Beware: A New Way to Screw Up a Vegas Project

johnmeyer wrote on 12/3/2005, 7:53 AM
I was just reviewing a large project prior to rendering and wondered why some of the event colors started to look washed out on my monitor. I went back and looked at the Color Corrector fX.

The first thing I found was that I had mistakenly created a bunch of unwanted keyframes because I had forgotten to turn off the sync button. (Sony please change this so the cursor always sync, but have the button instead turn on/off automatic creation of keyframes !!!)

This was not, however, the problem.

What I found instead was that the saturation sliders had all been moved down to near 0%. This was REALLY strange, because I didn't change saturation on ANY of the clips. I decided to delete all settings for one event, and re-apply the fX from scratch and see if I could create the problem.

Bingo!

As I was working on the keyframe timeline, I used the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out of the timeline, something I do almost every second on the main Vegas timeline. However, one time when I did this, the mouse was over the control area, not over the timeline. Bad move, John!

When you move the scroll wheel on the mouse while in a dialog, this moves whichever slider has focus. In the Color Corrector, the default is the Color Saturation slider.

Moral of the story: Be very careful of using the scroll wheel when in a dialog box.

This is going to be a hard habit to break, because I use the scroll wheel so often elsewhere in Vegas. I don't think there is an easy solution to suggest to Sony, because I think this is a Windows dialog box behavior, not something specifically designed by Sony.

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/3/2005, 10:41 AM
i like the scroll wheel getting focus on the current window, but the auto-key frame button seperate from the auto-sync woud be nice. :)

at least you figured out what the problem was!
B.Verlik wrote on 12/3/2005, 10:50 AM
I've also done the same thing with the 'arrow' buttons on my keyboard.
Grazie wrote on 12/3/2005, 11:44 AM
Yup! Guilty too . . G
riredale wrote on 12/3/2005, 11:54 AM
Naw, I prefer screwing up by accidentally leaving the "Auto Ripple" button on. Really messes up a project in practically no time at all...
JackW wrote on 12/3/2005, 12:19 PM
Guilty here, too. Posted a msg a couple of weeks back about doing this with the Opacity slider and the arrow keys.

Jack
filmy wrote on 12/3/2005, 2:08 PM
>>>A New Way to Screw Up a Vegas Project<<<

Hate to burst your bubble but been doing this sort of thing since version 3 / 4. very bad thing because the focus goes whereever the mouse might be - volume, opacity, playback - so there are a lot of ways to mess up a project with the whole mouse wheel/focus issue.
farss wrote on 12/3/2005, 2:30 PM
Agreed it might be hard to fix as there's no logical 'fix' without changing the whole way Vegas works however the code knows what has focus surely.
Couldn't whatever has focus have its color changed in some dramatic way, even made to blink?
And please don't get me started on the The Ripple Edit thing, too late I'm started. Someone explain to me the logic of this!
Trim the END of an event and all the envelopes move to the left by the trimmed amount, good way to screw up all your audio.
Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/3/2005, 2:47 PM
Even though it's an annoyance, sometimes I love the way Vegas des focus. I'm in the TL. mouse scroll to zoom in. Split. Shift. Move to trimmre, scroll, edit out a section & place on the TL. Open up a FX & scroll to lower the brightness. Very sweet & smooth.

It's just when I accidently do it that i don't like. :)
winrockpost wrote on 12/3/2005, 2:55 PM
It's just when I accidently do it that i don't like. :)
Great line
, applies to many things!
johnmeyer wrote on 12/3/2005, 6:08 PM
It's just when I accidently do it that i don't like. :)

Amen. For me it's "why didn't you do what I meant to do, not what I actually just did.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 12/3/2005, 6:19 PM
i know... i'm STILL waiting for software that knows what I want by scanning my thoughts.
Chienworks wrote on 12/3/2005, 7:21 PM
A standard joke at work is, "we didn't install the clairvoyant module yet." On the other hand, i'm not sure i'd want a computer displaying everything i think about! :o That would be truly scary.
B.Verlik wrote on 12/3/2005, 9:54 PM
OT from where this started, but another thing to note. Just a week ago, I tried to 'prepare' a DVD and I would keep getting a fatal error as soon as I pressed the "Prepare & Burn" button. It took me 4 days to figure out it was because I made a sub-menu that was nothing but a page of information on what I did to make this DVD. About one large paragraphs worth of information. I didn't realize that this paragraph became the 'Title' of this sub-menu and that's what caused the fatal error. Too many words in the 'Title'. So I shortened the title of the sub-menu to the first sentence then just added a separate text to complete the information and when I pressed the button, everything was working back to normal again. I didn't actually need a "Title" to the sub-menu myself, but apparently, Vegas DVD automatically uses the 1st words you type as the title.
GlennChan wrote on 12/4/2005, 3:02 PM
Maybe Vegas could be set so that a parameter name changes appearance when you push it off its default setting. In Final Touch HD, the text becomes yellow with a black outline when you change the parameter.

This could really help spot the times when you accidentally change track opacity with the arrow keys.
johnmeyer wrote on 12/4/2005, 4:37 PM
Good idea.