Thanks Edward. I was hoping there was something more cool, but that works for me.

If Vegas took all the available memory for its RAM Render space, it would not have any left to actually work in do calcs, store temporary data, etc, and all your other programs would crash too. Actually, they would just start paging memory like crazy until your processor overheated. But computer would grind to a halt.

The default setting is 16MB RAM, so that is normal. Sony suggests that this be set at about 70% of available RAM. The mystery for you is why it's only showing 16 MBs available.

Gary

Alright, well, whatever the issue was, rendering it with Vegas' own WMV thingy did the trick. I'm proud, it's pretty sharp, pretty decent looking, and I shaved about 4 megs off the old file size, somehow (I had it up on my site before, and wanted to make changes, hence this new fiasco). I did halve the framerate, but I don't think it looks to bad on a computer.

Glenn & Gary,

Yes, my bad about the KB. The old computer has 128 MG ram.

In Vegas 5, properties it says 16 MB in default and also says 16 MB available. I can not increase the amount over 16MB so it seems that is all that's available. The computer has 128 MB ram in it. Based on this I would hope to be able to select the 89-90 MB ram which is 70% of 128 just like Gary demonstrates in his Vegas 5 Companion DVD. So yes, Gary is correct in that my question is why does Vegas only show 16 MB available when in fact there is 128 inside? Once again, upon boot up the display even says 130,548.

Thanks for any help.

TEB

Don't forget that within that 128 Meg you also have to allow for room for the OS, Vegas, any running services, etc...

16meg is the max with 128 meg. Add more memory, you can choose a bigger number.

Pixlelated AVI playback
 

Windows Media Player
WinDVD and
Quicktime Player

all play back my downloaded and rendered DV (.avi files) with a lot of pixelation. The Vegas preview, even at its largest, does not. When rendered as Mpeg-2 they're fine.

I'd like to be able to view .avi full screen. Is there a codec I need to get?

Well , there is a first for everything so here is my first answer to a post :)

John , if I were you I would include a text media like Ed instructed but you could also apply the cookie cutter FX (squar shape cutter). Now on you're text you can apply compositing , flashes , transitions etc... Just reading your post gave me cool idea's with what I just mentionned

See ya

Big pixel render , not the same question as Fred
 

Hi all,


I just rendered my latest project without compression , my footage was pixelated a lot because i shot it in a nightclub without any real extra lighting.

I use the quickblur effect to reduce the pixelation but it's still very much there after rendering.

Any suggestions for reducing the pixelation

Thanks

Thanks Edward, now I will concentrate on finishing the new computer system.

TEB

If you are running WinXP it uses a fair bit of RAM. I think minimum requirement is 128MB (?). If you have a shared video card (probably unlikely though) that'll use a bit more RAM too.

Philippe

I can't envision what that would look like. Maybe I am doing something different than you with my text? I am too much of a rookie. Wanna post a sample? LOL

With 1 Gig, my max is 895 meg.

Sony Pictures Sound Effects Series
 

I just ran across a review of Sony Pictures Sound Effects Series by Charlie White. The Series sells for $349.95 on B&H. Has anyone used this yet?

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/products/showproduct.asp?PID=916

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=29761

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=NavBar&A=search&Q=&ci=10001

These folks http://www.womble.com/products.htm claim to have a program that does frame-accurate MPEG-2 editing. I've not used it so can't say whether or how well it works. If you give it a try please give us a report, OK?

Good luck.

Dennis

I hitnk DSE posted some comments about it maybe two weeks ago?

I've used it a number of times (Womble's MPEG Video Wizard) and it really does what it claims.

After you've done your editing (and it is frame-accurate indeed), you click on render and it shows you graphically what and where will be re-encoded and what will be left as it is. If you've just done cuts, nothing will be re-encoded. If you've done any transitions, just those will be re-encoded (and very quickly).

It has a very pleasant and fast intuitive interface with multiple tracks and input and output windows, a lot of nice transitions and filters and effects, titles etc. Of course if you use any filters, those sections will need to be re-encoded.

There's a free 30 day trial. I'm very pleased with it for mpeg work.

The only thing I didn't like was if my audio was AC3 and I wanted to add a fade, Video Wizard converted the audio to mpeg (this is a limitation of AC3 editing, though).

