Could be a heat issue. How hot is the CPU getting?

Could be a bad piece of media on the timeline.

Are you rendering a bunch of high resolution images?

You might also try pre-rendering over the area where it's dying to rule out the bad media option.

Bang for the Processor Buck
 

Vegas 6 and Connect HD should be in the mail tomorrow. I am very much looking forward to learning and editing with it in HD. Having had no experience with Vegas, and knowing that for HDV editing a 2.8ghz processor is the minimum required, I am curious as to whether bumping up to a 3.4ghz processor for $270 would give an appreciable improvement in editing speed/performance. If not, I'll just save up for a major upgrade when prices drop on the dual setups. Currently for editing my system is an Asus P4C800 2.8ghz 2g DDR 400 RAM and NVIDIA 5700 ultra video card, Seagate Cheetahs 3 x 74 g and one 300gb 10,000 rpm drives.
Curt

Curt, a quick rule of thumb is this:

Divide the processor speeds and multiply the increase by 90%.

This works decently for applications that are highly dependent on the CPU, such as video editing. In the case of Vegas, benchmarks show that you don't need to multiply by 90%.

3.4/2.8 = 21.4% speed increase.

If the processor versions are different, you may see an additional 6% increase from the "C" version of a Pentium to "E" AKA Prescott (the Prescott tends to be slower at non-video editing tasks though).

Check that the socket type is the same.

2- In my opinion, hold off for dual core. 21.4% speed increase is not worth it.

Thanks for the input. I suppose there really isn't a function within Vegas that will be significantly enhanced by such a small increase in performance. Looks like delayed gratification wins again.
Curt

I am rendering video and audio together. Not still pictures.

is there a program out there where I can check to see if the computer is getting overheated?

check cPU temperature
 

When your computer goes to boot up, hit DEl to enter into your Setup screen. If you scroll through your options, (I'm not sure of which one it is...I have since moved to a MAC) you will get an operating temp on your CPU

BRyon <><

Don't forget that "minimum specifications" is a little misleading as a term.

They'd upset and offend too many folks if they said "the fail-safe, if you try anything less than this you're on your own, because if you have any problems we told you not to use anything slower than this and we can't be held responsible for your wanting to go ahead anyway"...

It's like "default" settings in software etc. What they really mean is "outrageously conservative approach that should work for every circumstance with average just barely acceptable results that only the discerning would want to improve upon"

Fortunately, Vegas has not only Defaults that should give pleasant results from HDV, but also easy to find "Custom" options on nearly everything in the interface!! A few other NLE's make their "Custom" options a treasure hunt devised by some fiendish and perverted sadist.

Bottom line: your machine as it stands will work fine with HDV, as long as you remember that using the m2t as captured from the camera, will be devilishly slow on any system... but that's what ConnectHD is for.

You can capture straight to Vegas if you desire, but I prefer to capture using ConnectHD's HD Link utility. Hit the "Prefs" button to set the capture directory on a nice fast drive or RAID array, set the capture to m2t... and after it's captured, go to the "Convert" tab and select the m2ts just captured, and convert to CFHD AVI. (You could select the option to capture both m2t and CFHD AVI, but I've just found doing the conversion after the m2t capture works 'smoother')

I guess you could also capture using Vegas - which'll give you the m2t clips, and then use HD Link to convert to CFHD AVI. Reason being that ConnectHD has the latest CFHD enhacements, while the Vegas CFHD intermediate template makes use of the earlier CFHD iteration. It'll work, but there's a few extra tricks up ConnectHD's sleeve (just check the frame rate conversion list in the HD Link capture prefs for instance), and Cineform is constantly improving their codec and applications.

Good luck; and ENJOY!!!

