Glad it all worked out for you. I feel Vegas is the easiest tool for creating a photo montage.

How to render to image files
 

Hi,

Well i've had a poke around and i cant, for the life of me, find info inthe help on how to render outto still images. Its probably right under my nose but i have NFI where. LOL

Can any kind soul point me in teh right direction on how to render out to still images (say .PNG/.JPG/.BMP/.TGA etc)?

Cheers

You do mean capture a single frame AS a still yeah?

Preview window, .. tiny floppy disc icon above Screen? Click on that it will give you options of what format JPG or PNG and where. When do ing this have the Preview set to GOOD - yeah?

Yeah, been in front of you all the time . .. ;-)

Grazie

Hmm. no i actaully wish to render out to still images. Not just take a snapshot here and there. So ifi can render to still image sequence it would REALLY speed up what i am trying to acheive. its just not feasable to use that little snapshot thing i'm afraid.

:)

Okay . then you'll want to render to Snapshot script .. You can set to how often you take it .. I think down to 00:00.01 menaing sigle frame - yeah? that's what yer after? Go over to the script forum or try the sundance site RenderImageSequence.js I think it is called . . I often use it to create monatges then I set them to the n=beat using markers .. with SnapShotToMArkers script .. neat!

Grazie

YAY! :D Yep thats pretty much what i want to do. I set the FPS to .01 and just wan tto rende rout a heap of screenshots at the highest possible quality of the selected video stream.

Thanks for the pointer i'll take a look when i get a spare moment. :) I thought it'd be a default of Vegas but i dont think it is coz i cant find it for the life of me! :)

Go and get it Daymon!
 

Are you using V5? I think The render Image Sequence came withitr. Go Tools>ScriptingDrop down menu "remderImage Sequence. NOW, this might not be showing if you haven't GOT the scripts IN the correct place and you HAVEN'T yet run the "rescan Script Menu Folder" utility . .yeah?

Anyways here's a "Go knock yerself OUT!" option to get Loadsa stuff

http://www.blue7media.com/vegas/

A bunch of very VERY valuable tolos for Vegas and us VegHeads !

Grazie

There are several scripts available that will output a series of PNG or JPG images. However, if you are doing a significant amount of time on the timeline, they are relatively SLOW. If you are doing more than a few seconds worth, you may wish to frameserve to some other application such as VirtualDub and let it output the actual images.

Installing Vegas 5 + Dvd
 

I will be installing this over the weekend, any recommendations, advice, things to watch out for, settings, bad install experiences?

I know it's kind of wide open but I figured the question might reduce some headaches. Also, is there anyway to install it on my laptop as well? Thanks!!

Just install both, register both, and you should be on your way. I have quite a bit of setup information in the newsletters. Just click on the link below my name.

One additional heads up Michael,
On the V5 disc, there are additional programs including Boris Graffitti LTD. It requires a SN. The SN is on a post card in the box. Don't throw it away....

I am so glad I asked.....

Are we stuck using the program (V5) on just one computer?

Robert,

Kinda wish the Boris LTD card would have slipped out, fallen on the floor and under my massive desk without me noticing. Trying to learn the Boris interface was a non-starter; there's eight hours of my life I'll never get back.

Vegas 5 has the same license as 4 and 3 in this regard. You can install it on multiple machines as long as you do not edit on multiple machines at once. In fact, you can install it on two additional machines to use as network rendering nodes.

I'll answer you in reverse. Yes, I tried a reboot. The common link between the black frames is the frequency. And, the source is a video camera which, as it turns out, is also the culprit. Upon very close inspection - zoomed all the way in on the timeline - and moving slowly, frame by frame, I found the black frames. Now to figure out why my video camera is generating them. It's an MPEG4 camera. Any ideas?

How are you getting the video into the computer?

MPEG is NOT a great editing format.

It's Back Again
 

Any of you experience momentary freezes when scrubbing the time line with the JKL keys or the Contour Pro. Its becoming an annoyance

I am editing a two hour project. I have the Matrox card acceleration turned down, I am DMA, I have defragged the SATA drive, I turn off all system resources etc. In other words I've been doing this for awhile---

Any body experiencing the same??

Which AudioFX to get just voice
 

I'm assembling a short video for a Farewell party and have some footage shot on an inexpensive DV cam in a medium sized live room. The clip volume is low since the built-in mic was all they used to acquire audio.

I've normalized the clip and applied the Distortion AudioFX with some improvement resulting (love that it creates a Take whcih you can then switch back and forth between to see if what you did is better or worse).

I need to know if there is a standard set of Audio FX that I should start with in the FX chain in order to improve this audio. There are so many available, I could play with them all for a month of Sundays before I stumble on a good chain of FX for what must be a common audio situation.

Any specific recommendations will be greatly appreciated.

