Playback Rate Pitch Control - Impossible?

Ardhal wrote on 4/20/2016, 5:33 AM
I'd just like to clarify that this is *NOT* the standard question people ask on the forums where they're stretching or squeezing an event on the timeline in order to make it play faster or slower and they would like to preserve pitch (solved by messing with the event properties among other solutions). My situation is quite different.


I'm looking to speed up my workflow. I work mostly with long projects that require relatively little editing, such that most of my time is spent watching back through hours and hours of footage, making only minor edits here or there.

A few years ago I realized I could save a lot of time and get through my job faster by increasing the playback rate to 1.33x. (Pressing L, or manually adjusting the orange arrow in the bottom left of the timeline window). Note that this doesn't actually affect any events or media in the project: It simply allows me as an editor to review the footage faster.

Recently, the quantity and length of my projects coming in has increased by a substantial amount, so I'm searching again for speed-ups to handle the challenge. Looking back at this old method I'm using, I've identified that I could quite comfortably edit at an even higher playback rate (1.66, 2.0) and save even more time!

But there is a problem. I still need to be able to understand the spoken word audio in my projects while fast forwarding through them in editing. Unfortunately, as Vegas increases it's playback speed it also makes the audio sound more and more high pitched to the point where it becomes unintelligible.

My work in some other DAWs has made it quite obvious you *can* increase audio playback speed without also forcing it to become high-pitched, but is there any way to do the same (or to simulate the same!) in Sony Vegas while scrubbing in this manner? I'm aware that the internal preferences are quite substantive, could there be something in there that alters the way playback rate functions? An addon? A basic method I'm missing? Some workaround using temporary track FX?


Hopefully this makes sense! Curious to what people have to suggest and to learn more about this awesome software. Cheers!


tld:dr
I want to be able to press "L" lots of times to edit projects in fast forward, but with no chipmunk voices making it impossible to understand what is being said.

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 4/20/2016, 8:12 AM
Pitch correction requires an elaborate resampling algorithm that is not available during scrub or preview.
TeetimeNC wrote on 4/20/2016, 8:36 AM
Intriguing question Ardhal. I have suffered through some long form projects and your question got me to searching Google. I found what may be a less than perfect solution - apparently VLC lets you view video at high speed with pitch correction. I read that people use this for taking online tutorials which sounds like a great idea I'll want to explore. VLC also allows you to create bookmarks on the fly. So maybe you could preview your footage at speed in VLC and create bookmarks for your edit points, then load the same footage in Vegas and manually navigate to each bookmark. Of course this could only be useful if you have many hours of footage to review. But what would really be useful is if Vegas could actually read the VLC bookmarks and skip to each one. Is this perhaps something one of the Vegas scripting gurus might be able to make happen, if as I assume the bookmarks are in some sort of sidecar file?

Jerry
http://www.takeonesolutions.com
Photography • Video
TeetimeNC wrote on 4/20/2016, 11:47 AM
I played around with this a bit in VLC.

The good news: at 2x playback the audio pitch was maintained and it was easy to understand.

The not so good news: the bookmark feature is questionable. To save bookmarks you have to save a playlist (see XML below for results from my 12 bookmarks). Oddly, each subsequent bookmark entry includes all previous bookmarks. Also, I found a comment that suggests there may be an upper limit on the number of bookmarks so if anyone wishes to go further with this they should test with the maximum expected number of bookmarks.