Hope this helps.

Tony

Hi ,


I would if I had one :)


One quick example would be to do a mask with your text and some footage of fire.

You put your text at the bottom of the screen and with the cookie cutter you slice of the rest of the screen

You could have scrolling fiery text at the bottom of the screen , that would be cool.

I'm still a rookie myself but I am learning all the time , this is what I like so much about NLE with Vegas.

For example I just finish one of my project today (with the help of you and a couple of others :)

Very easy : text event with a nice font , white letters over black screen. It ended up not looking good. i thought then that the same logo with letters outlined in white instead of being all white would look good.

Fool around a bit but couldn't find the way to do it and ... BINGO , reverse engineering:

Instead of having the white letters on top of black background I will do black letters on black background and apply a white outline effect to the text. i had to play in the dark a bit because i was working black on black but it ended up being exactly what I wanted to be.

I am discovering that by thinking backward instead of forward and sideways instead of straight forward I (we) now have limitless possibilities with the wide range of effects available in Vegas.

It was difficult at first and there are still some stuff that I don't comprehend but by keeping on fooling around with it I'll get to know it on no time :)

Have fun :)

Oh, now I understand. I was having trouble envisoning hoe the cookie cutter came into it. I would do that effect differently, but I understand now and you are right, it would be cool.

I too am learning that there are ten ways to get different effects, and I just have to learn how all the pieces hook together. Even more interesting is that the sequence you link them totally affects the end result. Its more than learning a new language its learning a new way to think.

Your probably running XP.If you check your allocated memory it will show your app and Xp has eaten your memory.256 is minimum for XP and prefer 512 or more IMHO
Like Edward said add the memory
smitty

I must confess that I haven't read everything of your "rant", but:

- why are you doing slow-motion after a conversion to progessive? I would slow down the interlaced footage which creates progressive on the fly

- it is a known fact that most NLE's aren't very good at slowing stuff down, that's why there are specific programs to do it

- I didn't quite follow your 4 min 37 story. I've never had a problem exporting anything in Vegas 4 or 5

Can your monitor display a PAL signal?

What are the Vegas project settings? I assume you set it to PAL?

the problem lies in the fact that even with supersampling, im gettin really REALLY choppy slow mo.. so from interlaced video to frame mode to slow mo.. obviously im losing frames....

Why is it obvious you're losing frames? Naturally some things slow down better than others. If you slow down a person walking across the camera it is not going to look as good as slowing down a person walking toward the camera. Just the nature of the beast.

On top of that, rendering in interlaced is a nightmare and i no longer wish to put my HDD to that much strain.. i kid you not.. a 2 hour wedding took 33 hours to render and al i had was a widescreen mask, and my basic film bleach bypass, effects being colour curves, sepia, glow and corrector.

Not exactly true. You're doing a LOT of changes to the footage - that's what's taking the time. It's not like the hard drive is going to be constantly hitting over that period of time. You've added a lot of CPU intensive effects. Also, if you're going to render to interlaced, shoot interlaced. Up above you mentioned rendering to 25p!

Theres a myriad of other issues with it, such as output files only allowing a playback of up to 4 minutes and 37seconds.. irrespective of the output file type, if i wanted to encode in another app, such as procoder, forget it..

I have never seen this. I routinely render multi-gig files usually in the 2 hour range. Never seen one that did not play back correctly in other apps. 4:37 sounds suspiciously like some app on your system is hitting the 1 Gig barrier.

Have you tried holding down CTRL-SHIFT and then starting Vegas? This will reset everything back to the factory defaults. What happens when you render then? Do things look any different? Can other apps see past the 1Gig point then?

I know you're frustrated at this point but some of these issues you mention aren't problems on my system. I have no problems with other apps seeing the full file. You also have another option you haven't mentioned and that is to frameserver to the other app.

Ray: ehm, what has a DVX book todo with the Vegas NLE?

do you have an external firewire drive connected while you are trying to preview?

What resolution is your screen at?

Both WMP and Quicktime play DV AVI files at lower resolution per
default. See the following thread for full information:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=31220

You did use DV for the compression, right?

Full screen playback is a simple as double-clicking the movie that is
playing inside Windows Media Player.

