video preview help
 

Hello,

This is maybe the most ridiclulous post I have ever made.. But somehow in Vegas 5 I have lost my video preview window and have not been able to get it back !! I understand docking of windows and have done so many time, but for some reason I cannot get this sucker back..I have even gone into the view pulldown and turned video preview on and off..but no go..
I have even gone in the view menu, and turned everthing off, and then turned on the video preview, but nothing..
Any help anyone..?? This is a problem that i would think SHOULD NOT happen..

Mike M.

I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy), it goes after maximum quality when ripping.

Hi Rob...Where can I get EAC?...It's a software or a machine?

I doubt it. It's a fairly newly built system. Windows XP SP1. It's got no internet access, as it's purely for editing. So the only software I have on it is what I need for editing and nothing else. It's about 3 months old.

The DVD burner is a Philips DVD+RW 824.

Apart from that the system runs as smooth as a babies bottom.

Quick answer: hold down CTRL-SHIFT and open Vegas. This will reset EVERYTHING back to default (including any preferences you have changed) but will get the preview window back to where it belongs.

Longer answer: Odds are that you have moved it OFF the screen somewhere. Here's how you can find it:
1) Change your screen to a higher resolution.
2) Look in the areas outside your normal screen size
3) Find the preview screen and move it back into the normal screen size
4) Change your screen back to your standard resolution

Thanks Edward, you saved me a lot of hassle..I believe i must have moved the Video Preview window off the scrren like you said..

Thanks again !!

Mike M.

vegas. problems when extract audio..
 

Hi again. Who knows what mean " An error occurred while opening one or more files.?
{error 0x800a0026. message missing). This is the only thing what I get each time I tried to extract audio from CD..Any explanation will be very welcome....

Vegas.Problem with audio
 

I found the solution.With freerip, I fix it...Thanks Edward.....
Thanks Rob too....

Need Help with First Commercial
 

Hey Guys/Gals,
I am shooting my first commercial to be aired as a 30 sec. spot on Comcast cable. The commercial is an ad for a stage play that will be presented at a local theatre. I have captured the footage and I am editing it on Vegas 5. I have quite a few questions:

1. Do most station require a color bar with tone followed by 10 sec. lead? Or does it vary from station to station?

2. Currently I have my main audio to peak at -6 db using a soft limiter? Is this a good setting for tv?

3. I have my background music peaking around -10 db, is this good? Is there a general rule for the ratio of main to background music?

4. The director of the play like the film-look. Should I apply the Magic Bullet film-look to the master track? At what setting (if any) is standard?

5. Also, I want to make sure all my colors are legal. I plan to use the broadcast clamp on the master track. Should I this be the first in the chain of Track Fx followed by the film fx?

6. To go with the theme of this production, I used a white text with a red outline on top pf a black background. (Text appear in blakc bands created at top and bottom of screen). Will I have problems with this since red can be a tricky color? Should I apply a broadcast clamp to these tracks?

7. How risky is it to have a portion of the text between the safe area lines (overlay)?

8. What is the font size (using ARIAL) that can be easily viewed by most tv's?

I guess that's enough for now. Definitely more to come.

Thanks of all your help.

Sincerely,

Albert Rodgers

16x9 on a 4x3 external monitor - Please help!!!
 

I am working on a project I filmed in 24pa using squeeze mode on the dvx100a (F6). When I preview on an external 4x3 television through firewire, I want to see the material in 16x9 aspect ratio with the black bars on the top and bottom. I have set the project properties to NTSC DV Widescreen and tried the different options in the event pan/crop menu with no luck. Also, my video device is set to NTSC DV Widescreen in the video preferences page. I have tried on two different 4x3 TVs with no luck, so I ruled out a TV problem. Is there a setting in Vegas 5 or on the DVX100a I'm missing? Any suggestions on achieving the 16x9 preview?

Thanks in advance.

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)