 into the combo card and I saw the exact same error message you're seeing. Switching the camera to the other card solved the problem.

Good Luck

I'm guessing you mean "squeezed" on the GL2 vs. stretched (DV Widescreen is anamorphic on the GL2 and other cams with this feature). Once you bring the video onto the Vegas timeline, you can go to File/Properties and set the aspect ratio to DV Widescreen (1.2121). That will make the video in Vegas look like it will look when displayed properly on a widescreen display. As you noted, when rendering out your edited version, you need to select the DV Widescreen template.

Thanks Everyone.

I took all the advice given and found a solution. Since there appear to be a problem with one of the virtual drives (I partition the Lace 250 GB Ext. HD) I reformatted that one. There wasn't anything very important on that drive anyway. After I re-formatted this drive, I tried to capture footage. This time I had the Lacie Ext. HD connected directly to the the built-in firewire port on my laptop. Then I connected my GL2 to a Firewire Card. I went to Vegas changed the disk management location to the Ext. HD and VIOLA I was able to capture live footage to my Ext. HD. I checked both partitioned drives on the Ext. HD and they both captured. Yes!! Don't you love success stories?

Thanks again.

Al

PS Now I have to test my PD 170. I'm sure I shouldn't have any problems!??!

Issues with Editing Video with Multiple Audio Tracks
 

I'm looking for some suggestions for the best way to handle editing video (chopping it up like is typical) that has several, in my case, at least 6 synchronous audio tracks associated with it.

I've tried grouping but I find grouping to be fairly clunky and limiting. Often you want to use parts of a previous audio track with a different clip, particularly with rear or far shots.

I was looking for a way to just cut using the video takes and only one audio track, the dialogue track, and somehow have the software keep track of the other audio tracks temporally associated with that main audio track without me having to worry about it constantly. What I would really like to be able to do is treat all six audio tracks as one but, again, grouping doesn't seem to be the best way to do this.

So what would you guys suggest? Any help would be most appreciated.

Scott & Edward:

Thanks to you both. The fix to my above problem was clear once explained differently. I'll check out the Sony forum and have bookmarked Edwards.

:D

Why not do your splits with ripple on, and if you need to use portions of audio that get split out, disable ripple and drag those sections out as needed, inserting Xfades? I use grouping for most tasks...but it's not for everyone

Was glad to help too. I know Edward has been around for awhile and has some excellent tutorials. There's no doubt about it he has some great info over there. I think Spot has a film look tutoiral online and Billyboy does too. His web is wide open west or something to that effect. Do a google you'll find it.

Guy,

Thanks for the response. I fully admit this to be a request for greater convenience. Changing the properties of the footage once and a while is no issue; I just get a little tired of doing it in multiple projects with the regular addition of supplemental clips to the media pool. Despite my resistance to over automation, I really like Vegas 5.

Brad

how to fully control opacity of video event?
 

hi. i'm looking for a way to control the opacity of a video event throughout the shot.
i found how to control the opacity of a whole track, but i don't want to affect the track in it's entirety. i also found how to fade in and out an event by "pulling on the corners", but this only allows me to fade in, or fade out, but not freely control the opacity throughout the whole shot.

FOR EXAMPLE: i want to start a video event at 50% opacity, then make the opacity climb at a moderate pact to 100%, then go back down at once to 20%, then immediately back to 100%, and then finally decrease the opacity gradually down to 0%.

how do i do that?

Very easy.....right click on the video track and select "insert/remove envelope" and then select "composite level". Just add points to coicide the amount of opacity you want and your done....

got it. thanks for the quick reply!! that's as close as you can get to online support!

Great info - thanks Edward.

The MPEG2 result will not be lossless, am I right? I'm a newbie to HD, and was just expected to be able to render out to an HD 720p avi file.

...I need to go to college for this sort of thing?!

Thanks Douglas but that's not exactly what I mean.

Let me rephrase the problem. Let's say I have a video track (with multiple takes, etc.) and each one has 6 audio tracks associated with it from room mics. Let's also say I want to edit the video randomly just like I would a movie and all I want to worry about is dialogue for now.