I can't see how low light causes pixelation, it should cause
(excessive) video noise, not pixelation. Are you describing this
good enough? Perhaps you can put up a picture somewhere?

Linking menus
 

I am doing a project that calls for three menus on a DVD. My question is this, how can I set it up to automatically go to the next menu when the last one stops. I want to be able to go from 1 to 2 to 3 without having to click on the individual icons. Thanks. Bob

What do you mean by "when the last one stops"?

I think you are right Rob , I used the wrong term here. So , any effect that could reduce it besides quick blur which I used heavily so far.


Thanks

Vegas 5 & DVDA 2- Best way to keep the novice customer from copying with ease?
 

I know anything can be copied but is there a way to keep it difficult for the novice computer user. OTHER than scratching it. I will only be producing one to ten dvds. Nothing spectacular just something to keep anyone from using a disk copy utility to replicate my work easily.

are you saying that you want the menus to become visible as part of the playback? if you want it to look like they are automatically clicked or something, you could just encode 'em as graphics inside the source dv avi, so that they would be encoded during the mpeg2 step... the dvd would be one long mpeg2 file.

if you have 3 seperate mpeg2 files, you can make the end of each file go to a menu, which is set up to autoplay after a pre-determined amount of time... that's how it works in dvdlab, anyway.

Nope. Even the hollywood DVDs WITH protection are easily copied. Best, instead, is to give them added value. Make the package so attractive they'd rather buy than copy.

To copy the hollywood DVD's you would have to research a little. I am only trying to stop someone puting the disk in a computer and just copying to another disk without any other changes.
A basic protection.

How do I buy stock footage?
 

I am looking to buy a small stock footage library to assist me in building my promo materials, leaders for training videos, etc. But I have a few questions for people that have used stock libraries before.

1. Which format is best? Should I buy mini-DV or DVD ? If DVD, is one format better going into Vegas than another? The library I am looking at comes in NTSC 480x720 (DV) or Quicktime 480x720 (DVD). Obviously DVD is easier to access and manage since I do not have to capture clips. But will quality be acceptable?

2. Having never used this type of material, I see that a lot of clips are only a few seconds each. Are these useful, or should I be watching running times of each clip when evaluating a library? My thought is with 10 seconds or more, it would be easy to use two different pieces of the same shot without it looking repetitive.

3. Does anyone have any partcular favorite libraries that are cheap? Or does anyone have an opinion (good or bad) about the Fuzion Films library that I am considering?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=3866850898&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT

DV format would be more Vegas-friendly.

Gary

Rats. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. Its a lot harder to search, manage and capture than on DVD. :(

If it's only one to ten DVDs couldn't you just easily keep tabs on those people? Just a thought.

2- If not, you could:
A- Burn dual layer. Very expensive right now. People are slightly limited by this as the media is very expensive and they may never have burned dual layer before. However, this is still fairly easy to bypass.
B- Macrovision or other commercial copy protection. If you do a search you will bring up threads on this. I'm not sure it's economical for just 10 DVDs. It does make your DVD harder to copy.

I am not clear what you mean by 1-10 DVDs. If this is one project you want to protect, just custom burn each DVD with their name on it. Unless someone de-authors it, the original name will appear on any copies, thus making it easy to prove who allowed the copy to get out. If you are doing a bunch of projects at 1-10 DVDs each (like weddings or biographies) just let it go. All you will do is piss off your clients.

I charge $25 for each copy. If someone wants to go to Kinkos for $18 and get an inferior product (in many ways), they are welcome to do so.

Advance Capture - Dimmed Delete Option?
 

I've been using AdvCap very heavily over the past week.

Once clips are captured I get the final confirmation screen showing thumbnails of the "captured" clips. Why when I select/highlight a thumbnail and right click is the option to now DELETE greyed out? I have several reasons why I wanted to delete one or two clips after capture and thinking further about a clip, having this as an option is great, but why is it greyed out? Obviously this Screen is providing me with this option to do exactly that - "Which ones do you now not want?" - to have a last option to review and delete if I so wish. Then why is it dimmed/greyed out?

Thoughts? Correct for you too? Am I doing something wrong .. very possible!

Best regards,

Grazie