Thanks. I'm going to see if the 2.8 ghz works out and if it is for some reason too sluggish, I'll look at changes. Time will tell. Your encouragement, helpful suggestions and reassurance are greatly appreciated.
Curt

As Edward said a bad clip on the timeline may cause this.Take a look at the timeline at what clip it is failing on.Then as a test create a duplicate veg file and change that clip to a different clip.Then try rerendering to see if it gets by.If heat was an issue it would likely fail in different locations.

A little update... the batch render in Vegas has some issues. The main thing is I can't set clip names or anything. They don't respond to the region names. Just a 0 through infinity numbering scheme.

Any further ideas on using the batch render tool?

Thanks,

DJ

Well... you could either change the code in the included batch script to name the files as YOU desire or you could use one of the other options available such as the Veggie Toolkit which I mentioned. The DVD Asset Collector in Excalibur will also render regions and allow using the region name as the file name.

Matching track motion speeds?
 

I have to tracks of video that I want to transition from one to the other.
I want to "drag" the new track in with a graphic element which then continues off screen.

I've been able to pretty closely match the graphic elements (a skull) speed ( on it's own track) with the new track pushing in by using track motion for both and just tweaking.

Is there a way to exactly match their speed? The skull (with a transparent bg) pushes in on the first track and when it's halfway down it drags in the second layer of video and the skull continues offscreen hopefully at the same speed both it and the second vid track came in on.

I've also tried the parent track motion tool, but that didn't work since the track with the skull keeps moving off screen.

Again, I can make it look "good enough" by dorking with it, but I'm certain I'm overlooking a very basic device to match the speed on these two transitions.

First thing, make sure the "Smoothness" setting on ALL keyframes is set to ZERO (the default is ONE). This should go a long way in helping you make the speeds equal.

time synch?
 

new to vegas 6 wondering if anyone has any tips for time synching 2 sources for matrix audio, sbd/aud

would also be the same to synch new audio to a dvd, ie mattman_video grateful dead dvds

Are you talking about a "slide" transition maybe?

well,

I had someone go through and help me do a serious clean up on the computer and get rid of a lot of unnecessary stuff that I didn't need taking up way too much room.
in the end, it was space issue. there wasn't enough space for the all the render processing.
i got my PF Usage on my computer way down, and the render worked wonderfully.

Getting the Audio Back
 

Hi

If I import a clip into vegas and then delete the audio track, is there anyway to get that audio back without having to re-import the original clip ?

This may be a workflow thing, but I prefer to edit the images first then work on the audio and find that the audio clutters up the timeline. When I have arranged video clips, sure I could click on them and move the audio to separate tracks, but invariably the video track moves a little.

Also, if I have a long clip that I want to chop into smaller ones, what;s the best way to do this ? I did use the trimmer at first to make subclips, but this also trims the audio & video so I can't extend it when editing, so what I have been doing is splitting events in the timeline, very timeconsuming.

Am I missing something about the workflow ?

First, forget the TRIMMER when editing. Place the CURSOR where you want to cut-press "S" and its done. 2nd-as for bringing back the audio after editing-I'm curious-well let me say this first-the audio and video ars linked unless you unlink them so you'd need to bring the clip back in and SYNCH the audio back to the video but now my curious question-why are you editing the video without the audio unless you plan on doing voiceover stuff otherwise you're adding an extra and sometimes difficult step of cutting the auido to exactly the same as the video and then SYNCHing everything up. Perhaps I'm missing something but when I edit if I'm using native audio I'll always edit the A&V together.

Don

This is all probably just part of my Vegas learning curve (having come from MSP Pro). I am editing a dialogue sequence that has the same thing shot from 3 angles. I am not finding it easy to split the clips up and arrange them quickly. I want to use the two shot as a guide to the sequence and drop in the various closeups and use the associated sound.

I was trying to work with all three 'long' takes of the same scene (two shot & two reverse angles) and split them as I went along, but the timeline just gets cluttered. So my thinking was that if I split them all into shots, and say have them available in the project media window, I would be able to just drag them in as required and adjust the length to get the video & audio as I need.

