Communication errors when capturing video in Vegas using DVX100
 

This is really starting to frustrate me.

Capturing video in Vegas 4.0d is beginning to wear me down. Maybe I changed a setting or something because for some reason I constantly am getting communication errors and lose contact with the video camera. It's constant. However I can use another video capture program I own (Visual communicator pro) and never have a problem.

I'm using a Panasonic DVX100 with firewire. If anyone has a clue what I may be doing wrong please let me know. I never had this problem before so I'm thinking I may have messed up a setting somewhere.

Under the preferences, video device, there are two selections available. One is OHCI compliant IEEE 1394 and the other is video for windows standard. Using the video for windows standard with Main Concept DV Codec didn't work. Same results with the IEEE 1394.

I'm at the end of my rope and don't know what else to try. I'll see if I have another cable somewhere and try that.

Thanks,

Sony Vegas 90 Day Winner
 

Yeah. . .I thought about doing something for that competition, but my laziness took over. I couldn't have competed against that anyway. Very nice!

and the irony of it is the Adobe ad right underneath the main feature article.. LOL

I love that vid!

Odd, I can hear it but not see it. Granted I have Windows Media Player 8 but I have the WMP 9 codec pack installed. Hmmm

It plays Quicktime when I follow the link.

You may need to get the free QT Player.

It'll be worth it - it's a nice piece of work!

vegas and cleaner5
 

Anyone ever experience any issues converting AVI's from vegas in cleaner? trying to create a wmv version 7 file...it finishes the file encoding in literally 5 seconds...leaving me with a 277 KB file that plays about 20 seconds of audio only (no vid at all) the funny thing is that it worked fine on other files made in vegas on my laptop...but shes overheating when rendering and shutting off... wahhh....

How do you handle your audio in Vegas?
 

I'm figuring out that good audio is a difficult thing to master. Also, I noticed on an earlier project that adjustments made to audio listening through my PC speakers was profoundly different than through headphones.

How do the veterans do manage their audio? Headphones or good speakers? Which do you think is more representive of the true sound that will be on the final project played from a TV (and perhaps suround sound system)?

Also, do many of you use Sound Forge. I understand it can fairly easily clean up background noises. Do you think for a novice it would be useful for improving the overall audio? I think I already know the answer to this next question is "no", but can it amplify a persons voice without amplifying the background noises in a situation where it wasn't possible to get the mic in as close as I should of? And if so, is it something that could be mastered in a couple hours or would it takes days to get the hang of?

Dan,

Veterans in the proaudio business use specialized monitor speakers, but also check their sound through speakers representative of their audience. "Miami Vice" series composer Jan Hammer would check his mixes on fine studio monitors and a mono TV speaker. For digital artifacts such as pops, clicks and noise reduction, I personally find that headphones are much better. This practice varies with the individual.

As for the art of noise reduction, don't expect to master this quickly. Modern computer editing and processing software has
really sped up the process, but it's still an art. SoundForge is a fine package, but you'll find that you collect particular pieces of software for their processing strengths.

As for amplifying a persons voice in the presence of ambient noise, try SoundForge noise reduction followed by a compressor.
The latter will attempt to bring the dominant signal to a constant level. Depending on your audio material, you may notice considerable noise "pumping" as the noise level rises and falls during the speech. However, most of your audience will tune this out, especially if you can remix the ambient noise, taken from an isolated section, at a lower level.

Slow Motion
 

HELP! How do you do slow down or speed up clips in Vegas? There's got to be a simple way and I'm just missing it.

Go to http://www.jetdv.com/tts and read issue #9. It fully explains the two main methods to speed up or slow down a clip.

In summary, they are:

1) CTRL - Drag to resize the clip.
2) Velocity Envelope

Vegas is excellent for audio. Sound Forge goes further. Some of the FXs found in Sound Forge is not available in Vegas (like the Channels FX, that does decent pseudo stereo).

