Problem with Wax Plug-in
 

The wax-plug-in keeps giving errors when using in version 7 of vegas. I can't find any info wether the problem is that it still doesn't support vegas 7. Wax keeps telling me that I should check if scripting is enabled (and refuses to open), but of course it is....

You might try checking in the support area on the debugmode.com website.

Border
 

Hi - Does anyone know where I might find a border from like a silent film when they used the title cards?

Copy to clipboard question
 

Hi all,
I am new to vegas,
I used to see the FX's effect on the preview window (on the full window),
but after I pressed the 'copy to clipboard' button, the best I can see is a half frame (the other half is bypassed, or showing the frame I copied to the clipboard), HOW can I see the FX effect on a full frame ?
Thanks, Sassi.

Why are you copying to the clipboard? Put the FX on the clip and play it out. If you don't like it open up the clip and remove it. The clip board worls really well for color correction-pick the frame you want to match, copy to the clipboard then move the cursor over to the clip you want to work on, press the slit screen icon and do the work to the clip.

Don

Thanks again for the help. This is going to be a slow process.

Vegas 7 and Blackmagic
 

Try as I might I can not get Vegas to recognize the Blackmagic Design Decklink (device unavailable). Works fine with Vegas 6, do I need to uninstall?

Jim

Don,
Thats what I usualy do, but i mistakenly copied a frame to the clipboard.
Can I 'empty' the clipboard ? again I preffer to see a full window of the effects.

You don't need to 'empty' the clip board and to see the clip or frame full frame it sounds like you have the split screen icon pressed on. It's next to the clip board icon in the preview screen, turn it off and you should be fine.

Don

To convert from 4:3 to 16:9 you should first change your project properties to DV Widescreen. Then use Pan/Crop on each event and apply the 16:9 Widescreen crop setting. Check to make sure something important didn’t get cropped off of the top or bottom and move the crop as needed. (I like to lock the movement to vertical only so I don’t move the crop sideways) Then proceed to the next event. Finally render using one of the Widescreen templates.

This process will, of course, decrease your vertical resolution and that decrease may be noticeable on a 50” plasma, but you got what you got. There aren’t a lot of options.

~jr

I just let Vegas to the SD downconvert for me. It does an outstanding job at this. I go right from the timeline to NTSC Widescreen MPEG2. Be sure to check the option to Stretch video to fill output because HDV is 1.3333 aspect and DV Widescreen is 1.2121 and if you don’t you will have a slight black pillarbox (vertical black bands on the left and right) which may be noticeable if you are viewing on a LCD/Plasma widescreen display.

~jr

Vegas 7 preview window resolution issue
 

I'm having this resolution horror issue on my 2nd LCD. It looks ok for Vegas 6 but when the same settings is applied on V7, it sucks! Anyone with the same problem?

While I have not personally used a core2 for video editing, all of the reviews make it sound like these chips are great for such tasks, so I think you'll be fine editing on a laptop. I think whatever brand of pc you go with, you'll want to upgrade to at least 2gb of ram. If the 5400 drive becomes an issue, get an external firewire drive/case.

Hehe, two words; Big Corportation, it is inevidable, imo that Dell will screw alienware up.

Back to the topic though, I just bought an HP 8000t 2.0ghz laptop. I've not really had a chance yet to put it though the paces, but I've been pleased so far, with exception to the @#$! bloatware.

I wouldn't get hung up on brand, the reason being, I almost went with the sony, but the video card in the sony is maxed at 128, I wanted the full 256, so HP it was, Dell was 500.00 bucks more and Apple, well, I won't open that can of worms. I looked at Alienware, but decided not to buy the hype.

So do a comparison by spec by spec, just because dell, sony, etc, say blah blah, the devil really is in the details. For instance, I had to actually call Sony for a spec since the website didn't list it.

You be careful out there.

try postiing a screen shot, I'm not sure what exactly is your issue.

I second Don. I'm betting you have the "Split Screen" button on. Just turn it off and all should be fine. It's the button above the preview screen that looks like a circle that's half dark/half light.

Somehow the resolution on the preview scrren looks very poor as compared to Vegas 6. I'll try to get something.

DVD A4 Subtitle Question
 

I made some subtitles in the veg file in Vegas. How do I export them as a subtitle for DVD Arch?

Tools - Scripting - Export Regions as Subtitles

My new VEGAS laptop... HP's dv9000t
 

Howdy...

When you have a daily video podcast, you're always editing on the road. To that end, I'm constantly looking for the latest and greatest laptop for edited, although I'm not one of those guys who wants to spend $4K on a laptop...

So... I've just received HP's newest laptop, the dv9000t. Core 2 Duo at 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 240GB dual hard drives... Looks to be a great machine for editing on the road.

If you're interested, here's my 'unboxing' event...

http://www.neo-fight.tv/2006/09/unbo...p_dv9000t.html

Enjoy...

Best,

Benjamin

Firmware and driver update
 

Get the 5.7 drivers and firmware at

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/software/

It seems Vegas 7 kills analog capture from Decklink Extreme PCIe -
Analog capture works with standalone DeckLink application before starting vegas. Starting vegas displays "no video input" in internal capture app - and then the DeckLink application is dead as well. Submitted to support, and they are looking into it. Would be interesting to know if you have the same experience.

/magnus

very cool. thanks for sharing :)

Nice laptop! Now I want one!

I am just trying to get Vegas 7.0 to recognize Blackmagic as a viable display preview device.
Once I get past that we will try to captue.

