I got it working. Here is what Dan at DVXuser.com helped me with:

Lie to it while looking.

Set the project type to regular 4:3 instead of widescreen, and it will be letterboxed on the TV.

I'd suggest just doing this while color-correcting and such, then resetting it to what it should be immediately afterward so you don't forget.

Dan

(At least this works on my setup. Running the preview out via firewire to a cam, then S-Video from the cam out to the TV.)

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Jefferson : u could always try Maestro if u have a spare 30 grand .. :)

what im tryin to do is set up a clip action after a button is pressed and before the chapter begins..

still having issues with that after al this time.. lol -->>>

I'm sorta with you on this one. DVDA2 is very challenging when trying to create some of the more advance menus. I've always wanted an animation or a small video clip right before the menu where the animation or video clip becomes the menu. This works if your animation already has the buttons but there is no way to fade out the buttons and fade them in at some point of the menu animation or video clip.

The only alternative is just to use a separate video as the beginning sequence and for it to start before it goes into the menu then fade to black and then the menu comes up.

Vegas DV Codec compression issues
 

Forgive me if this has been covered before. I did run a few searches, but couldn't turn up anything that solved my problem.

I'm new to Vegas. I have experince using Premiere, but that was years ago (back in the 1998/99/2000 timeframe), and when I put together my video equiment recently I decided to give Vegas a try since it was cheaper and the demo seemed to do everything I needed just fine. However, now I'm having a bit of an issue.

I just got a used Canon XL1 on Wednesday. The camera is fantastic and is working great. However, the original XL1 does not (unfortunately) have true SMTPE color bars. So to have something to calibrate the viewfinder and/or external monitors to, I decided to feed over color bars from Vegas and record a few minutes worth to the beginning of a tape.

So I created a Vegas project that used the Vegas "Generated->Test Patterns->SMTPE Color Bars (NTSC)" plugin to create a color bar clip. No problem. Looks great in the preview pane, so I render it out to an AVI using the DV codec.

It looks HORRIBLE. The breaks between the color bars are smeared badly, especially the vertical lines. I run this out to my tape but its barely useable. The compression artifacts are horrendous. And worst of all, the gray bar in the lower left that's supposed to be barely visible (12.5 IRE if I remember correctly) isn't visible at all, and it's not because the camera's incorrectly calibrated. It's just that the compression is that bad.

So I try again, setting the quality level to 100%, setting the keyframe to every 1 frames, etc. I can't tell a difference. It still looks just as bad.

Up until this point (last night), I'm using the demo version of Vegas. So I wonder if it's just an issue with the demo version and wait. Today, my full copy of Vegas came in the mail from B&H, so I eagerly installed it and tried it out. No dice. It's still giving me the same cruddy result.

Now, I hit upon a few workarounds. For one, I can "preview it on an external monitor", ie, run it through my camera and record it to tape from the preview. Works flawlessly. My XL1's hardware compresses it beautifully. There are still a few compression artifacts, but they're only there if you're really looking for them.

Option two is to render to an uncompressed AVI file and then print that AVI out to the camera. Same result - it looks awesome.

These work great for my current problem (getting color bars on the tape). The problem is, in the long term neither of these is a viable solution to me. I can't just render everything from my preview window. I need to be able to archive off files onto DVD-ROMs, transfer them to other machines, move them all around, etc. And when I get into complex effects that can't render in realtime anymore, this just won't work.

But I can't use uncompressed AVIs, either, because I just don't have the disk space for it, and can't possibly afford them. And they're too big to trade back and forth, to back up easily, etc.

I can't help but think I'm doing something entirely wrong here. Vegas's DV codec can't possibly be this bad or there wouldn't be this many users. And I like Vegas just fine. I'm not used to it yet, the way I was with Premiere once upon a time, but it does everything I need - except for this compression issue.

Somebody please help and tell me what I've screwed up, because if I can't make this work then Vegas is completely useless to me, and that's $500 completely down the tubes. Over the long term, I absolutely need an editor with an acceptable DV codec compressor. I'll be adding too many effects, titles, and rendered 3D graphics to my video projects to not have this. Right now, I don't even need speed - I just need it to work.

