At the current upgrade price, it seems like you have MUCH to gain and very little to lose going from V4. Certainly worth downloading the trial and giving it a shot.

craftech,

I'm not sure what changes you're looking for in the basic editor, but here are some of the features that have been added since V4 that I find invaluable for straight-cuts editing:
- Media Bins
- subclips
- nested veggies
- improved ripple edit
- grouping behavior improvements
- a/v synch tool and "out of sync" indicators
- visual information about length of overlaps and fades

I haven't upgraded yet, but I've played with the demo of V7 and the improved snapping behavior, copy/trim project feature, saveable (and transferrable) desktop layouts, improved keyboard customization and preview enhancements look like very good efficiency improvements. If Media Manager is finally working right in V7, that should have some big payoffs, too, although it is a bit tricky to get used to.

In addition, on the VASST site, there are several free workflow scripts that I'm not sure work in V4:
- johnmeyer's "cuts only" script;
- "promote media markers"
- "audit for video/audio levels" and "audit for small gaps"

If you're willing to spend some, Excalibur, Ultimate S and the Veggie Toolkit all offer tons of workflow improvements... many of which I believe are not available for V4.

I may be fortunate, but I have found V5 and V6 to be very stable. Any problems I've had have turned out to be hardware related. We all know how important avoiding program crashes is for efficiency!

Titles,. sadly, remain as rudimentary as they've always been. I'm sure Sony believes they've solved this problem by bundling Graffiti Ltd. with Vegas. Graffiti may be fine, but I can't stand the interface, so I've turned to After Effects and Photoshop to create anything other than basic drop-shadow text. If I had my druthers, I'd rather Sony focus on fully supporting alpha channels than re-inventing a titler. (Weren't there supposed to be some improvements to this in V7?) That way, I could continue to use AE, Photoshop, Bluff, Graffiti, or whatever, and wouldn't have to drop a key filter on the title when I bring it in to Vegas.
Try the demo and see what you think.

Hi Brian,

Not to say that I've done much with it, but creating a title plate in Photoshop, adding a drop shadow, and turning off the background gives me what seems to be a perfectly fine 8-bit alpha including a drop shadow that's semitransparent. I can't speak to the other apps but I've never needed to key anything out with a PSD file.

What am I missing here?

Rob Mack

In what format, and with what settings are you saving your PSD file?

I'd be thrilled to be wrong about this!

Brian, it's possible that the PSDs you already make work fine (relatively fine, anyhow). I use to have trouble with alpha transparency until I found the relevant option

Right-click the event ->Properties -> Media tab, alpha channel

If your image truly has an alpha channel, that should do the trick.

Rob

Great, thanks! I'll check it out.

There is one preference setting that might make a diff for you in Photoshop. In the prefs under "File Handling" make sure to turn on "Maximize Compatibility". I'm using CS2 but the setting was there in 6.0 as well.

However, I think if you can see a a PSD image at all in Vegas then this is probably turned on.

So here's what I'd do with a PSD. Start with a new image. It'll just have a default background layer in it. For text, just put some text into the file. It'll automatically be a new layer. Now place a drop shadow style on the text. Finally, turn OFF the visibility property for the background layer. You should be seeing the text and shadow on top of a checkerboard. Save the file and drop onto the timeline.

You should be seeing your text and drop shadow with everything else being alpha. BTW, if you save the photoshop file as a 32bit PNG you'll get the same effect but without the ability to go back and change the layers.

I've never needed to do anything in Vegas to make this work.

Rob Mack

I've never needed to do anything in Vegas to make this work.

I agree 99% with Rob on this - except that I generally start with a transparent layer.

Mike

Thanks for all the tips.

This forum kicks the proverbial you-know-what. This forum, and the people who make it up, are Vegas' single-best feature. It always astounds me how quickly I get my questions answered here.

That's because we're all hovering over our keyboards waiting for a question we know the answer to!

Mike is totally right. You can just start with a transparent background. I'm used to having to turn it off because I have a photoshop action that i set up 4 years ago that starts with a white background.

