It would be very helpful, no matter what the resolution, to have the audio at actual pitch during scrubbing. Is there any way to accomplish this? As of now when I scrub audio it responds like an old-fashioned tape machine.

what do you mean, when you go slow, the audio sounds slow and when you go fast the audio sounds fast?


How would it be possible to achieve actual pitch? It seems to me, the pitch is determined by how fast the audio data is being recieved depending on how fast you are scrubbing.

Busterkeaton: I must apologize. I believed that in my separate audio program (used infrequently) that the scrubbing tool did not behave as the one in Vegas and that actual pitch was maintained. I was very ,very wrong. They both behave the same way. Sorry for the confusion.

Did I dream somewhere that some scrubbers maintain the actual pitch? Now that I reflect on it - it would take alot of processing power to do that. Damn, getting old is something ain't it?

If you're not sure how useful something like this could be, play with FCP or Premier-- they both have this feature. I find this to be a very useful feature as you can move frame by frame using the arrow keys on the keyboard and hear the audio under the cursor.

This makes it very simple to hear when a person starts saying a word with frame-accuracy. Yes we can look at the waveforms, but there's no guesswork when you can hear the audio cue you're looking for.

Unfortunately Vegas doesn't provide audio feedback when scrubbing using the keyboard (arrow keys, F3/F9, etc.). The closest thing you can get is dragging the playhead across the timeline.

Dragging the playhead with the left mouse button (or whichever your primary mouse button is) will act as if you were using a shuttle knob (the more you turn the knob, the more the audio pitch and video speed increases).

Dragging the playhead with the right mouse button (or secondary mouse button) will scrub the audio/video at a single rate no matter how fast/far you move the mouse (i.e. pitch will not change). This is probably the best way to get the control you are looking for. If you zoom in on the timeline, you can get finer control and pretty easily drag the playhead frame-by-frame with audio feedback.

Still wish you could do this with the keyboard though :(

Note: Make sure you click and drag the playhead and not the cursor. Dragging the cursor will not give you audio feedback by default (though you can get some audio feedback if you hold down CTRL and then click and drag the cursor)

Media100 also allowed you to hear a little audio forward or behind the play head. You'd hit a key combo and it'd play a little audio beyond the play head without moving the head. This way you could easily find the spot that was just before or after the thing you needed, like the start of a breath or the point just after a swallow.

I asked for this feature a long time ago and what we got was the Numpad Zero key behavior, which isn't very useful. Sorry folks, I should have explained it better to them but they never ask you to clarify after a product suggestion. Yet another case where SCS was happy to add a feature but didn't have any idea why you'd want it or how you'd use it.

Rob Mack

There are more animators using Vegas than most of you might realize. This feature would be very useful for the reading of lip sync, or to just double check if we got the lip sync right in our animation apps.

The one I use, TVPaint Animation has exactly what this thread is asking for and the amount of sound scanned from frame to frame can be tweaked so that it plays more, or less, or nothing at all of the preceding and following frames.

But there are many animators who don't work with an animation application such as TVP and expect to read their tracks in an NLE. I know of cases where people turned away from Vegas just for this reason.

Well, for example, I want to have a video cut happen right at a drum beat or cymbal crash. I can't rely too much visually on the waveform because some music has a lot of stuff going on and it's hard to see those beats or instances on the waveform. Going back and forth like an analog tape machine to look for a beat just doesn't "cut it" for me (heh-heh, sorry, I couldn't resist the pun), even though I understand that that is how it was done in the old, old days with analog tape. I just couldn't understand why I am able to scub frame by frame with other software but not with Vegas, but hey, I wouldn't give up on Vegas 'cause Vegas kicks a$$.

I scrub audio in Vegas all the time using the jog wheel of my ShuttlePro2. Works great. If you are serious about scrubbing, get a Contour ShuttlePro. It's the best $80 you'll ever spend to improve your workflow.

~jr

jr, how is that done?! I've given up on figuring that out a long time ago. Could you please tell me what you have your jog wheel left and right set to, to hear the sound when you rotate/scrub?

