If you simply uninstall and reinstall - without deleting anything else in the folders or registry - your settings should be preserved. What you might want to try first is a "Repair Install".

No, it's not. Well not if the lens was made well. It's actually quite hard to see looking at the lens until the camera is facing vaguely into the light in which case it shows on screen. I have heard of some people with the Panasonic adaptor having this problem too.

With a good sunshade the dirt cannot normally be seen. Problem is the cost of matte boxes, and having someone flag the lens while using the Glidecam isn't very practical.

If you still have warranty I would send it back if it had dust inside
the lens. Otherwise I don't know what you could do to fix it,
otherwise to try some post production tools for dust removal and
such things.

Problems with .veg files
 

I saved a couple .veg files that I spent hours on. when I went to open them Vegas got stuck in the "building peaks" mode. It got to 11% and never went further. I see the previously saved version also is giving me this problem.

Is the .veg file salvageable? Might the problem be coming from a file that Vegas is trying to access? Is there some workaround for this. I hate to think I have lost all this work since my backup files for these veggies are behaving the same way.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Building peaks should happen AFTER the file is open. A few questions:

1) Is there free space where these AVI files are stored?
2) Can you load these files (AVI files - NOT the veg files) into a blank timeline? Do the peaks build then?

After you get it to build the peaks correctly, the VEG file should open.

Anyone gotten good 60i to 24p results in Vegas 4?
 

I tried this experient once, shooting in 60i and converting to 24p. That was before Edward Troxel was onboard, and Vegas became as widely used as it is now.

When I tried it, most shots looked okay, but on ones with fast motion, during the fast motion frames, the moving parts of the image would become a pixelly mess. I noticed this on other shots as well, where there was little or no movement, and was never able to figure it out. I followed the 24p conversion steps I found on here, or perhaps somewhere else, and it still came out this way, so I justed to know if this is just how it is, if you don't either shoot 24p to begin with, or use Magic Bullet, or someone's done a sucessful conversion.

I've not tried to create 24p from a 60i (59.97i) source but I've had beautiful results going to 30p. I use a multi-step process:

1. Load up the 60i source on the timeline.
2. Open Vegas Options (Alt+Enter) and choose "Interpolate" from the deinterlace option.
3. Export to a 30p uncompressed DI (digital intermediate) file.
4. Load the 30p DI onto timeline above the original 60i.
5. While comparing the 30p to the 60i (by muting/unmuting the 30p track) add a Sony Sharpen filter to the 30p footage and adjust to taste. I've typically started with a setting of 0.5.
6. Export the sharpened 30p footage to the format of your choice.

For an example of such treatment, check out a short film I shot on a JVC GY-DV500 and deinterlaced to 30p in Vegas, here:

http://michael-morlan.net/pages/production/prod_try.htm

I'm happy to post some full-rez stills if there is interest.

Michael

This is a new one. . .anyone else tried this? I always heard 30p was the WORST thing to try to convert to 24p, and that 60i (29.97 fps, interlaced) was better.

Why exactly do you want to go 24p? Is it for "dramatic effect?" You don't gain any spatial resolution and you lose more than half of the temporal resolution. It sounds like you have some high motion scenes in your video, going from 60 individual images per second to 24 images per second sure isn't going to make the motion look smoother!

John

There was a slight typo in my original post. "30i" should read "30p". I've corrected it now.

Josh, re-read my post. I'm writing of going from 60i to 30p, not 30p to 24p. As you note, that way lies madness. :)

As John Cline notes, why go to 24p from 60i? Just because it's the buzzword of the day? 30p provides the same aesthetic but with a bit more temporal resolution.

Michael

Well, I have 30p (30 psedo p) with my XL1s, but I can still tell the difference between that 24p, and I just want to see if anyone's had good luck with using Vegas to do the 60i to 24p. Just to see. I don't really want to get into the 24p v 30p debate.

One thing to do before a re-install is to delete the appropriate folder under Program files/Sonic Foundry Setup (or probably Sony something setup on newer versions). Otherwise, the re-install might just renew the faults from the previous installation.

extreme image processing looks bad... what to do?
 

i have two shots, which were taken on two different occasions at the same location. one shot is slightly under exposed, the other is significantly over exposed. in editing i need to cut from one to the other and somehow maintain continuity.

i worked mostly on the under exposed shot and tried to match it with the over exposed one. using color curves and color correction plug-ins, i managed to come close enough. but in order to achieve this, i had to cranck the RGB color curves way up so that the handle went clear off the chart and adjusted the Blue color curves as well.
i rendered the sequence to see how it looks. as far as continuity, it looks great. you couldn't tell they weren't shot one right after the other. but the quality of the dark shot i had to brighten up looked really bad. it was blurry, there were pixels noticably moving around and bright blue lining along certain conteurs in the picture. definately not something i want in the movie.

is there some better way to match the two shots without deforming the image quality that much? any tips? reshooting the shot is not an option, unfortunately.

thanks!

thanks. i'll reinstall today.

adi

That's a very tough one. There is very limited information in an
8-bit compressed file and you have run into the limits. If the
second shot is overly bright (in general) you could lower the
brightness a bit so you don't have the crank the first one as
much. Other then that I'm not sure what options you would have.