And, this workaround would be dependent on some kind soul developing a Vegas script that might work like this:

1. Parse the bookmark timecodes from the specified VLC playlist file.
2. Place a marker at each timecode in the already loaded timeline video event.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<playlist xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/" xmlns:vlc="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/playlist/ns/0/" version="1">
Playlist
<trackList>
<track>
<location>file:///E:/Users/Jerry/Videos/Shopper%20Videos/Test%20Files/5434%20A.ASF</location>
<duration>389413</duration>
<extension application="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/playlist/0">
<vlc:id>0</vlc:id>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55},{name=5434 A.ASF #7,bytes=-1,time=60}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55},{name=5434 A.ASF #7,bytes=-1,time=60},{name=5434 A.ASF #8,bytes=-1,time=66}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55},{name=5434 A.ASF #7,bytes=-1,time=60},{name=5434 A.ASF #8,bytes=-1,time=66},{name=5434 A.ASF #9,bytes=-1,time=72}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55},{name=5434 A.ASF #7,bytes=-1,time=60},{name=5434 A.ASF #8,bytes=-1,time=66},{name=5434 A.ASF #9,bytes=-1,time=72},{name=5434 A.ASF #10,bytes=-1,time=77}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55},{name=5434 A.ASF #7,bytes=-1,time=60},{name=5434 A.ASF #8,bytes=-1,time=66},{name=5434 A.ASF #9,bytes=-1,time=72},{name=5434 A.ASF #10,bytes=-1,time=77},{name=5434 A.ASF #11,bytes=-1,time=83}</vlc:option>
<vlc:option>bookmarks={name=5434 A.ASF #0,bytes=-1,time=20},{name=5434 A.ASF #1,bytes=-1,time=27},{name=5434 A.ASF #2,bytes=-1,time=33},{name=5434 A.ASF #3,bytes=-1,time=38},{name=5434 A.ASF #4,bytes=-1,time=43},{name=5434 A.ASF #5,bytes=-1,time=49},{name=5434 A.ASF #6,bytes=-1,time=55},{name=5434 A.ASF #7,bytes=-1,time=60},{name=5434 A.ASF #8,bytes=-1,time=66},{name=5434 A.ASF #9,bytes=-1,time=72},{name=5434 A.ASF #10,bytes=-1,time=77},{name=5434 A.ASF #11,bytes=-1,time=83},{name=5434 A.ASF #12,bytes=-1,time=90}</vlc:option>
</extension>
</track>
</trackList>
<extension application="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/playlist/0">
<vlc:item tid="0"/>
</extension>
</playlist>


Jerry
http://www.takeonesolutions.com
Photography • Video
Ardhal wrote on 4/23/2016, 7:24 AM
Jerry,

I'm glad you were captured by my question in some way! VLC is totally a great example of what I mean when I say other software seems capable, absolutely!

Another solution would be, in theory, to mute any audio in Vegas, listen to VLC, and run an AHK script that doubles play/pause and seeking inputs into vegas back over onto VLC. But as soon as things start getting cut I'm afraid this just seems to invite so many problems!


I've noticed that when increasing playback rate in Vegas many audio FX are *disabled*. Compression, EQ, Volume envelopes, and so on. I am guessing it does this because it's difficult to keep up with streaming the audio quickly and all it's associated effects at once. Is anyone aware of a method of disabling this, at all, perhaps in the internal preferences?

If that were possible I could just pitch shift the entire track down to compensate during editing, then reset things to normal when complete!
cadudesun wrote on 1/27/2017, 9:50 AM

Hi. I just added a suggestion to address this issue:

"Speed up/down timeline playback rate preserving pitch": https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/suggestion-speed-up-down-timeline-playback-rate-preserving-pitch--105358/

If that suggestion (feature request) interest you, join the thread and provide further ideas and comments.

Musicvid wrote on 1/27/2017, 10:37 AM

Cadudeson,

You are spamming.

If the various pitch correction methods already available in Vegas are not good enough for you, make it ONE post, thanks!

cadudesun wrote on 1/27/2017, 12:49 PM

Musicvid,

What you name spamming I name trying to be useful to the community by suggesting a feature which would solve the exact problem that is being discussed in this thread "Playback Rate Pitch Control - Impossible?"

I also took care to mention: "If that suggestion (feature request) interest you, join the thread and provide further ideas and comments."

Sorry if it has caused any inconvenience for you.