Direct Video Monitoring - would anybody else find this useful?

Robert W wrote on 8/30/2017, 8:25 AM

There is one feature that I would find very useful if it appeared in Vegas, but I am not sure if I am in a minority of one. I would like to be able to monitor a live video input, have the ability to record it directly onto a track on the timeline, and to have it visible live in the video bus and preview window. So effectively I am looking for the equivalent of audio direct monitoring but in video.

One of the reasons I could do with this functionality is that I do a lot of work with puppets. There are times when you want two performers to operate four puppets, and you need to shoot two separate takes and combine them afterwards. At present I might shoot a take with a tone on the front for sync, then play back the first take over speakers and a monitor while we shoot the second take. But then you have to start thinking about imaginary on screen boundaries to try and avoid blocking each other out and ruining screen composition.

It would be much easier to see live on a monitor where everything is. There is no easy way to shoot what amounts to dubbed layers of video in most applications. The only way I can currently think of doing it in OBS Studio, doing a take and then creating a scene with that take 1 as a video in the back ground and green screening over the top the second take as an overlay. But then you are producing a final video which has all of the elements locked in, and you will get a degree of degradation on the video printed through from the first take.

Anyway, I am not sure if any of that makes sense, but it would be great if there was a feature that let me acquire footage directly onto the timeline and that live video could be processed like any other track in the preview monitor so I could make amazing multi-layers compositions. It would be very much returning to the spirit of Vegas being the video editor that works like a smart audio editor. Would that appeal to anybody else? Is there any way to do that in Vegas already?

Comments

NickHope wrote on 8/30/2017, 9:19 AM

A screen capture function has been suggested a few times recently, mainly to cater for the gaming community who currently use all sorts of dodgy apps to do it and then complain when their non-standard files won't work in Vegas. Your suggestion could go hand in hand with that.

Robert W wrote on 8/30/2017, 1:26 PM

I think nearly everyone who streams or records for gaming uses OBS Studio these days, which is a really solid application. Also, it is open source and it is also available for Linux and Mac in addition to Windows, so in theory not dependent on Direct X. I wonder what the chances are of anybody importing some of the code into a Vegas extension, or it being officially adopted into the Vegas code base?

Musicvid wrote on 8/30/2017, 9:54 PM

 I wonder what the chances are of anybody importing some of the code into a Vegas extension, or it being officially adopted into the Vegas code base

 

a) Possibly neither difficult nor expensive, if the coder is on board with OBS and their open --source licensing.

b) With Sony, zero would be the answer. Magix has already shown an interest in comingling commercial and open source licensure terms, so such a thing may not be entirely outside the realm of possibilities.

VEGAS_CommunityManager wrote on 8/31/2017, 2:32 AM

Personally, I would love to see something like this. I'm also using OBS. 😉

Thank you for your feedback. Our development team will discuss the pros and cons internally.