You just get used to things after a while. This alpha issue is a good case in point. I think once upon a time you had to force a color in an image to serve as an alpha and people have continued to do it that way for years after they needed to. Now you can have 8-bit alpha, meaning you can get 256 levels of transparency. Very cool!

Rob

Photoshop CS2 has some awesome automation actions for digital video editors that were negotiated into the release by Rich Harrington. You can run them on a whole directory and automagically get the PARs and resolutions correct for video. Also they make the images broadcast legal, and some look for and correct oversaturation that could make a television go nuts. And if you want something different, you can copy/paste/edit the actions. He even added actions that setup gridlines to show you the "title safe / action safe" areas useful for DVD menu authoring.

OK,

Do prerenders still disappear at the drop of a hat?

Do I still have to do without a simple DROP SHADOW behind the letters in the credit roll amongst other things? I realize you can "fake it", but are we kidding here or what?

Why do I have to resort to Scenalyzer (great as it is) to capture video from a tape with interrupted timecode? Why can't they update the batch capture?

Are the envelopes (like velocity) a done deal. Can't they be improved? It's not like the industry doesn't use these features every day or anything. Try cutting to a frame after changing the velocity and see what happens. It jumps out of sight.

Don't any of you need to edit Mpegs? Can Vegas 7 do that yet?

And if I want to clean up VHS footage for example, can I use some basic plugins finally in Vegas 7 that will do that or do I still have to rely on Sourceforge or Mike Crash for that.

Let's get real here. I have yet to post a "laundry list" of wishes. My "laundry list" has always been the same. All I have ever needed was a good basic editor to make my own creativity easier to turn into good looking video.

If these basic issues are ignored version after version no one can honestly excuse them by saying that Sony can't please everyone.

John

Ah. Found them. You have to load them first.

Looking though them, many of them don't have much relation to Vegas. The alpha channel scripts look completely superfluous. Some of the other stuff is useful though.

Because Vegas treats image sizes a little differently, it might be a good idea to look at these very carefully and, if needed, remake them for Vegas. Specifically, most of the other NLEs treat 720x534 as a proper square pixel image. Vegas needs 720x528 (or the default 654.5x480, if you like half pixels ;-) )

The Alpha channel scripts seem pointless. If you've got transparency in the image, it's alpha info by definition.

Rob Mack

Rob (talking about CS2 action scripts again) -

I also don't bother with the alpha channel script. I laughed at that one. It's actually for use in AE (I think, or maybe it was some other program), which treats alpha differently (black and white swapped for masking).

I also tweaked some of the sizes for Vegas, and created some good HDV ones by simply editing what was already there.

Give them a good whirl. I find that they make an enormous time saver and productivity booster for adding stills in Vegas. For me this really made the upgrade to CS2 a high "bang for the buck" upgrade. I open an HDV image template in PhotoShop, import a jpg into a layer using Smart Objects, size it with the mouse, then run a script or two on it, and bang! it's ready for use in Vegas. There are probably even faster ways to get this done!

In his training DVD, Rich Harrington walks you through a procedure to give "film looks" to a sharp, high-res jpg. I programmed this into an action script. It really looks good. Jpgs don't stand out quite so much as being from a digital camera, especially after you apply some motion to them.

Well I guess we're way off-topic here. Oh well...

John, Pre-renders still disappear but there does seem to be enhanced pre-rendering capability (seems like it ram renders quicker than 6 did).

Velocity envelopes and volume envelopes have been made easier by just click shift and draw how you want them to go (much faster than the 3 double clicks it took to make a selectable area of volume envelopes and then click and drag down the middle one to lower a peak). Mind you I would love to see something like an auto clip end adjustment/movement when ripple is enabled, however that would be a MAJOR pain if it was default - You could screw up every thing on you T/L.

Vegas 6 and 7 can edit and work with Mpeg files, I've done it when necessary.

I don't see new plugins in the list so probably still gonna have to go to crash for your needs.

But I have to say that existing w/o nested projects would kill me, I would just outright fall over dead, so I say - get to it man - upgrade and let it rip ($140 won't kill you and there are a LOT of improvements from the days of 5,when I started, let alone 4).

