Thank you, Jerry. The screen shots bear out what I said in that the Stand Alone version seems to have rather more tabs/controls than are available in the Plug In. If this is right, can anyone help with my point about gaining the maximum advantage when needed by moving an event between the two versions please?

Richard

Richard, I guess I see it a little differently - do you see a setting/adjustment in Mercalli V2 SAL that is not in the Vegas Plugin? There is obviously more stabilization data available to user in SAL, but I don't know of any additional knobs I can tweak.

As far as moving between Mercalli V2 SAL & Vegas, I only know of two ways to do this:

1) Render (i.e. "Export") from Mercalli V2 SAL and drop the result in the Vegas timeline, or...
2) Write down the settings on a piece of paper & re-create the settings in the Vegas Plugin.

Others may know something I don't. If so, please post!

...Jerry

I just bought Mercalli recently and don't have enough experience to try to claim to be an expert, but Jerry's #2 (write down the settings) is what I was thinking. The only reason I was suggesting this is to avoid having to render back and forth. The SAL has a lot of visual instrumentation, but the settings seem to boil down to just a few yes/no choices and a few numerical values.

As you know, the SAL doesn't know what an "event" is, so it looks at an entire clip. I ignore what the SAL instrumentation says for time periods that I trimmed out of the clip when I worked on the event in Vegas, but some might prefer to just render the event anyway.

An ugly proposition would be if you had, say, 50+ events that all need to be stabilized. That gets messy regardless of how you want to do it. I guess you could tackle that based on how much time you have to invest.

1) Fastest way would be to complete your project, render it from Vegas, then run the completed file as whole into the SAL to get the best sending. Render directly from SAL or use Vegas plugin.

2) Suppose a couple of different parts of the video are more shaky than others. You could create two or three different regions in Vegas, put each region on its own track and use the Mercalli plugin on those tracks instead of individual events.

Sorry if I'm making this sound more complicated than it should be.

Thank you guys. That's a big help.

One last question. When you render out from Vegas to place into Mercalli, what format do you use? And, liokewise, do you have to render out from the SAL to return the piece to the Vegas project and, if so, what format do you use this time?

Hope I'm not being naive about this but I'm easily confused!

Richard

Richard,

First, if you haven't watched this excellent tutorial by John Rofrano, it may answer some of your questions:



If you still have questions, please post back.

...Jerry

PS: In Mercalli V2 SAL, I have been unsuccessful in exporting any of my AVCHD 1920x1080 clips to anything but WMV (and have been less than thrilled with resultant WMV), I emailed Mercalli support and they suggested installing the K-lite codec pack (which I refuse to do because of all the problems sited in this forum). That said, the Vegas Plugin seems to work fine - once you've sorted thru its idiosyncrasies.

Spectacular tutorial/demo John. It was a real pleasure to watch, learn and
understand the logic of the s/w

Also, what you did was to compare the versions, by underlining the value to an exsisting user thinking of UG-ing, which I can imagine Prodad wouldn't do, obviously. Did they?

Great stuff, thank you.

Grazie