Black Level
 

How can you adjust the black level of a picture in Vegas? I noticed that xl's carry this control but my gl2 does not, and i would like to experiment with this if you have any advice

Would this work for External Monitoring in VV5
 

In another thread someone listed a Sony Walkman in place of a DV tapedeck.

<< One of this sites sponsers, EVS, has a new Sony miniDV walkman for under $1100... Would that work for you?
http://www.evsonline.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=GVD1000 >>

I looked at this and based on the description thought it might fill three purposes:
1. Save wear and tear on camera heads by performing DV-to-computer input via 1394.
2. Provide Vegas Video External Monitor preview which requires 1394 output.
3. Perform simultaneous DV tape record during a live shoot for redundancy.

Item number two is particularly attractive to me, will it work?

Capturing VIDEO!!! no save?
 

i just bought a Canon Optura 20, and Vegas 5, and i have it all hooked up, i can control my camera and everything throgugh my computer via firewire....but when i capture it says it is, but when i stop the capture it says capture complete and then list nothing and no clip is saved! and one time i acutally got it to get something...let it got for about 5 minutes for this test...and got about1-2 seconds, what am i doing wrong, step by step how do you catpure, so frustrated.

The black level can be adjusted from the Color Corrector using the Offset slider.

Keep your eye on the waveform monitor when using this to make sure you don't go below 0 IRE.

Gary

Capture settings
 

Paul,

With the Sony Video Capture tool active, select its Options menu then Preferences. Select the Advanced Capture tab and increase the pre-roll to at least 5. Then select the Capture tab and ensure that the second item in the box is unchecked (Stop capture on dropped frames).

Network rendering performance: Linear as you add nodes?
 

Does the network rendering performance scale linearly as you add nodes or is there a point of diminishing returns?

I'll carry my own thread since no one is online now to help...

I removed the distortion FX and normilize effect I had previously put in. Then added at the track level (only these talking head narrations were on this audio track):
- Parametric EQ with the default settings
- Reverb with the Warm Ambience setting
- Volume with a 4dB boost
- Then had to selectively add a 2-3 dB boost to individual events where the speaker was quite soft.

That increased the intelligibility of the speaker and took out some of the ring from the live room it was recorded in. Its still missing something though (this is like making spaghetti sauce, its missing something, but I don't know what). May be the best I can get starting with poor input. Guess I should have stayed awake during those Vegas tutorials on the Audio aspects of the tool.

DSE, Ed T, Gary K, Glen, Ken, or others, any ideas?

Have you tried boosting the audio at the 8K point by 6 db or so?

BTW, pet the boll weevil statue for me the next time you are by there.

8k being the standard voice range, right? I guess I should use a band-pass filter centered on 8K. Now I wonder where in the chain it would go, before or after the Reverb and Volume FX. So many options!

Not many folks outside the Wiregrass know we have a monument to a bug. You must have red clay under your boots.

Each machine will be assigned jobs as previous jobs are finished. Once all pieces have been rendered, the one machine must "stitch" all of the pieces together. So, the video is rendered faster but there is a final step that slows it down.

Network rendering can be used in a variety of ways, though. For example, if you had a few projects that needed rendering while you still worked on additional projects, you could assign a couple of them to two separate machines while editing on the third. Or if you are on a multiprocessor machine, use network rendering on the same machine (might even want to try it on a single processor just to see how it works).

Remember also that each copy of Vegas only allows two additional nodes. But I believe the basic answer to your question is genereally yes.

Turn OFF the "Minimum Clip Length" option in the capture preferences.

No... 8k is a little on the high end. You have all sorts of harmonics up there but not much that contributes to intelligibility.

IMO, what you should do:

1- Get a better mic. A camcorder is generally the worst place you could put a mic, but is the only place for it for run and gun situations. A shotgun mic on the camcorder is generally the best compromise.

The audio forum has lots of posts on this, but a better mic with a shockmount (and windscreen if necessary) is usually a good step up from the built-in mic on your camcorder (generally crap). If you have a 1CCD consumer cam, then a lot of the posts there may not apply. You might want to look at something on the level of the Sennheiser MKE300, which could be a huge improvement over your cam's on-board mics (a lot of them are really bad). Anything more expensive/better may not be appropriate for what you want to do.

Getting good sound in the first place is a much better idea than fixing sound in post (which is rarely effective... time, money or quality-wise).

2- Don't add reverb or distortion. I don't see the point.

3- DSE has written an good article on noise reduction.

http://digitalproducer.com/articles/...e.jsp?id=25455

You are looking at using the track EQ to get rid of everything but voice frequencies. Set them to be sharp and play around with them unless you hear the voice get distorted, then back off. You may need to apply multiple EQs to get them sharper.

The parametric EQ does the same thing and may or may not give better results (theoretically it has a very small advantage). I haven't tried it for some reason.