Dave

While Sony/Madison can't please everyone, some of what you're asking for is pretty reasonable.

Prerenders would probably need to be reworked from the ground up because what they're doing now just can't make for persistent prerenders. Ain't gonna happen with what they've got, although a fix could look the same.

Credit rolls, drop shadows in them, etc, etc. Either they build a good tool for it or they seriously push it off to a third part app. When I say seriously I mean make sure people know at every turn what tool they need to go use. This becomes an issue of managing expectations, something they aren't doing now.

Yes, Vidcap needs a big effort to turn it into a much better tool. I use it, I occasionally have trouble with TC breaks, but not that much trouble.

No opinion about envelopes. Supposedly you can now draw them but I haven't looked yet.

By MPEG on the timeline I assume you mean VOB files. Not designed for editing, but then it looks like all sorts of other MPEG is getting attention what with HDV on the timeline. If I ran the circus I'd be setting expectations. PPro does this well by showing you a red line to say "you can't play this without rendering first". Vegas maybe needs to do that and it can be part of the prerender strategy. You want MPEG on the timeline? Then you have to render it like in PPro.

For VHS, assuming you did TBC and all that stuff on the way in, yeah, they could support more useful filters, in more useful ways. I'm not sure what you need but there's certainly been more development of filters for (avisynth?). What Madison really needs to get behind is third party development. They'd probably see more of that if they could buy and develop a good VJ program. It kind of fits into their product line and pushes them over the cliff of DirectX too. And there are a lot of young'uns out there who'd be enthusiastic about developing for a program like that.

Rob Mack

True. Photoshop tips weren't the point of the thread. But this does touch on the idea of using other apps with Vegas.

Rob

Somebody mentioned a few weeks back that if your prerenders are in a nested veg file, they don't get blown away.

How do you make a VOB work on the timeline? Can you just change the file extension to .mpg? What do you mean by render? Render to avi?

What Vegas really needs for this, to do it right:

Speculative Previewing and Speculative Prerendering a la GridIron Nucleo Pro for After Effects.

God, I love it! It really speeds up deep AE work like nothing else.

You can certainly change the VOB to MPG extension. There's no sound in a VOB, though.

I'm not exactly sure what ppro does but it marks stretches of timeline that won't play in realtime. You then hit enter to render and it places files in some folder of your choosing. Kind of like what Vegas does but more organized. I believe it chooses the prerender format based on your project template, so if you choose to work in a project that is 10bit and 422 it''ll make prerenders that way (I'm making assumptions here)

What Vegas would need for prerenders is, at minimum, to force you to decide what the project output will be ahead of time and then to treat the prerenders as if they were on a track and subject to ripple edits just like everything else. Probably needs to be able to run a checksum of some sort to verify the prerender remains valid. You don't need to be able to see the prerender track, but Vegas needs to behave like it's there.

Rob

Very true. There are a few ways to approach prerenders and you could do background renders constantly. I wonder if this would be obtrusive?

So what might a program need for better prerenders?

1- a predictable output format. (Does the program build DV25 prerenders? Uncompressed? Sony YUV? I think you have to choose the format in the project properties before prerenders can happen.)
2- Lots of dedicated disc space to store the files
3- A way to make them subject to ripple edits
4- a fast way to verify that they still represent the underlying tracks
5- a way to "lock off" a prerender (you could prerender individual media files when they have MediaFX applied. You could prerender nested Veg files on the assumption that they won't change a lot.)
6- A way to show that a range needs to be prerendered to play properly
7- a tool to profile your storage media to guage the throughput it provides (if you want HD prerenders you better be putting them on a volume that can support the throughput.)
8- Speculative prerenders in the background. Vegas would prioritize background prerenders nearest your cursor, either doing them in small chunks or bigger fixed files that it can fill in arbitrary frames of as it renders them. Vegas already does something like this as it caches frames.

It's a project, and maybe the madison folks can figure out better ways to make it fit into the current design.

Rob Mack

Don't forget making the background renders work with network rendering, so you can have a nice little render farm constantly pumping out pre-renders, while your editing machine concentrates on the editing side.