I addition to what Gints said you can remove some background noise with noisegate (both Vegas and Sound Forge). but the result can be very dramatic because it creates total silence in some spots and unlike Noise Reduction it does not try to remove noise that sits behind the sounds you want.
Generally I find that when I'm driven to use noisegate I must add some other background (like music or ambience) to cover the holes, so they don't stand out too much.
(Now I'll step back for a while and philosophize over how you can have holes standing out.)

Figured out why Vegas capture communication errors were happening
 

just spent a week of hell trying to figure out why my video capture wasn't working in vegas with constant communication errors. I reinstalled software, put a fresh hard drive in and put new windows 2000 installation, bought a new firewire card, yanked a chunk of hair out and still .... the dreaded communications errors popped up when I started capturing video. I started going crazy. I used 2 different cameras in testing with the same results. Switched cables, etc.

I just woke, sitting with my cat and a cup of coffee and figured it out and thought I'd pass along this solution. My DV camera was hooked into a firewire port AND I also had my canopus AVDC-100 digital/analog converter plugged into a firewire port. The canopus was turned off so I didn't think it would conflict BUT IT DID. Once I yanked out the other firewire cables and only ran the DV camera, it worked fine. I also had an external drive (shut off) in another firewire port which I also disconnected although I think it was the canopus.

Just thought I'd pass this along if anyone else ever has this conflict.

credit roll speed
 

How do I alter the credit roll speed in Vegas 3?

The only way I can think of is to apply a velocity envelope, but that seems wrong

The PROPER way to change the speed is to open the scrolling text dialog and look at the upper right hand corner. There you will find a timecode labeled "Length" which defaults to 10 seconds. Change this length to be the amount of time you want the clip to scroll. After closing the dialog, change the length of the event to be the same length.

Thanks Edward!

What I'd Like to see in Vegas
 

okies heres a thread for those who wanna give their 2 cents about what theyd like to see vegas include.

I'll go first.

1) I would like to see a default template selection, where youcan set up templates and load them up as your edit layout.
This include 5.1 assigned audio busses with appropriate EQing for different environments.
Basically something like this...
You insert your video clip, and you audio is automatically split into 5.1 and sent to its appropriate bus output. Any changes made to the master channel are duplicated within these panning/LFE tracks. Basically its a 5.1 reprocess of a stereo track.
Now i know you can do this with audio busses as well as ccopy track routines, however they arent as precise as what i am refering to. And most people probably already work with their own templates (I do) however it would be nice to be able to go into the project properties and say, alrighty, i have a stereo recording off tape, and i also want to add some music, and i want this all split into 5.1 surround. I also use a DVX, so i want to use 24p, this recording also has alot of dialogue, so i want to boost those levels so bus 1 should have "X" effect, while the rear speakers should have a lil more reverb...

Go to your project and voila, theres your project, input from 2 stereo sources, output in 5.1.

2) I want to be abot to open and work on VOB files. Not jsut the video element, but true, 5.1 encoded VOB files.
I wanna see the ac3 file split into each respective channel on a spereate track and bus and i wann be able to mess with it

3) I want a "Camera shake" compensator. Im pretty good with a camera, however i do alot of re-processing and re-editing of existing footage. They shake alot and the way i fix this is by running a track motion on the clip and manually zooming in then I adjust the movement by keyframe, setting an achor point by site.
If for example i could automatically anchor a point and adjust the compensation level it would make my work easier. Much like Pinnacle Edition Pro 5 camera shake fix.
This can probably be done with the existing track motion

4) Transitions and Alpha blends. At the moment im using Pixellan with a load of greyscale blends i picked up over time, as well as afew of the new free plugins. Pixellan effects are also very good.
However there just seems to be something missing.
More 3d stylisations such as Hollywood FX would be a welcome addition. Or suport for Hollywood effects. Hell Premiere and edition are opposed to each oter on teh market, and premiere user can use these, but Vegas user miss out.