If there are specific noises in the background that are in a narrow range of frequencies then you can do some additional tricks as pointed out in DSE's articles.

More information on this:
http://www.dv.com/news/news_item.jht...se0903_feature

4- To make the sound less boomy, you could tune a few parametric EQ filters to handle the room modes (where the resonance of the room boosts certain frequencies).

To do this, work in reverse:
Set the parametric EQ to make a narrow bandwidth of sound louder. In Vegas, set the bandwidth to 0.1 octave (the lowest it'll go). Start the frequency at 100hz or thereabouts, and scan through 0-300hz (these numbers are not very good). The goal here is the find the fundamental frequency of one of the room modes.

As you scan around, listen to the sound to see where the volume peaks. This is where one of the room modes are. There are usually extra room modes at multiples of the fundamental frequency (2x, 3x, 4x, etc.). Don't worry about everything over 600hz.

If the room is rectangular, there will be 3 room modes and harmonics of them.

4- To save time with volume envolpes, you could apply a compressor instead. A compressor can bring down the volume on loud sounds and will typically have a control for makeup gain.

I don't think I can explain how to use a compressor very well. Perhaps there is a good link somewhere?

It might more sense to get a cheap camcorder.

Your three purposes:
1- Yes.
2- Yes, if you get one iwth analog-digital passthrough.
3- Yes. (not sure where the simultaneous part fits in)

I'm not exactly sure why'd you go for the walkman decks... it's smaller, but that wouldn't make a big difference to me. It is not bottom loading like most camcorders out there, but that wouldn't make a big difference to me when I'm saving lots of money.

Yep, raised in Ashford (east of Dothan) and lived there for about 30 years.

Sometimes a bandpass preset in EQ with rolloff on the low and high ends works. Set it in the 4th slot. You can also select one of the lower frequency settings and drag them up or down to boost or notch at that point.

Glenn,

#3 - The simultaneous part being recording to the tape in the camera and passing the same data stream out via firewire to the Walkman deck and recording to its tape. Though now that I say this, for the same money I could get a Laird direct-to-disc setup.

#3- One of the Sony camcorders I tried was able to do this too.

Video mixer hooked up to the camera via analog. The camera was recording onto tape, and converting on the fly to a Mac (which was also recording it). It saved the day- I didn't know that capture now was limited to 30 minutes in Final Cut (didn't know to adjust that setting).

Gary on any of your training DVDs do you cover doing color corrections in conjunction with the waveform monitor?

Glen,
Billy Boy has some info on scopes and color correction on his website in tutorials 8 and 9.

Slo mo ok on timeline, jerky in final product
 

Now this just doesn't make sense to me. I needed to slow a portion of a clip in order to have it appear on screen longer. The clip is acceptable to me playing in slow motion on the timeline. I find if I render it to .avi or to a new track it becomes jerky. The process does not improve the smoothness but, in fact, makes it worse. I saw this on a finished DVD and I can not figure why it looks fine on the monitor when playing from the timeline at approximately 21 fps.

If I RAM Render it, it plays then at 29 frames and also is jerky.

Has anyone seen this before and have you any suggestions for me as to what I can do to try to make this work?

What I am doing is a wedding video and the the time each bridesmaid appears onscreen varies. The cameraman followed the first bridesmaid down the aisle to where she ended up standing then when he realized the next bridesmaid had already come halfway down the aisle the camera went to her, very briefly. I decided if I put all bridesmaids in slow motion I could have them appear for equal amounts of time. I did slow this one more than the others so that might add to the problem but it appears if I could play it a 21 fps it would work.

thanks in advance

Rendering in Vegas 5.0
 

After my project done what do I choose as a rendering process to get this back to a CU VH1 or DVHS deck, I cant seem to find anything with TS , do I just use MPEG2 ? Do you guys/gals have your properties in your projects set to 720P 30 fps or something else?

Thank you

Isn't it 7.5IRE?

(Threads with 7.5IRE in them never turn out very conclusive...)

You have to change the MPEG2 Rendering Template.

1. Choose File-->Render As, and select MainConcept MPEG-2 for the format.

2. Choose the HD 720 - 30p Template and click the Custom button to the right.

3. At the top of the Custom Template window change the Template name to something you would like, such as HDV 720p.

4. Click the Video tab. At the bottom change it to "Constant bit rate" and enter 15,000,000.

5. Click the Audio tab. Change the "Bit rate" to 384.

6. Click the System tab. Change "Stream type" to Transport. For "System bit rate" uncheck the "Auto-Calculate" box and enter in 19,400,000. Immediately click the Save Template button at the top of the window to save your new template. If you click anything else after changing the "System bit-rate" then the number may jump to a different value.

You can now use the template you made to save out files compatible with your HDV camera. If you require files to have the .m2t extension, then you will need to manually change the extension from .mpg to .m2t.