Once the video and dialogue tracks are all arranged nicely, I'd like there to be a way to just throw in all the other associated audio tracks and auto-magically have them line up with the dialogue audio.

So is there any way to do this or am I just dreaming? Particularly, I am wondering, how would it be done if I Were editing video with Vegas and then mixing the 5.1 soundtrack in a different program all together?

Someone told me it could be done with SMTPE timecoding, but as best I can tell Vegas supports no such feature.

So any other ideas, Douglas or anyone else? Thanks a ton.

You can pretty much bank on Edward knowing the answer right off the bat and without guessing and conversation.

how do i copy and paste from one project to another?
 

i need to copy and paste events from one vegas project to another. i tried, but it didn't work. any ideas why?
thanks.

Open Vegas, Open one of the projects. Open Vegas again, Open the other project. Select the items to be copied and press CTRL-C. Go to the other instance of Vegas, position the cursor correctly, and press CTRL-V.

i see. i tried to do it on the same application of vegas and not two seperate ones. i guess that is what i did wrong.

thank you.

Yep, if you close the project, you loose the clipboard contents.

Audio Mixing
 

Are there any tutorials for audio mixing with Vegas Video 4.0. I made a decent lil short but the audio is terrible.

This might be helpful:

http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/tu...s/mixaudio.htm

Help mixing 16:9 with 4:3 footage
 

I am trying to edit something I shot this weekend. I had my GL2 set to widescreen mode and I forgot to set my Sony to widescreen as well. So now I have 16:9 and 4:3 footage I want to mix together. The problem I am having is that if bring the 4:3 footage into Vegas first it is fine, but as soon as I bring the 16:9 footage in, I can't see the 16:9 footage. If I bring the 16:9 footage in first, same thing. I can see it and can't see the 4:3 when I bring that in.

I was planning to just mask the 4:3 (letterbox) so it matches the GL2 16:9.

Thanks

PS, I am using Vegas 4.0

Thanks

<<<-- Originally posted by Doug Turner : Great info - thanks Edward.

The MPEG2 result will not be lossless, am I right? I'm a newbie to HD, and was just expected to be able to render out to an HD 720p avi file.

...I need to go to college for this sort of thing?! -->>>

MPEG is motion JPEG. JPEG is a lossy format, so every time you re-encode MPEG you will lose data....
Resampling of lossy formats requires high quality algorithms to sub-sample the data in order to retain image quality (bi-cubic subsample). If you were to render the edited footage only once, you may not notice degradation if rendering to MPEG2, however a re-render of said footage would degrade....how much depends on a number of factors, but is best avoided.
Throw interlacing into this mix and things can get very murky....
I'd suggest - upsample to 720p first, then render out to lossless AVI (though the file could be huge, then edit the AVI (add titles, effects, etc.) then render to either WMV9 or MPEG2 depending on final display method.
You'll only discover the best method for yourself through a bit of experimentation, but this has worked for me up-sampling HD10 720p footage to 1080....

Are you creating 2 Video Tracks separatley? If they are RIGHT ON TOP of each other you will not be able to see the other.

No they weren't on top of each other. I think I might have figured it out though, the only problem is when I render the project to MPG2, it doesn't look right, it is all cropped in the center of the screen, not widescreen like it shoudl be.

Any ideas on that?

Another annoying thing about groups is that when I turn on "ignore groups" in order to cut video without affecting audio, the video after the cut point is no longer part of the group and I have to totally re-form the group. Is there any way to prevent this behavior?

adding effect to track is causing slow preview
 

hi. i'm sort of new to vegas. i read through the manual, but like with most manuals, i forget most of it a minute after i finish reading it. i think i got the basics down and i'll just learn as i edit - a method which works best for me. from time to time, i'll post a question here on this message board, which has proven itself so helpful in the past.

today's question:
when i add an effect (saturization) to the video track i am working on, the preview suddenly becomes slow. is this expected behaviour? if not? what could be causing it?

It seems that if you split via scripting it does not lose it's group.