Please help!

Thanks guys, highly appreciated.

Barend

To what format are you really rendering? What settings did you change in preferences? Sounds like you are NOT rendering to DV-AVI is you're changing the "quality level" and "keyframe" settings.

First of all, just to make sure, hold down CTRL-SHIFT while starting Vegas. This will reset all settings back to defailt.

Now, add the color bars to the timeline. At this point all you need to do is Tools - Print Video to DV Tape. This will give you the exact same pristene color bars you are seeing in preview.

Vegas' DV Codec is widely considered one of the BEST DV codecs around and is TREMENDOUSLY better than Microsofts (which is what Premiere used until just recently)

split screen question
 

Is there a way to split the screen into four, with a different clip playing in each? I was going to try using the pan/crop tool in four different video tracks, would that work? Is there an easier way to accomplish this?

Use track motion.

Can you elaborate as to how I would go about doing this?

I agree that Track Motion is the easiest way. You need FOUR tracks, one for each video. Then you use track motion on each track to position the clips in the proper size and position.

Now if you want one button and you're done, take a look at Tsunami (link under my name). Specifically, take a look at the Video Wall tool.

thanks edward- looks like i'll be purchasing tsunami

This is basically what I finally did, as I stated in my initial post:

However, in the long term, this is entirely untenable. I can't use this for any project that requires heavy rendering of effects, because I don't have nearly a fast enough CPU for it (and upgrading my computer isn't an option at this point in time).

What format am I really rendering? I rendered to AVI and selected the DV codec. I've also rendered to various other formats (WMV, MPEG 2) and had results that looked fine. Maybe this means that I'm actually using the Microsoft codec, which is the one you lambast so much (and I've heard others say much the same about). I don't know.

As I said in my previous post, I haven't done any serious kind of video editing in almost five years. The DV codec basically didn't exist then - at least, it wasn't common. Everything I did at that job was M-JPEG based using an outdated (even then) Intergraph VE-100 workstation.

I am most definitely NOT trying to start up a flame war regarding Vegas vs. Premiere here. I'm quite certain that there's a way to do exactly what I want do do, which is to render this to a video file that's already compressed with a DV format codec so that I can transfer videos around in raw digital form. I'm equally certain that it's my own newness to the software that's preventing me from doing this correctly, which is why I'm asking for help. I desperately want Vegas to have one of the best codecs around, because as of right now it's the one I'm stuck with regardless. I simply don't have $600 to shell out on another video editing package.

I will go get my exact settings off my other computer and post them momentarily (yes, I know - I should have done that in the original post). I will also try and post a couple of frame grabs this afternoon to demonstrate how bad the problem is.

At this point I would recommend this:

1) Hold down the CTRL & Shift keys and start Vegas. This will reset all setting back to factory default. Yes, you will probably want to change some back but this will get you back to standard. Make sure you do NOT change: "Ignore 3rd party codecs" and "Use Microsoft DV codec".

2) Add the color bar to the timeline

3) Go to File - Render As, pick AVI as the format and NTSC-DV as the type.

That should give you a good render.

I have tried this, and ended up with pretty much the same results. However, I have done some further testing and expanded my knowledge a little bit.

First of all, I was mistaken with the quality I was getting off of my camcorder. It appeared to do better in the viewfinder, but after recapturing the video, it seems to be an almost identical compression.

Second, after I used Vegas to render a 3D logo I've been working on into DV-AVI, it looked fine. Very nice on my monitor, the viewfinder, and my television.

My conclusion is that this is a limitation of the DV format itself. I had known that DV (much like MPEG and most all discrete cosine transformation compression schemes) didn't handle high contrast solid edges very well. Also, I'd known that DV's 4:1:1 sampling would have an effect on this. It appears that this is simply far worse than I thought it would be.

However, this isn't the end of the world that I thought it was because my other computer generated footage (which doesn't have lots of high contrast straight lines) compresses just fine.

