Neo Scene and Vegas 7

Xander wrote on 2/17/2009, 4:08 PM

I originally bought Neo Scene to aid the workflow between AE and Vegas. What I typically do now, is bring my .m2t's and .mts's into AE, do the CC and then export as Cineform for working in Vegas. This has definitely improved the editing experience in Vegas. Originally, I would edit the .m2t's and .mts's directly on the Vegas timeline.

I currently have Vegas 8c. Got it because of the 32bit mode (which doesn't work) and the aforementioned compressed format support. However, it has been almost impossible to get a reliable render out of Vegas 8 since day one.

There has been talk on the forums that Vegas 7 is more stable, so now for the question(s).

1) Anybody using Neo Scene with Vegas 7?
2) Will Vegas 7 and Neo Scene make for a more reliable workflow now that I don't have the dependance on the Vegas 8 features, i.e .mts and .m2t support?
3) If so, 7d or 7e?

Vegas 8 was an upgrade so I still have the lisense. Any other thoughts?

Comments

LReavis wrote on 2/17/2009, 6:01 PM

I haven't found the need for Neo Scene yet, but I would suggest that you not give up yet on Vegas 8. I've spent untold hours trying to get Vegas to render properly, including V7d, which many consider to be more stable. I wasn't for me, nor was my trusty old P4 on an Intel motherboard - another solution recommended by some. It seems long projects, with bunches of feathered masks and other burdens simply are too much to render in one fell swoop.

What did work was placing markers at regular intervals (2-min. usually works for me). Use the scroll wheel to adjust the timeline, then press PgDn - M - Enter sequence repeatedly to place all the markers. Then use the Batch Renderer from Peachtree's Vegas Toolkit, or other batch render plugin, to render all the little segments between markers using the free Cineform intermediate codec included in Vegas. Put the resulting renders on the timeline between their respective markers and then render out to any format you wish. Usually even a 2-hour project will render just fine - although I have had problems with rendering to MP4 sometimes. In such cases, I render the entire timeline again to Cineform, then open it up in Super (free), Camtasia, Virtual Dub, Windows Movie Maker, Divx Converter, TMPGEnc, or other app that can render to the format that I'm wanting.

I realize that rendering twice to Cineform theoretically should impair the image quality, but I've loaded high-quality .PNGs to the timeline and then put screen grabs from the final render into Photoshop and printed them out without being able to detect any significant hit to quality.

Even with the little renders, Vegas will crash or stop rendering after every half-dozen or so renders. No problem - open it up again and start where it left off. If you later decide to re-edit the project, just delete the AVIs for those segments that you are changing, then manually re-render the little segments before attempting to render out the entire timeline.

It appears that 8C is more forgiving of large .JPGs & .PNGs than other versions, but really large stills can stop the show. Also avoid .MOVs (render them to Cineform intermediate). I have used Startup.exe to avoid loading antivirus, etc., but I haven't found that yielded much payoff.