jeez bob,

i can't even get to the link and you've already jumped.

Don't worry-- you'll bounce. just wait and see. And me? I'm still just trying to get to the link.

besx3,

bt

Just did a copy and paste on the link, that at least works fine.

"How come the audio guys get to have all the fun?" . . LOL! Think of all those "Perky-Pert-Perks" while on the road? I don't see the same for a vidjocks or NLE-ers ? . . .

BUT, the "sound" point you are making is that this is ALL digital .. where's the Beef!?!?!?!

Bob, I hope you are recovering well in hospital

My point is that you can tie just about any parameter of any FX on an audio track to an automation envelope, I've tried this and it's great. Needed to create the sound of a big wave crashing and used some pink noise with a few FXs, then used a few envelopes (think lsow flange) so the sound tracked the wave coming down, great stuff.
Now my beef is that with Video FXs none can be automated, kerframed yes, but as far as I can see I cannot use automation to write keyframes or parameter values.

Bob.

hmm..
how good would it be to get a unit like the Korg Kaos to allow us "touch" a video effects paraneters in realtime..... I odnt see why it cant considering the keyframes can be drawn automatically thru cc for audio, doing it for video is jsut chaining that cc controller to that onscreen positioning touchpad...

im thinkin too far ahad but i dont see why it cant work..

i was hoping to do it with firstly this plugin and secondly with the Mackie control surface, but most control surfaces can be used, once you can have atomatable video FXs.

farss -

I was playing around with this plugin alot yesterday, after the new version was released. I am going to post a tutorial hopefully later today, I think I have time to do it.

It is fun to play with, no doubt!

Mike

ps agree completely re. the frustration of 'only' being able to key frame vid fx.

I don't know that you'll see envelopes in the video world, they don't exist.
You can already do what you want to do, just play the file back and adjust. Keyframes will be inserted.
Keyframes don't exist in the audio world and envelopes don't exist in the video world. It's just a difference in interface and nomenclature. but in practice, it's all the same thing from where I stand.

Okay, I have made a short tutorial vid for y'all to download. It gives a demonstration of how the BlueCat plugin can be used to help automate video FX.

Download it by right-clicking on the following link and choosing 'Save As': Bluecat demo vid

It may stream if you have a fast connection (it's 400kbs wmv file, approx 4.8MB).

Enjoy!

Ibliss--

again-- a picture is worth... a lotta talk.
nice days's work, sir.

whattaya say, Bob? Come in off the ledge long enough to talk up what else we need here... ie, what's an envelope got that string of keyframes can't deliver. I'm guessing there probably is something, but I still don't get it.

Thanks again ibliss!

bestx3,

bt

Oh wait-- see if I'm following ibliss
1) first the envelope info copied to the vid track affects 'simple' variance of the composite envelope.
2) but then at end of tute-- all hell breaks loose and-- we're led to infer that an darn video FX plug we want to manipulate, is likewise capable of being varied...

Admittedly, I'm a slow study-- For the rest of the FX shown, Tint/Distort/etc, am I manually templating the envelope information itno keyframes in events??

wethree -

1) - yes, that's exactly what I've done.

2) - sadly not quite. In the second half of the vid, the track with the pulsing composite level has various effects - pinch/punch and I think a bit of glow. The next track down has a straight copy of the video. So the result is the fx track x-fades in and out with the regular track in time to the music. Faster than seting up a bunch of keyframes to switch the effect on/off, I think anyway.

Hmmm.

So back to a question I submitted to Bluecat earlier today. How is their DIGITAL PEAK METER PRO plugin, similar and different from the SOUND KEYS plugin offered by www.trapcode.com for AE5 and higher?

Can Ed Troxel and the coders explain what can and can't be achieved in the keyframes vs envelope arena...

Here's an excerpt from the Trapcode site with regard to SOUNDKEYS if you are unfamiliar with it.

NOTE: that in the following excerpt, SOUND KEYS is called a ' keyframe generator'. Any chance Bluecat and Trapcode might be able to share approaches and come up with a tool that can handle envelopes and/or keyframes in either Vegas or AE?

(excerpted from www.trapcode.com)
Sound Keys fundamentally differs from the keyframe generators that come with AE. They (wiggler, motion sketch etc) have their own palette, whereas Sound Keys is applied as a regular effect and keyframes are generated into its own output parameters and then linked with an expression (or copied into place). An advantage with this approach is that all settings for the plug-in are saved with the project.

Since Sound Keys was released After Effects 6.0 came out and included the handy new keyframe generator "Convert Audio to Keyframes". The main difference between the two lies in that Sound Keys can extract keyframes from frequency ranges rather than just the overall amplitude. This makes it possible to extract motion from only the kick drum, or only the voice for example. Another difference is that Sound Keys offers different falloff modes.

Hosts
Adobe After Effects 5.0 and higher (Mac OSX/Windows)

hey --

and how come a velocity envelope on an accompanying video track won't take the same envelope node transfers a composite and fade to color envelope on the same track will?

So -- when is an envelope an envelope, and a keyframe a keyframe....I'm headed to the ledge myself, Bob...

Thanks a lot ibliss. I was quite envy with the AE 6 that has this kind of feature. And your plugin has open the door for Vegas 5 to do that.
After reading the manual of vegas script sdk, I realize that vegas doesn't allow you to modify the value of a effect directly. It only allow you to change the value through the "presets". So that means in order to do that, you need to create some presets like "level 1", "level 2", "level 3" .... and write a script to add those presets to the right spot in the video. It's not a real conversion, but just a imitation. But the point is, it's doable.