Jim

Colour grading and crushing blacks
 

I have found a tutorial on this in AE, but I was wondering if there is a good tutorial on colour grading for Vegas - blowing out whites and crushing blacks...

Spend the money and buy the DVD "Absolute Training for Vegas+DVD, Vol. 4 - Color Correction in Sony Vegas" from VASST.
Details at http://vasst.com/product.aspx?id=221...a-fa0c83fa1dcd
It'll be the best $59 (U.S.) you've ever spent.
As I said on another forum, I've been doing video for over 30 years and was astounded at how little I knew about colour correction.
Glenn Chan is superb on this video.

Mike, thanks for the kind words.

David:
The DVD may help, as well as the following article I wrote (it goes into depth about Levels in Vegas):
http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?i...0-90d2f8de9fc1

Does that answer your question? If not, there is another method to "blow out whites and crush blacks". The Disc Four Excerpt in the link Mike gave has some information on that (it's a sample video). It uses the color curves instead of levels... it's sort of the same idea as color curves and levels in After Effects. The difference is how Vegas handles the levels... it is slightly superior and more confusing than in After Effects.

Is your timeline a a cineform timeline? what camera are you using?
thanks.

I’m using a Sony HVR-Z1U and my timeline format depends on the project. If I’m doing mostly straight cuts without a lot of color correcting, I’ll just use the raw M2T files because Vegas 7 can play them back at full framerate. If I’m doing a lot of editing or if I’m doing 24p, I’ll use CineForm Connect HD to capture the footage to CF or CF removing 3-2 pulldown for CF24. If I’m doing work that involves field audio (e.g., I captured the audio on my Marantz PMD660), I’ll capture raw M2T, sync the field audio with the video, then render to CineForm with the field audio instead of the camera audio in CF format. This gives me one AVI file with the correct audio.

Regardless of what format I capture in, I go straight to MPEG2 from the timeline. I suppose if I was going to print back to tape or other formats like for the web, I would render CineForm and then make my tape copy, web copy, and MPEG2 copy from that. I don’t believe you loose anything because the CineForm codec is high enough quality. The same is true for doing any chroma key work. I would either capture or convert the chroma key clips to CineForm and do all my editing on that. Ultra 2 with CineForm rocks for chroma key.

~jr

I am assuming the training covers the latest version of VV (I don';t believe the CC tool have changed sine VV4 anyways...)

Thanks for the link!

You're correct. There haven't been any changes so it's still appropriate.

woh.. I finally figured how to do it. Didnt know that the actual exported text is the title of the region! I had several text boxes on the timeline initally. I had to copy them out to rename the region. My question now is, how can I make the text 2 lines if it is too long? Also, I cant seem to change the font of the subtitle. IS there an option?

Up rezzing to down convert
 

I've been experimenting with programs which uprez SD footage to around 1440x960 and clean up the image (ie removing jaggies). Before anyone laughs, these programs use data from the proceding and following frames to add resolution.

I'm trying to determine if there is an improvement to this footage once down-rezzed, compared to the original footage - at least when burning back to an SD DVD.

The footage is from a DVX100 in 24P mode.

If the newly up-rezzed footage shows clear improvement, and assuming that there might possibly be an improvement in the final down rezzed footage, what would be the best settings in Vegas for an output to DVD?

(yeah, I know...questionable workflow/questionable benefit).

So far, the up-rezzed footage looks very promising, while the down-rezzed footage does not show that same promise. Before I give up, I want to make sure my settings are providing the best result.

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Brian

Gradual Render Slowdown
 

I do batch processes with lots of 2-3 minute videos. Usually pretty simple effects. What I like to do is render overnight and I have been doing that for the last couple months and it's been working great.

In the last week though something strange is happening. I start my batch render and it starts plowing through the video but after about 2 or 3 minutes the render frame rate gradually goes WAY down (starts at about 20fps and goes down to about 2) and stays there. I don't think I've changed anything with my computer, but the changes I've made since this started happening haven't helped at all.

I have a p4 3ghz Hyperthreaded. 4gigs of ram, windows xp, tons of harddrive space, mid-range video card. Video are quite simple with only a few effects but the same ones for each video. I've tried increasing and decreasing the number of rendering threads in Vegas, tried increasing and/or eliminating my virtual memory, but they didn't make any changes.

I'm not sure how big a part RAM plays in rendering anyway but I got a whole lot of it but when I watch my task manager has this goes along it only uses about 150megs steadily throughout. I have no other programs running while rendering except for AVG antivirus but it's not scanning just patrolling or whatever.

Any suggestions on what might be causing this? I've tried rendering to different codecs too but it does the same thing (just starts off at a different speed but gradually gets slower by like 90%)

what's up with your temp file folder in the default "C:" location?

How do I place audio into my menu background?
 

I have a nice project ready, I just want to put some background music to the menu. I can see the menu has both a video and audio track, but I am at a loss how to place the audio track (a 24 second .wav file) into that empty audio track? It is probably simple, but I can't get it. Help is appreciated.

EDIT :

Ok, figured it out - BUT how do I make it loop continually and forever?

Well my temp folder is in the c:/windows directory (would that cause a problem?) but there's pretty much nothing in there (90kb of no-name files and an "intelchip" folder). I started a new render and looked in that temp folder and there still wasn't anything in it. Is Vegas using a different folder perhaps, if so how would I find which?

Change the end-action "command" to LOOP.

That did it, thanks Ed.

thank's, yes you are right, most PCs and their installed players if configuered correctly will open the DVD with their main menu page.