The differences between Draft, Preview, Good, and Best are fully documented. I have it copied in the FAQ section on my site. Just click the link under my name.

Okay, that helps a little, but I'm still kind of lost. The clip I was rendering was 60i, with an "add noise," "color balance," and "hsl adjust" plugin added. No frame stretching/squeezing/resizing, etc., and no velocity envelopes.

I guess, then, in this case, I wouldn't see much of a difference?

Vegas 5.0/DVD Architect 2.0 Training Videos
 

Hello all,
It's been a while since I've made a post, but I do read the board often. There are some very helpful people in here :-)

I have a question that I hope is not inappropriate. I've been using Vegas 5.0 for a couple of months (my first NLE) and somehow managed to put together a very credible 50th anniversary video for my parents. However, I had to play it back on DV at their party because Architect left me feeling like an idiot. I think I could benefit from training videos for both programs as 'manual surfing' can be frustrating. I'd love to hear what anyone has to say about either the Douglas Spotted Eagle or Gary Kleiner training videos. Has anyone experienced both? And dare I ask...is one any better than the other?

Thanks in advance!

They are both brand new. I'm not sure many (any?) people have seen either - let alone both. I'm sure both of them are very informative.

You can quickly do a comparison in the video preview window.

Select "good" for the preview quality. Copy the image to the clipboard.

Select best and do the A/B comparison thing.

If you do not notice right away then I would not bother.

Ah! that's just it. The preview LIES! I previewed on a external monitor, my Sony PVM 14m2u, and when you preview, it DOES appear noticably softer on draft than on the others, but when you render, it looks the same. Strange.

Trouble With Cropped Clips Transition
 

I have a video track that is superimposed over another track, in a standard Picture-In-Picture form. The background video is fine - my problem is with the cropped PIP box.

The smaller boxed video (placed using Track Motion) has some clips cropped to my liking using the Event Pan/Crop, and there are a series of simple cuts between them. Nothing fancy.

However, two of the clips have a Hard Flash transition applied between them. Both of the clips have the same cropping and they look great - even the fade transition before the Flash is applied is A-OK. However, for some reason, the Flash transition makes the whole entire 4:3 area light up, instead of just within the cropping. In other words, the transition isn't paying attention to the cropping.

It's so strange - both the clips that are in the transition are cropped. Am I missing something? Shouldn't the transition effect pay heed to the cropping of the two clips it's connecting?

Oh, and I'm still on Vegas 4.0e.

for rendering the choice is really between GOOD & BEST ...
unless you are doing special effects type images that are line intensive ( IE: line animation , line drawings , non photo realism images ) then i have found that preview works better then good/best.

Do you mean as far as getting good quality? I wanted draft because I was trying to make the video look kind of lower res, and when i previewed it via my external monitor, draft seemed to give it the look I wanted. I only found it out it seemed to lose no quality at all when I watched it on the external monitor. I found adding a very slight gaussian blur, vertical only, softened it a bit without simply making it look blurry, but then when I rendered, I lost the 60i look.

Not to my knowledge. If I remember correctly a transition will
always operated on the full frame (ie, ignore cropping). Think
about this. Why didn't you see the fade? Because what is
cropped is already black (I presume). So you can't fade that.

A flash will show op because it will fade to white (instead of
black) shortly. So it seems like transitions ignore cropping.

I just tested this in Vegas 5 and this confirms my suspicision.
The only thing I can currently think of you can do is render
the whole PiP sequence *WITHOUT* the crop but *WITH*
the flash to a new file. Then use this new file and do the
cropping on that. This should yield what you want.

Disregard.

Evelyn Woods school of speed reading fails me again.

Patrick: what do you mean by "had give me flashes between clips"

The problem is not getting flashes. The problem is NOT getting
them outside the crop area.

Imran: another way might be to use two tracks and simply put
a mask in the upper track. That will cut off all information, including
transitions. Not sure how this would work in PiP, though.

As a last resort, couldn't you render those two clips with the flash and then place them back in the timeline as a single event to be played PIP. That takes the Flash Transition out of the equation so it can't (in theory) apply to the whole area.

This will work, but doesn't answer why your original setup wasn't working.

You either have to:

1) Render the footage out with the flash transition- bring it back into the project to THEN apply the crop

or

2) Simulate a crop using generated media. That way the flash can affect the entire 4:3 area yet the generated media will do the cropping for you.

Dern, I was hoping there was just something I was doing wrong. I'll give some of these suggestions a shot. Thanks all!