I've seen Vegas work with that version of the Tascam unit. Very neat.

The faders adjust the volume on each audio track. The buttons can mute the track or arm it to record. Feedback seems to be instantaneous.

I'm guessing that this is a Centrino (Pentium M processor) system, in which case the 1.6 processor speed as efficient as a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz system so processor speed wise he's probably going to be fine.

Thanks for your reply Glenn! I am curious how it can be configured to be used for other (video) edit functions.

DSE, have you had any experience with this unit to compare to the Mackie control surface?

Thanks again!


Lance

Lance, I've seen it work, and played with it a bit....no real difference. I mean, a control surface is a control surface...it just depends on what look, feel, and features you want. The Tascam is a great tool, no doubt. I happen to prefer the Mackies, but then again, they gave me a great price on several seconds/Bstock, and so we have 4 of the Mackies.

i have a averatec 4265 with a m1.6 that i use on the road.
it works good with V6 on SD .. HDV ?? not so good ..for HDV i switch to HP AMD 3700 laptop ...

from my experience a M 1.6 doesn't come close to a PIV 3.2 when editing video or using combustion .. it might be as fast using word or other software that doesn't require alot of CPU power but M's just can't handle massive CPU consumption

Film-like color curves with legal levels
 

What they are:
If you just do a s-shaped gamma curve in Vegas, that can actually push colors below and above digital black levels, causing clipping and loss of image detail in highlights and shadows. That isn't film-like at all. To get things right, you need to get color curves with points at digital black and white level.

Download them off of:
http://www.glennchan.info/Proofs/dvi...lor-curves.veg

You can read the text if you want. But if you're lazy, open up the first and last clips and save those as presets.

2- Note: You should be using the Sony DV codec (this is the default in Vegas5 and V6), and targetting DV or MPEG2 via DVD architect.
If you are targetting other formats, it may be "computer RGB" color space and these curves are kinda inappropriate. Apply the color corrector filter with "convert studio RGB to computer RGB" or the levels filter.

Enjoy!

Magic Bullet Editor's / Wrong Levels
 

I don't really use MBE but was wondering how you'd get proper levels using it. A lot of the time you want to work with studio RGB within Vegas (16-235 instead of 0-255). MBE always pushes values towards 0-255, which is not what you want.

The following would work, but is kind of a waste of rendering time and MBE's floating point processing:
Use the color corrector, "studio RGB to computer RGB" preset
MBE
Use the color corrector, "computer RGB to studio RGB" preset

The downside is the extra rendering and banding you might pickup along the way.

Glenn,

A little over or under won't hurt anyone. Particularly, super-whites up to 110% IRE (255) tend to work just fine. Plus, you're going to run everything through a Broadcast Safe plug-in prior to broadcast, right?

Josh

Feathering video edges
 

Im cant seem to find out how to feather edges on video. for example if im matting someone in another shot but the edges are still a little rough cause of a slight light difference, i just wanna fade the video out onto the other layer. Can anyone help me?

Gary,

What's the "Maximum Number of Rendering Threads" I should be using for my machine using Vegas 6? Should I keep it at the default, which is "4" ?

I'm using a Pentium 4 at 3.20 Ghz, hyperthreading, 2GB dual channel DDR SDRAM at 400 Mhz.

--Dale

P.S. I really am learning a lot from your five dvd tutorial. Do you have a learning dvd on Acid 5 or can you suggest one?

Leave it on the default of 4.

If, for some reason, you want it to behave more like Vegas 5, you can reduce it down to 1.

Add a border FX using the "Soft Edge" preset (adjust as needed). At the bottom of the FX box is a timeline with the word "border" to the left. To the left of that word is a small triangle. You'll need to click on that triangle so that the effect will apply to the resized image instead of the entire screen.

thanks a ton, ill try it in a little bit to see how it goes, thanks again.

The broadcast safe filter will just clip off values about 235 (if you use the 7.5IRE setup presets). For DVD, you don't really need to use it other than seeing how your video will look like on DVD players that clip illegal colors (illegal as in not in the 16-235 range; many DVD players do this).