> Could you please tell me what you have your jog wheel left and right set to, to hear the sound when you rotate/scrub?

This has been discussed at length in this post: Vegas Pro 8: Audio scrubing with external control As I said there, I loaded the Shuttle pro settings right from the Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 folder (Sony Vegas Pro 8 -- ShuttlePRO v2.pref)

Scrub Forward 1 - 7 are F17 to F23.
Scrub Reverse 1 - 7 are Ctrl+F17 to Ctrl+F23.

I would just load the prefs from the Sony folder. These are for the outer wheel not the inner wheel.

~jr

But this is not the Jog-, but the Shuttle-Wheel. So it's not a frame by frame scrubbing, but same we have when using the JKF keys or using the timeline scrub-control.

When you use the Jog-Wheel to have frame-by-frame stepping audio is muted, even on the Contour. At least this is what I get.

Marco

When you use the Jog-Wheel to have frame-by-frame stepping audio is muted, even on the Contour. At least this is what I get.

Same here. I really had my hopes up reading the above and then...

Bob.

I'm nowhere near my editing suite at the moment but, has anyone tried assigning F17 and CTL-F17 to the jog wheel?

If you hold the K button down and click J or L, it will do a very slow scrub, this may allow you to get where you want.

Dave T2

You mean asigning this to the JOG instead to the SHUTTLE? This is worth a try.

Marco

Assigning the Fkeys to the jog knob won't work. The Shuttle is just a series of switches, it is the F key that defines the function. When the switch is hit, the F key activates, which in this case is a slow jog. Not a one frame jog. If you look at the assignment for the JOG knob, you will see it is the equivalent of move one frame.

Dave T2

Mmh, then this is no way to achieve the "one-frame-scrub".

Tinker a script might be a way. It's like looking where the cursor is, doing the L-key-command for a very short moment, jumping back to where the cursor was plus one frame. Then using the script from a key-command. Makes sense?

Marco

I guess I'm with Chienworks on this one. I don't see why you would want the jog to give you a 1/30 second burst of audio. The shuttle goes plenty slow enough to scrub back and forth and find the exact spot. I like having the jog silent as I rock back and forth between frames to find the correct video position for a cut.

Sorry to have gotten your hopes up. I guess I don't know what I'm missing but I do know that it would annoy the heck out of me if the jog made noise while trying to find a good video split point. I guess it all depends on your work flow.

jr

It's simply what other pro equipment gives me and it helps when doing accurate work within no time. Using the shuttle instead even with lowest speed is more like trial&error. Using the waveform is also a big helper, sure (especially when you use large track heights with vertical zoomed waveforms), but this is not fast.

For example I often work with the Sony MAV to do near live editing. When editing interviews and statements I would be left if I hadn't this function. For Vegas this is nothing I consider to be a must but just a helper for some situations. This is why I think a script solution would be just fine.

Marco

I was just playing with modifier keys while dragging the timeline play head. It seems like Ctrl+Drag gives you something similar but this is really primitive compared to what I used to see in Media100.

The idea there was that you could use a key combo to play ahead of or behind the current position. It would always leave you back at the position you started at so if you actually wanted to move the playhead to a new starting point you'd do it separately.

Here's an example of how it would go with Vegas.
--park the playhead somewhere
--Use a key combination to play the next X frames (configured in prefs) and then return to the spot you were parked at. (I'd suggest something like ctrl+alt+shft J or L)
--If you need to move the playhead forward or back use alt+arrow key or equivalent
--try again

This is really useful when you need to audibly find the start or end of something like a mouth sound or breath.

It's similar to what Numpad Zero does, but useful instead of useless.

If one were to script this the behavior would be kind of similar to the Numpad Zero behavior. I don't know if you can actually bind a script to keys but if you can't then maybe you'd have to actually build a little graphical tool with buttons on it.

Rob

Rob,

That trick can work. Change the NUM PAD review to one frame. Park the cursor where you want and hit NUM PAD 0. This will play the next frame of audio and video.

Might work for some.

Dave T2

But this will also play that one frame before the cursor, doesn't it?

Marco