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 :-/