The point is... those curves can help you avoid clipping important image detail.

I am not seeing this in my testing. I have a Pentium M 1.8Ghz laptop and a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz desktop and the VASST render test takes almost twice as long on the Pentium M 1.8 when compared with the Pentium 4 3.0. So a PM 1.6 is no where near a P4 3.2! I would definitely avoid Pentium M’s for video work and get a laptop that has a real Pentium 4 or AMD.

Here is what I observed using the original VASST render test on the PC’s I have used Vegas on:

Pentium 4 1.7Ghz = 3:21
Pentium M 1.8Ghz = 2:48 (33 seconds faster than P4 1.7)
Pentium 4 3.0Ghz = 1:35 (73 seconds faster than Pentium M 1.8)

So while the Pentium M 1.8 is faster than a P4 1.7, it is not even close to a P4 3.0

~jr

Audio problem, deleted track, need best way to recover
 

For example.

I have a three camera edit, with three associated audio tracks. I deleted one of the audio tracks. What would be the best way in vegas to re-connect the audio.

Any ideas?
I have tried just bringing in the avi and moving the audio to match but it doesn't work very well. I have cut out sections and it doesn't sync up?

Thanks,

Jon

The easiest option is via scripting. For example, if you delete the audio - select the video and Excalibur can bring back the audio. If you delete the video, select the audio and Excalibur can bring back the video. Ultimate S can also return the missing audio for a video event.

To do it manually, you can double-click the event, open it in the trimmer (which will have that section selected) and then return the audio.

Jan Ozer says the winner is - Vegas!!!
 

This month's issue of eventDV has Jan's final article,
Battle of the Software NLEs, Part 4: Slideshows, Rendering, and Conclusions at
http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/Read...rticleID=10771.

Final scores are as follows:
Premiere Pro - 18
Final Cut Pro - 21.5
Xpress Pro - 14.5
Liquid Edition - 17.5
Vegas - 23.5

There are several comments he made over the course of the series that I'd disagree with him on (such as no batch render capabilities in Vegas 6) but at least he's finally seen the light :-)

Mike

good read. what nle preference did he have before?

I assume it's just DV as I tried renaming it to .avi and it plays but no luck as it is still out of sync... it doesn't "go out of sync" it just IS out of sync in vegas... I render a small part in the middle and it's off. I am working on a 2.4ghz celeron with 1gig of ram. It was captured and edited on a 1ghz G4 and there were NO sync problems what so ever on his system. and playing the 2gig file in media player 6.4 also has no problems all the way to the end.

Just checked and it's out of sync in dvda 3 also :-/

Wow, didn't even no it would do that! Thanks I will give it a try.

Thanks

Jon

Post Star/bling/shiny effect
 

Im gonna start editing the first rap video pretty soon and in one of the shots, i need to add a shiny star like effect on a certain spot. can i do this in vegas with a plug in or should i use after effects?

Encoding for Quicktime with 3ivx and Vegas
 

Well, I'm a new correspondent for http://rocketboom.com (shameless promotion) and they would prefer to get stuff encoded with 3ivx - although they are very flexible. So I downloaded 3ivx and put it in the video plugin folder. But Vegas doesn't seem to find it. Has anybody had any experience with this program? Do you know where you should unpack it/install it? I'm running Vegas 6.0C and would love to hear anybody else's experience with this.

But on the other hand, if somebody else has a good alternative for encoding Quicktime, I'd be glad to hear about that. I understand that AVID Express does a good job ( and I guess it's free) but frankly I'm not in the mood to learn one more NLE system.

Thanks for the advice!
Milt

Dale,

Glad you are finding my videos useful.

If you want to be working on your computer while you are rendering, you can get better performance by reducing the threads. Otherwise leave it at 4.

The only Acid training video I know of is the one from VASST for Acid 4 with Rudy Sarzo.