The only reason I wanted to get rid of the audio initially was to free some clutter on the timeline. The visuals are easy to see what goes where, but the audio is not as clear, especially where one video clip is put on top of another (i.e. I was putting a close up clip over the top of the 2 shot to get timing for the edit points).

The EASIEST way is via scripting. For example, the "Restore Missing A/V" tool in Excalibur will return missing audio for the selected video clip or restore missing video for the selected audio clip. Ultimate S will also restore missing audio for selected video.

Definitely the first step anyone should do after loading Vegas the first time is to go to both File - Properties and Options - Preferences and change all of the temporary and other folders AWAY from the "C" drive. Glad to hear you found the problem.

A slide or a push would have worked equally as well. What was getting me was matching the third layer to the layer that was sliding in and keeping the speed of the third layer as it moved OS and the B layer remined full screen.

Using Edwards idea (Thanks Edward) I was able to get the events painfully close, and then I realized that I didn't like the look of it <sigh> It looked funny to have the two layers come in together, have the B layer stop, and then the C layer keep going.
It looks much better to fly the C layer across the B layer as it pushes or slides in.

I'm slowly learning to take the same tactics with editing as with shooting. Plan everything out ahead of time and even doing mini-storyboards. There will still be trial and error but hopefully less of the shotgun "hey, let's try this approach"

St. Louis Vegas Users
 

If you're near the St. Louis area, a meeting is being planned for Jan. 28, 2005. If you're interested in attending, please send me an e-mail and I'll keep you informed as details are finalized.

Audio track FX
 

Just an enquiry, when I use a audio FX preset at track level and save the project, the next time I go back in the Audio fx chain, the preset has reset to "Untitled", has this really happened or is it that it is set as default to open as "untitled".
Or is it that I don't have something enabled.
I'm not using any automation at all.
Regards
Colin Rayner

This is normal. Basically the presets are just that - a group of settings that are premade. Once you've picked the preset, Vegas doesn't have to know a preset name - just what settings were chosen.

It might be nice if it did remember the name (as you could easily go back to see which preset you had chosen). However, as soon as you change any setting, the preset name is no longer valid.

Thanks Ed,
Again...................

Mouse scroll timeline
 

I wonder if it's possible work with scroll weel on mouse , for frame by frame editing the timeline. With simple drag the edit line, it's not so easy to find desired frame to cut.
Regards.

By enlarging the timeline you will be able to get to frame by frame-you can use the mouse wheel to enlarge the timeline or use the + sign on the right side of the timeline to do the same
Don

AC-3 to DVD Architect
 

Just checking, having rendered my project into 2 files, Mpeg2 for the video stream and AC-3 for the audio stream, I import the two into Architect, do nothing more to the audio file, create a button for the Mpeg2 file and all is well?
Every resource that I have checked is quite vague on what to do with your AC-3 file once you add it to your project in DVD Arch.

There is nothing more to do, or that can be done with the AC3 file. If it's the same name as the MPEG, and in the same folder, DVDA should automatically marry the two together. If for some reason it doesn't, double click the mpeg to load it into the Timeline, and drag the AC3 file to the audio track in the timeline.
That's all you need to do.

Video Timer
 

Is there a way I can insert a video timer, that will count with the video. What I want to do is give a sample video that someone can look at and say for example: At 3:43 minutes there is XYZ and I want that cut out.

I'm looking for a timer over the video itself.

Thanks for that Spot, I have the Intro to DVD Arch and V6 Fasst but didn't get my head around that.
Thanks again

Look at the Timecode FX. Just add it to the track and that should do it.

Thanks Edward, since I'm doing it on a multi track project, I just added it to a transparent layer. Thanks again. BTW, I've been enjoying your newsletters.

Thanks. Glad you got the timecode to work and you're finding the newsletters useful.

<since I'm doing it on a multi track project, I just added it to a transparent layer.>

You could drop the Timecode FX right onto the Preview Widow to apply it to the whole project.

Gary