Chroma blur to minimize low-light noise
 

I thought I'd share this.
I was trying to boost colors/brightness of short video shot in pretty dark environment. So I applied ColorCurves and Saturation effects in Vegas. Resulting video was acceptable except that low-light noise was boosted as well. I tried free plug-ins Smart Smooth and Dynamic Noise Reduction to get rid of that but to my eyes they just make everything too digitized/squarish. Then I found that some people recommended to use soft blur filter which removes some details from the image.
Had nothing else to do, I tried Chroma Blur with max settings and voila... Colored noise became what looks like film grain and image detail wasn't destroyed.

Anybody has some tricks on color restoration of dark videos?

Select the graphic you want to replace. In the properties window (on the left side of the DVDA layout), under "Graphics" there is an option for "Thumbnail". Choose that and you can select any still or motion graphic you want (for motion, remember to select "animated" next to the "style" option). As long as you don't change your destination, I think that should do what you want it to.

V5 and ParticleIllusion
 

Hello all,
Does anyone here have any personal experience using Particleillusion with Vegas?
Do they "play nice" with each other?
Can you render out alpha channels in Particleillusion?

I have read about some import/exporting issues as far as AVI's & native DV footage at the Wondertouch website.

Thanks in advance.

Help...Capture problem from my GL2
 

I'm new to posting here but have been around the forums alot over the past year or so. Thanks to input from many of you I am the proud owner of a GL2 which I picked up this past December to go with Vegas 5 which I've been running with for the past year or so.

All of a sudden, I can't capture with Vegas. Actually I can capture some clips but not all of what I need or want from a days shooting. No problem last week capturing about 15 minutes of my daughter's basketball game all in one shot (clips), but today, I can't do anything with my son's rugby game. The program keeps crashing! Sometimes after 1 or 2 minutes...sometimes just before I capture all of it. Most of the time the program freezes and I lose everything yet other times I seem to be able to save some of the clips.

I've tried re-installing Vegas but to no avail! I can't seem to find anything in my searches here that points me in the right direction.

I'd appreciate any suggestions/pointers any of you might be able to provide.

I'm running XP PRO, Intel 3.0 and 1 Gig ram and have had excellent render times to mpeg2/DVD. Now I can't even get the footage into the machine reliably!

All I can say is great site here with excellent contributors. I've learned lots here...

Thanks!

I've moved your thread to our Vegas forum.

Vegas also has color correction tools (secondary CC?) that can
work on ranges like mid or highlights etc. So this should allow
you to do just some correction to those areas and leave the
dark stuff alone.

If not there should be ways with two tracks with the same footage
to merge and seperate the effects to control what you are
changing.

Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to check for
myself how this could work etc., so hopefully others will chime
in. If not I'll see if I can dig into Vegas myself at a later time to
see what is possible.

Usually you really need to combine a lot of effects to get the
look you want (that is what most professional do). Don't expect
one or two filters to be so flexible it can create exactly what you
want. Also check out this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=38499

It talks about noise reduction futher down as well.

Unfortunately, you haven't really given us a whole lot of information to go on. How about a small test - can you capture using Scenalyzer Live?

Welcome aboard DVInfo.net Ken!

Make sure you are also running the latest patch for your version of Vegas.

Thanks Edward...where can I find Scenalyzer?

Thanks Rob...I'll check for updates but am running right now with V5d. Are there patches as well somewhere in addition to this update?

As I mentioned...I can capture some clips during each attempt to transfer but the system eventually crashes/freezes - sometimes a minute or two in,sometimes ten minutes in. In some cases I have managed to save to the HD others not. The preview window actually freezes on a frame but the camera keeps on playing the footage.

It almost seems like a hardware issue where the HD isn't able to keep up to the camera. I am recording via firewire to seperate (from the Vegas drive)paired (RAID0) sata 200 gig hard drives 85% empty.

I'll keep at it and will try different firewires and plugins...my system has one in the front one in the back.

Thanks again

Other noise reduction tricks I know of:

Temporal/time-based noise reduction
The filter looks at changes from frame to frame. If there's little change in the pixels, then it'll assume the change is from noise and it will reduce things.

You can use filters for Virtualdub to do this I believe. Virtualdub works outside vegas.

Frame-based noise reduction
The filter looks at a pixel and compares it to its neighbours. If there's little difference then it'll assume the change is from noise and it will try to reduce it.

I think the median filter is like this? (I wouldn't use it though, it's really, really slow)

The dynamic noise reduction filter does one or both of the above, I haven't really investigated it.

Diffusion effects:
Duplicate the video onto itself.
Top layer, add gaussian blur.
On the bottom track, add unsharp mask to gain back (perceived) sharpness.

This is great for hiding artifacts.

I outline another method in the post Rob linked to, involving the overlay transfer mode. That works great, although it creates it own look. See the bottom of the first page at
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=38499

Luminosity blending mode:
In programs like Photoshop and After Effects, there's a luminosity blending mode which takes the luminance/brightness information from one layer and applies it to the layer below. So one layer provides the luminance information, and the other layer the color information.

What you can do is to use channel blend so you use the color channels (usually red and green) with the least noise to use at the luminance information. This should affect the look of your image and reduce noise a little. If you want to get fancier, you could use color curves on the luminosity layer and crush the shadows/blacks in the blue color channel, then turn the image into black and white. *(haven't tried that)

Color curves:
You can crush the shadows/blacks to hide noise. Draw the curve so that the bottom quarter is concave up. You'll likely need to compensate for the darker image so you'll probably need to make everything else concave down.

Overall this will increase contrast in the picture.


And there's always the reshoot filter. ;) (Ok maybe not.)

Looking for a script
 

I don't know if this script has yet been invented but would be the best script I could imagine.
I feel like I spend a great deal of time watching the pc render a project before I can move on to something else. Rendering slows the machine so much I can read e-mail but I certainly can't continue editing by running a second version of Vegas.

I do my wedding videos as separate projects for each sections, one would be "preparations", "ceremony" etc. What I would like to do is be able to have a half dozen projects rendered while I sleep. I can run two instances of Vegas and start them rendering but a third won't cut it. Certainly I can't do this with six.

I know of the script that will permit us to render to .avi, then .wmv, and others but I know of no script that will let me plug in the names of the projects that I would like to render.

Does this exist? If not I imagine this might prove useful to a lot of people.

Yep, this exists.

Check out the MultiRender tool which is part of the Veggie Toolkit. You can batch up as many renders as you want, start them up and go to sleep.

Randall

It was a bad cable! Funny how the simple things tend to get overlooked when one is in near panic mode. Never had one of these fail before though. Thanks

Yes, a bad cable can definitely cause that problem. As for Scenalyzer, you can find it at http://www.scenalyzer.com

Thanks Edward...I'll check it out for future reference. Thanks for taking the time!

Hi Shane,

I have a very little experience and the best success I enjoyed was to use a green background in PI and key it out in Vegas. I've had quite acceptable results with fires and steam.