Gary

Redering time 1080i or 720p
 

Rendering times. The native of the HDV footage is 1080i off the fx1. For rendering if I use the 720p template would it a faster render than 1080i???

go grab particle illusion and dont look back.

SE is going for under a hundred bux

Slightly disrelated question - when I do a selective pre-render, I get a good playback on my external of how the final video will look but if I do a Dynamic RAM preview it comes out jerky and nothing like it should (I have 1GB RAM and have set the Dynamic RAM amount to 800MB). Is this jerky performance usual and if so, what's the value of the Dynamic RAM preview?

Thanks everyone; and Gary: I just this morning discovered "The Sony Seminar Series: ACID Pro 5" dvd training disks.

Thanks again--


Dale

Faster? No. Think about it: Going from 1080i to 1080i is a straight re-encode. Going to 720p requires a resize, deinterlace, and re-encode. The speed of your PC will determine how much longer 720p takes to render but it will definitely be longer than going straight to 1080i from 1080i source because the computer has to do more calculations to make 1080i into 720p.

~jr

copying tracks to another Vegas
 

Hi Edward,
I tried the nesting, but still had the same problem. I could not copy a whole track with the key frames and all, to another instance of Vegas.
The only thing I managed to do was shift select the motion key frames copy and paste, then do the same with the shadow key frames etc. This obiously takes more time.
Maybe a future Vegas could add the ability to copy a track with all the key frames.(from another instance of Vegas) Would there be a reason for not allowing this?
Mike

Did you install it? I'm not sure what you mean by the words "put it in the video plugin folder"?

You should install 3ivx on your PC. Then go into Vegas and make a render template for it. Start with a template that is close to the dimensions you want and then press the Custom button, go to the Video tab, and select 3ivx in the Video format dropdown list. Finally save this under a new name. You will now have a render template for Divx in Vegas.

~jr

I can save you the time to sync but I can’t create the titles for you. Downlaod the VASST Freeware script called SubText. It will allow you to load the DVDA .sub file and it will create regions on the timeline in Vegas with the subtitle text as the region label. All you have to do is double-click in each region to select it, add a Generated Text Media (which will default to the length of the region) and cut-n-paste the region label into the generated media text.

This should at least speed things up a bit.

~jr

Hi John,

Thanx for this. I'll check it out this weekend, it sounds good enough. The worst part of work is the syncing to the actual audio which is a horrible work.
I never used a script before, but I'm sure even I will find a way to get it to work.

Best regards,
Peter

Ok so when I say I put it in the video plugin folder, what I meant to say was that I installed it, and when I installed it, it asked what folder I wanted to unzip the file to - that's when I thought that I should unzip the file to that folder. Perhaps I should just let it install in the folder that came up which was c:/program files/3ivx

Does that help?

Thanks again,
Milt

Gotcha covered. We have an on-line tutorial called Using Scripts in Sony Vegas Software that will help you get started.

~jr

Yes that does help. I would uninstall it and reinstall it in the Program Files folder like it wanted to do. Vegas (and all other programs) will find it because it will register itself as a new video codec, not because it’s in a particular directory.

It should still work, but I would re-install it into its own directory just in case you uninstall Vegas at some future point, you don’t mess up 3ivx.

My other instructions still apply as to how to get Vegas to use it for rendering. You have to build a custom AVI rendering template that uses the 3ivx codec.

~jr

Indeed that make sense, I kinda figure that also but wasn't sure. Thanks!!

Worked great. Thanks as always.

Jon

powerpoint > Vegas ?
 

How can I get powerpoint presentations into Vegas ...just stills of graphs and stuff like that
Thanks

Vince

The easiest method is to go to the File/Save As in PowerPoint, and save the slides as jpgs or png files that Vegas can import.
Then in your Vegas prefs, set the "Still Image Length" in your Options>Prefs>Editing dialog, to the length of time you'd like the slides to appear in Vegas.
That's it....just drag em' to the timeline in Vegas in the order you'd like them to appear.