I have found a solution to my problem. I have created my own set of color bars using Photoshop. My new image uses the same colors and the same patterns as Vegas' SMTPE Bars test, but I've precisely placed them to defeat the shortcomings of the DV compression algorithm. My new color bars compress beautifully and look great, and are now completely useable. In fact, after compression they now look almost but not quite like the Vegas bars look before compression. To elaborate, Vegas adds a very thin (one pixel wide) "blend line" (my own term) between each of the color bars. I took out the blend line, but the DV codec adds it back in for me as a compression artifact, so it ends up looking quite good.

Basically, my logic was to place the borders on precise multiples of four pixels, since DV only samples the color values every four pixels. The Vegas supplied bars were spaced somewhat irregularly, and this resulted in the bad color blending artifacts that I was seeing. By replacing them, the color change now occurs on a pixel that is actually being color sampled, so there is very minimal blending as a result, and the final version looks fantastic on my television set. Very, very slight compression artifacts are still visible, but I haven't seen a codec yet that I couldn't spot the artifacts on, so I'm happy now.

I'd post my "RussBars" for all to use, but since they're based pretty heavily on the SMTPE Bars, I'm not at all sure of the legality of that.

Edward, thanks for your help. I really appreciate you taking your time on it.

i think you need to talk to the local station you will be playinbg the spot....they should have the answers to majority of these questions. other people have asked similar stuff before and the answer is usually talk to the locals and find out what they need/want. it varies quite a bit from station to station.

If your master is on mini-DV, then yes. You will need to set bars and tone appropriately. The station should have guidelines for this but generally the tone should be at -12dB.

You should listen with your ears on accurate monitors/speakers in as good a room as possible when mixing. You can start with numbers as a guideline, but you need to use your ears as meters do not approximate human hearing too well.

Also make sure the music isn't over 12dB on average as you will get a little distortion.

DSE's film look article is a good starting place.
http://www.digitalproducer.com/artic...e.jsp?id=22424
*It does not guarantee your video will look like Hollywood.

Magic Bullet takes longer to render, but has some advantages. The main ones are black/white diffusion (this takes lots of button pushing to do in Vegas) and a library of preset looks so you can pick and choose a look if you want something stylized.

It should be last. I would use curves instead and look at your histogram (everything should be between 16 and 235). You'll also need to check that colors aren't too saturated.

edit DVX footage (PAL) on VEGAS
 

I am willing to pay for someone to show me how to edit
PAL footage on Vegas (on my laptop).

I live in NYC (CHelsea).

I dont know simple stuff as SETTINGS and how to put to shots together etc...

Voytek

Old Split
 

Anyone know how to remove an old 'split' on a clip. It was
accidentally included and done awhile ago.

A lot of reds can be illegal colors depending on which red you pick. You can check the vectorscopes and/or apply the broadcast clamp to your title to see what it looks like when you are using legal colors.

Some/most people will not see material at the very edges of a DV frame.

I highly recommend you hook up any TV to your editing system. If you camera/deck supports analog-digital passthrough, set it to convert in the right direction. In Vegas, click on the TV icon. On your TV, set the right input. If you use a S-video connection from camera/deck to TV, also check your footage on the composite connection.

This way you can solve two of your problems and spot other problems before they happen. Play around with text size on your TV to check for flicker, chroma crawl (the moire crap on edges of white text on black backgrounds), and readability. You will also have an idea of what happens to text outside the title safe area.

Glad to hear you found a workable solution!

Well I'm not very close to you but you might want to take a look at my newsletters (link under my name). There are also DVD sets made by Douglas Spotted Eagle and Gary Kleiner that shows how to the basic tasks as well.

Good advice, but I would add one thing to that. In addition to your normal studio monitor set and a general consumer TV, I would find the cruddiest TV set you can get your hands on. This should be pretty easy (and cheap!), but it should help you a good bit. Your commercial is never going to look good on a cruddy TV, and you shouldn't waste time trying for that, but you'll want to at least make sure that you can get your point across on it. You'd be surprised how many really, really bad TV sets are still being watched.

Delete the clip on the right and expand to clip on the left to fill the hole.

Or use the "Unsplit Wizard" in Excalibur.