I am trying to write a script to see if I can do it. I will post it if I suceed.

Farss,

Thank you for showing me how I might use this plug-in. Unfortunately, I don't see the same relevence to the videos created by Spot and Johnny.

They need a demo like this that shows how we might use their 52 features. I was going to buy their plug-in, but didn't know how I might use most of the stuff (yet thought it was probably important).

Firstly,
thanks to ibliss, I know now how to copy an envelope! Obvious when you know how! I had though of doing the two tracks trick, that'd be OK for simple FXs but what about using automation to write CC values for RT color grading?
I don't quite see the point of what SPOT is saying though, sure traditionaly audio uses envelopes and video uses keyframes. But Vegas has already broken that tradition, we have velocity, opacity and fade to color envelopes for video, why therefore cannot every video FX be controlled by an automation envelope?
I don't just see this as being for some quick and easy FXs in a music vid either. Think about grading a one hour video. I don't see a pro stopping every time he wants to tweak a color and adding a keyframe. He wants to keep his eyes firmly on the monitor and his hands on the controls, taking your eyes off the monitor to look at the PC screen would throw your sense of color balance right off anyway.
I know being able to work that way is traditionaly in the realm of high end systems but since when did the Vegas team respect those sorts of traditions.

Bob.

First, it would be virtually impossible to do a video that shows all 52 functions and have it be streamable. Second, most every tool has a tutorial with downloadable media so you can see first hand how each of the tools works.
If you are unable to see how having hundreds or thousands of photos be loadable to the timeline, timed to markers, aspect ratio matched, Pan/crop applied with various depths, varied starting/finishing points, reduce interlace flicker applied, and pre-set selected transitions applied all with one click, then perhaps Ultimate S isn't for you. Ultimate S saves time and saves clicks. That's about all there is to it.
That said, I'm failing to see where that is relevant to this particular thread, as this thread is more about a Direct X plug rather than a scripting tool.

Farss, I agree that Vegas has broken many paradigms, but considering the number of envelopes required for some of the video plugs...it could become very confusing. Just for giggles, load up an automatable compressor or parametric eq. Select all the automateable points. Look at how many envelopes there would be. Should they all be envelopes? I dunno. I'd rather not have them be this way, I'd rather stick with keyframes. But, if the majority of users wanted envelopes, I guess Sony could certainly do it. It's absolutely a paradigm issue, not a technical issue. Sony could use envelopes for all FX if they wanted to. Then they'd be totally out of the normal paradigm of the NLE world, thus inviting even more disdain from those that would call Vegas different. But...Sony listens to users...maybe you'll see some changes if enough folks ask for it.

SPOT,
I totally agree, that many envelopes would be a visual nightmare, just enough to do drive CC even would be impossible to adjust visualy. But that's not the point here, the point is being able to write FX parameters by automation. If it can / has to be done using keyframes then it's almost just a question of semantics.
I'm trying to push the envelope here, OK. Why is automation so good for audio? Because it works the way our brains do, listen to the sounds with our ears and adjust with our hands. If you have to stop the sound to make the adjustment you loose it. I'm pretty certain you'd agree with me on that one.
So what I'm about here is the same thing for vision, if it's done by keyframes, envelopes or a direct read/write into a database doesn't matter, what matters is making the system work for us.
Bob.

howdy howdy,

Here's what Guillaume of Bluecat sent me in an email yesterday.

Hi Brad,

the trouble is that I am not a Vegas Expert since I work more in the Audio domain than Video... The plug-in is able to produce an automation envelope, and what you do with it afterwards depends on your host software.The Only limitation in Vegas is that you need to keep the GUI active to get the output envelope (due to Vegas DirectX implementation...).

I have had a look at Soundkeys. It seems that it works the same as DPeak Meter Pro except that in SoundKeys you can choose your frequency range (DPeak Meter Pro just exports the overall volume). This produces an automation envelope (is that what they call KeyFrames in After Effects?), and you have then to link this with another effect parameter. If you want to use the envelope on a video effect, you need to copy it to the video track. So it is not possible to use the output of DPeakMeter Pro tdirectly to another effect input. This is the way directX plugins work :-(.

By the Way to get an optimal output you need to choose the smallest latency you can get with Vegas, otherwise there might be latency between the envelope and the real signal.

I hope this helps and that you enjoy the tool! If you get some good results do not hesitate to send me samples of you videos!

Guillaume Jeulin
Blue Cat's Music Software.
http://software.bluecatonline.org
************************************************

You know-- the more I think about the difference between envelopes and keyframes, the more I wonder if expressions -- the javascript? way to enact keyframelike change without keyframes-- might be a next nice step in Vegas's evolution.

So here's the new question-- Again for Ed and the coders who hopefully can help the uncoders understand the difference between --

keyframing, enveloping, writing expressions (as is done in AE and Combustion land) and scripting.

bestx3,

bt

bump

This is pretty awesome I just wish like farss said it could assign these keyframes to a video plugin. Talk about having some fun with this pluggin. Imagine being able to assign it to a velocity envelope or a CC or many other things to produce some very cool timing effects with audio. I asked about this a long time ago and this is really close but not quite what I was asking about here on the forums