5) Faster rendering times. Main concept upgrades should be made availbal efrom SoFo's site. Considering their main MPG plugin is Main Concept, one would like to think that updates are made to the codec all the time. Considering Vegas doesnt like MPG as much as it loves AVI i would like to see more than 20fps on my half rendered project.

6) Hardware Support. As much as i likd Premiere, it wasnt half as streamlined as Vegas is. I stopped using premiere then switched to Vegas when it first came out. I havent looked back, howevr i do feel rightly pissed that premiere not only has Matrox support, but Canopus and afew others.
HW i refer to is a realtime MPG encoder/decoder (canopus/matrox) , GFX board (like pinnacle) as well as a Realtime DV encoder/decoder which allows for realtime timline output in any format.
Vegas is good and the only thing thats holding it back is HW support.

7) A 3D Vector Titling application. Or not as big...
In a more basic sense an application which allows for 3d motion, panning and lighting.
What might work, would be Xara 5 (or Xara3d) as a plugin.
If you havent used Xara, its a small 3d text application. small and neat and exports as AVI, bitmap etc, its absolutely incredible for what it is. Do a search you wont regret it.
Its a simple and efficient titling app which i use alongside vegas. Titles are used as composites in a clip. Looks better than the standard vegas crap anyway.
Xara is lacking in afew departments, but for what it does im not complainng,
Now if SoFO took this concept and made it better by adding a 3d track motion, THAT would rock...

8) Suport for Premiere plugins (a man can wish.. LOL)

9) DV Capture dropped frames compensation. More of a perk than anything else.. basically if a frame is seen to be "dropped" it would be nice if Vegas couldgo in to it and "replace" those droped frames with some interlacing or aliasing to blend (Or basic frame blend) the drop out points together so its not as noticable. Audio well... forget it...
anotehr alternative to this would be to stop the player if a dropped frame is detected. Rewind teh tape automaticaly and restart the capture. Timecodes would obviously be used for this theyre already in use when capturing... so this is jsut a "Smart" use for them.
Then if we want we can configure it to attempt recapture 3 times then if it fails, to just keep goin. (Just like when u uncheck "stop capture on drop frames")
As for the droped frame fix insertion, vegas should be able to create a virtual track which insters this frame as per timecode without the need to re-encode teh whole file.
There are alot of file split proggies out there, runnign one internally shouldnt be hard...

This is all i can think of, and i knwo here are afew surprises coming out for vegas (Boris for one), but right now, after seeing edition pro 5 and premiere pro in action, vegas looks to be lacking in some departments.

Thers alot more i could mention but ive rambed enuff and i dont think anyones gonna read this...

I also havea shitload of Architect gripes... but ill shut up now...

what do you think Vegas could do with?

If/when they upgrade to support DX9, then third party companies could create non proprietary hardware support for graphics and capture boards. I think the vegas folks are working on that.

I would prefer that over the closed Adobe Plug-in architecture.
Adobe got strict when everybody started using it.
Worse would be a Vegas only plug-in interface. They don't have the market share.

Vegas is already on the right track with .net scripting support.

Right now I would like someone from the Vegas team to offer some info on whether or not they will support DVCPro 50 or at least generic DV50 for capture and edit and output (via firewire of course).

Well my requests are simple:

1. DVD authoring from the timeline

2. More powerful / elegant media file management

3. I'd like to be able to move the timeline to the bottom of the screen!~

Why is this happening?
 

Feel free to move this to the correct forum.

I've done a music video and when I try to render it out
in interlaced mode with Vegas this happends (see file)

When I render in deinterlace it stops. I can't really tell
what's wrong. I've tried almost every thing I can think of
but nothing hepls exept deinterlace it.

Perhaps someone out there have had the same problem?
(oh, and changeing upper/lower feild order does not help)

http://www.atamashi.com/glorious/hard.avi

If you could post a few stills that would be more helpful - I for one can't download 20 MB right now.

But 99% of the time what people think are interlacing problems actually disappear when played on a normal TV set, so try that to be sure there's a real problem.

