Compositing Workflow - Still a Dissapointment?

mjroddy wrote on 4/24/2005, 5:03 PM
I know I'm in a minourity on this, but I'm still dissapointed in how to apply a composite mode. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, so I'm open to suggestions on workflow.
Say you have a recurring event: a graphic, perhaps, a watermark; you want to apply that using, for example, Screen Mode. As I see it, you now have to place your graphic on V1, with all your video media on V2. So now you change the Compositing Mode on V1 to Screen and all of a sudden your entire project needs to be rendered and plays at a significantly lower frame rate - even though your graphic only comes up occasionally.
I worked on a project where I wanted the watermark up every minute and hold for 15 seconds or so (maybe it was even less). So I had to suffer through slow playback even when the graphic was nowhere in sight.
The only workaround I thought of was to have those points in time where the graphic comes up, rebuild those areas to where the graphic comes up on V3 and put my media on V4 - for only those areas.
If we were able to apply composite modes on the event level (like in Boris Red, etc), we wouldn't have that problem.
Am I missing something? (something related to the above problem, that is.)(one could go on and on about what I'm REALLY missing ;-)

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 4/24/2005, 5:12 PM
I'm in total agreement, Matthew...and have had quite a few discussions with a couple engineers on this one. It's any compositing mode. So, for the timebeing I've been doing one of two things;
1. Rendering the segments as new tracks
2. Prepping the logo/bug in another app so it has correct transparency and other attributes.

Neither are ideal, but they work, nonetheless.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/24/2005, 5:52 PM
Hey, wouldn't veggie nesting solve this? :) Make a veg with all the proper compositing & such, then put that veggie in your main project. It should only slow down when that veggie is used because it's not compositing in the main project.

Maybe you could use an opacity envelope on that track too? I think I did something simular to this a year ago & that's what I did.

Try those & see if it works.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/24/2005, 6:01 PM
happyFriar,
Try doing exactly as you suggest. You'll find that it does slow down the render significantly regardless of which veg file has the compositing mode applied. It really should be that the only time the compositing mode affects the render time is when there is actually media in that slot. This was a problem with Vegas 5, too. If you put a track into 3D mode, even if it was a totally empty track, it would slow render times by as much as 50%. This carries over in the nested veg file, too. (not the 3D, but composited track slowness.
Ouch.
johnmeyer wrote on 4/24/2005, 8:56 PM
Is this bug still in Vegas 6? I reported this ages ago! I can't imagine how much render time has collectively been wasted by all Vegas users because of this. Here's the final post in a thread I started back in September, where I provided a little more insight into what circumstances cause the problem.

Compositing causes ENTIRE project to render

Basically, if you care about rendering time, and you only have a few short composites on your timeline, you are best advised to select those sections, render them in advance, get rid of the composite tracks, import the renders, and proceed. Pretty ugly, but that's what Sony's lack of discipline in fixing long-standing bugs has cost us.

Don't even get me started about the dozens of issues relating to keyframes, and interactions between event, track, and loop selections. I've already read posts that confirm that these things have not been fixed either.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/24/2005, 9:16 PM
Hmm... I thought the nesting veggie idea would work. Oh well.

If you're doing bugs (I did them occationatly), try making a veg with your bug the way you want it . Use a color you can key out easily that isn't in your bug (ie lime green). Render out that for as long as your bug will be on (or so it's looping). Then, put that rendered file into your project & chroma it.

I used to do that a lot. The nice thing is that if you modify the bug & render it to the same AVI, it will update in your main project with the updated AVI.

The bad thing is that you should be able to do the compositing w/o increasing render time. However, when I was doing things like that I was working on a P3-667 & everything took forever, so I made it a point to render & work at the same time which is probley why I never noticed this bug.
mjroddy wrote on 4/25/2005, 1:07 PM
I just used the bug as an example. There are many reasons to change your composite mode. For ANY compositing (assuming you change the mode), you have to make sure they are below your main timeline or you suffer loss of 29.97. Say I want to fly a logo in using 3D on track mode on V1. Now the entire T/L is hosed unless I render out.
Yes. There is that workaround, but by making compositing on the event level, no workaround would be necessary. I like a clean T/L where I can see my work at a glance. If I render little sections out, I'm no longer working with the original project. Now I'm working on two. It's just more messy.
It's a personal workflow issue, I'll admit. But it just seems so "simple" to make things on an event level, rather than on track.