Blue triangles at cuts in timeline
 

Just out of curiosity, I've been obsessively zooming in, checking each cut for anything funky, and it dawned on me that I didn't know why, at some cuts, the very small triangles are sometimes dark blue and sometimes light blue. I thought at first that dark blue meant a straight cut, but there are a few light blue ones which are straight cuts as well.

This isn't keeping me up at nights. ;-) I was just wondering.

Marcia

One has a short fade on either side of the cut- the other doesn't.

You might want to install SP2? Perhaps this will fix your problems.
Might also be that some packet writing software is causing
troubles, otherwise I'm out of ideas...

I do appreciate your advice thus far.

I set the broadcast clamp on coinservative and the Magic Bullet on the filmy setting. So far so good. The audio sounds great and peaks and has a hard limiter at -6 dB.

I spoke with a Comcast rep. who is not aware of the standard procedure for the leader. All she said was to have 10 sec. of the color bar followed by a count down. Thats all whe knew. She said just use what is industry standard. (of course she didn't know what that is). So.....

Do the following leader sound reasonable:

10 second color bar with -12 dB or is that 1 mhz tone in Vegas

Countdown (is this really necessary)

10 seconds black

***30 sec. commercial****

30 second black.

Reminder- They will be transferring commercial from mini dv to beta.

Thanks again.

Al Rodgers

<<<-- Originally posted by Albert Rodgers :
Countdown (is this really necessary)

10 seconds black

***30 sec. commercial****

-->>>

Wouldn't the 10 seconds black defeat the purpose of having a countdown?

In all honesty, it is really totally up to the station. We have aired commercials on the local ABC station simply by printing to MiniDV, taking our camera there, and playing back from the camer into their equipment. They did not require tone, color bars, or countdowns. However, each station will be different in what they accept.

for progressive Pal
 

You might want to check this thread on the Sony Vegas forum...(I asked the same question...)

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.co...ssageID=319532

Hope this helps!

Paul.

Dito. I contacted a cable station for a project that I am working on and all they wanted was five seconds of black at the head.
They accept mini DV or beta. They also said that the audio levels could be right to zero db. I did'nt feel comfortable with that so -3 or -6 db will be what I use.

They also said that they scope it and adjust levels for broadcast anyway.

Link to Spot's stuff: http://www.vasst.com
Link to Gary's stuff: http://www.vegastrainingandtools.com

Grouping
 

I need to put something new at the beginning of a project, how
can I get everything grouped together and move it all to the right? About 11 tracks.

This is how I do it but I'm sure there must be a better way.

I select the selection tool on the menu then I go down and minimize all the tracks and zoom out as much as I can then just use the select tool to select all.

Experts, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you only want to move all those tracks over, just use the select tool and select all but if you want to group them, that's a different thing as the audio track and video tracks will be synch when you group objects together so that when you expand on the video the audio track will also expand together with that.

Hey - thanks for the quick response - that did work.

Most appreciated!

No worries...

One quick thing though, track motion markers can't be moved. I still haven't found a way to move those along with the tracks so I was hoping someone with more expertise can answer this.

Wax integration with Vegas 4.0
 

I installed the Wax Plugin recently, and when I tried to use it on a clip, I got message to the effect of "Wax cannot determine the event's length. If using Vegas 4.0 and above, make sure you can run scripts, because Wax needs this ability." What does this mean? Can I not use Wax with Vegas 4? (4.0c, to be exact).

Yes, it can run Wax. You just need to make sure you have the .NET Framework installed. THAT is what is required to run scripts.

There are many methods in which this can be done. You can also simply do a CTRL-A to select everything on the timeline and then move it down the timeline.

You can also put the cursor at the beginning of the project and do an "Insert - Time"

You can also use the Select Events tool to select the desired events and move them down the timeline.

<<<-- Originally posted by Edward Troxel : There are many methods in which this can be done. You can also simply do a CTRL-A to select everything on the timeline and then move it down the timeline.

You can also put the cursor at the beginning of the project and do an "Insert - Time"

You can also use the Select Events tool to select the desired events and move them down the timeline. -->>>

Hi Edward

Does that apply to the Track Motion markers? I'll have to try it when I get home after work.

I was thinking of Cntrl-A as well... ^_^