I've tried that. Looked the same.
Well, I cant post stills because it's a motion problem.
You have to see a movie clip to understand the problem.

If it is an interlace problem, a few stills should show the problem. Do you have a field order choice in Vegas? If so, swap the order and see what happens.

err... one thing to remember is that if u use an interlaced method, then render in anythign LESS than "best" artifacts WILL be noticable,
Im not about to downlaod 20mb, but if this is the issue (interlacing) there are many ways around the issue

Thanks very much Jim, you've given me hope. I have a similar setup as you and I'm getting an error when capturing; however my error doesn't show up until after stopping (very frustrating when I'm trying to capture a full tape!). I started 2 threads on the SoFo site; one about the above and one about latency in my external monitor,but both seeming to be a firewire issue. I'll try your remedy and report back.
Thanks again Jim,
Randy
BTW, I wonder if having an additional firewire card or 2 (as opposed to using one 3 port card) would allow us to use the 3 devices concurrently...just a thought (or shot in the dark)

The error after stopping also happened to me just FYI.

Well that's very encouraging then; I've got a bunch of different capturing to do tomorrow, I'll unplug everything but my capture device and keep my fingers crossed. BTW Jim, I edited my post (before reading your latest, just in case you missed it) and wondering if 2 or 3, 1-port firewire cards (as opposed to one 3-port cards would save us from having to plug/unplug everything. I should also mention that I never had this problem on my old PC which reinforces my suspicions of the firewire card.
Randy

Randy,

The results of my last capture test (3 seconds ago) confirm that it's the canopus DV / Analog converter that's the bad guy for sure. I left my Firewire hard drive on and it didn't interfere with the capture process.

I now own 2 firewire cards from all this trial and error and they're both good so maybe I'll try that suggestion of yours to put them both in the computer and see if I still have conflicts.

Jim

Please let me know how it works out Jim.
Thanks,
Randy

Randy,

Your theory proved correct.

I installed the second 1394 card and attached the canopus DV/Analog converter to that. Capture worked just fine when my camera was attached to the other 1394 card ! I even powered on the Canapus and capture still worked flawlessly.

Mystery solved. I guess I'll keep both 1394 cards and run the setup as it sits.

Great...I'm off to buy a new (1 or 2 port) firewire card!
I'm hoping this also has something to do with my external monitor latency.
Randy

The IMPROPER way is to Ctrl-drag the edge of the scrolling media to the desired length. It's faster and seems to work well. It may make the render time a bit longer, and if you get flicker or anything like that you should probably stick to the PROPER method.

I did a test for you (I don't normally use credit rolls much) I put one proper and one improper credit roll alongside each other (using track motion squeeze) and rendered to PAL DV. The scroll was 40 seconds and .250 playback respectively. No difference in rendering quality was discovered.
The default font even looked so good after the squeeze that I would recommend using it like that.

Of course, if you need to go lower than .25, you either have to, once again, do it the "correct" way OR apply a velocity envelope. Since you have to have the screen open to enter the text anyway, I've found it just as easy to type in the correct number to begin with.

It WOULD be nice is there was an option for the number to match "the length of the event".

Where is Boris for Vegas???
 

ggrrr.....

yes im still waiting...

hey does anyone here use graffiti? apparently it does vector texts... hmm...

any thoughts on what Boris for vegas will have??

uhhh... it's being packaged with Avid XpressDV?

I read in another forum that they pushed the release date back inorder to make it more compatible with all the new NLE's that exploded onto the scene.

BAHH HUMBUG!!!

well SoFo... have a look at the "what i wanna see in vegas" thread and get cracking!!

Audio dropouts while printing to tape
 

Has anyone else had this problem?

While printing to tape the music will stop about half way thru the clip. I played the clip back on the computer and everything seems to be just fine. I've tried a number of things and I give up. Tried playing with sample rates but no luck.

The video is very smooth, looks terrific and no frames are dropped. It's just the darn audio.

I wanted to note that I am printing to a DVX100 and using 24p 2-3-3-2 pull down.