Quality of video from Vegas Video

jcjewell wrote on 6/8/2001, 1:20 PM
I am not yet a Vegas Video owner, but hope to be soon. I've been using the crippled trial version (see pet peeve below). I'm generally extremely impressed, and am writing here for a couple of reasons.

1) I'd like to hear from some people who have experience with both Vegas Video and Media Studio 6.0, and hear what it was that convinced you to go Vegas Video, and also what features you feel you passed up by going the Vegas Video route, and why you decided to go Vegas Video anyway. This information is not only good for me in justifying my decision to myself, but also may help Sonic Foundry to understand what is important to its customers.

2) In my experimenting, I had a fairly simple effect. For the sake of discussion, let's say that I have a video of a bride standing in her parents livingroom. I want to have a small video of the bride's mother drift in from the lower left corner, growing larger until it comes to its final resting spot/size in the upper right corner of the screen, at about 1/8 size of the screen. A simple picture-in-picture effect. From there, the video of her mother crossfades to clip of her father, etc.

My question: I tried every which way I could think of to render the video so that it would look OK on the PC. But ultimately, each time, the smaller video was of very poor quality. The people were almost unrecognizable, and in fact I think if you didn't know them, you wouldn't know who they were from the inset video. The picture doesn't seem that it is so small that it shouldn't be able to pull it off. Afterall, I can resize the same clip to the same size in the preview window, and it looks just like I want it to look in the video. It's just that when it renders to the picture-in-picture in the video, it looks horrible. For that matter, the "Sonic Foundry" insert that appears every 5 seconds or so (because it's a try version) also looks very fuzzy.

Now--I've not had a chance to dump it to my DV camera, because I left the power supply to it in Mexico, I think (long story--I'm going back for it). I'd like to think that what I'm seeing on the screen on my PC is a pale preview of the true video, but I won't be able to verify that until I get my camera back up and running.

Can anyone comment on either of the above two items?

Thanks! Oops-- read below, also...

Pet peeve: I don't understand why the crippled version has to keep you from saving a project. The Ulead Media Studio Pro 6.0 trial lets you do everything the package will do, includings saving, it's just that when it renders it puts a HUGE red "X" across your video. That's fine for me. I can see well enough how the product works, and it does serve their purpose of keeping people from using it without buying it. I just like that I get a full 30-days to play with all the features, exactly like I'm going to be using it, including saving and loading projects.

Comments

Chris_L wrote on 6/8/2001, 2:25 PM
I'm surprised, very surprised. Ny PIPs have been great.

What are your project property settings for rendering/resample settings?

I'm trying to think what features I miss from Media Studio and the only one I can think of is playing back projects from the timeline straight in to the camera, like you can with Premiere too.

Unless I've badly missed something, this isn't possible with Vegas.

Yet if the Preview On External Monitor function sent audio to the camera it would work from that.

The more I use this program the more I love it. It's superb.
jcjewell wrote on 6/14/2001, 12:23 AM
Thanks for the reply, Chris--

I have, in order as they show up in the dialog box, for the Video tab:

NTSC DV, 720, Lower field first, 480, .9091 (NTSC DV), 29.970 (NTSC), Best.

I did try "uncompressed", and get excellent quality, but of course, my computer can't support the throughput so I get real jerky playback. But it does lead me to think it's just some kind of setting problem as you suggest.

If you have any samples accessible on the net, or know of any that are out there, I'd love to just see what the potential is for Vegas Video 2.0 output so I can make this decision. I'm really impressed with VV2.0 but like most everyone, final output quality is of paramount importance to me, so if the quality suffers, I'm going to continue my search.

Looking forward to hearing more-- Thanks!

--Jeff
FadeToBlack wrote on 6/14/2001, 2:35 AM
jcjewell wrote on 6/14/2001, 1:59 PM
GG,

Did you find that there was a quality difference in output between the demo version (that puts in a black "Sonic Foundry" page every 2 seconds or so) and the 7-day try you mention? Does it actually produce better output?

I had thought that Sonic Foundry monitored these forums, but now I'm starting to wonder. It makes me a little leary about going the Video Vegas route, if support will be like this. From experience, I've found that support gets WORSE after a customer buys the product (the company has your money), not better.

Will try the email address you sent, though. Thanks for the advice.

If anyone else has any input on this matter, I would really like to get a final word on what a simple picture-in-picture effect looks like (with a small PIP in one corner). My experience with the demo version has not been encouraging. ULead's MediaStudio Pro 6.0 seems to have much nicer output.

Someone please prove me wrong. Especially if someone can point me to a small video that is downloadable on the web, which was done with Vegas Video (I'm surprised that Sonic Foundry doesn't have a sample video available for download, which shows some of the effects and techniques that are possible).

--Jeff
SonyEPM wrote on 6/14/2001, 3:14 PM
There is no difference in render quality between the demo and full versions EXCEPT we put garbage in the frames and audio so the file is watermarked(useless).

feel free to contact me directly if you have further technical questions: daveh@sonicfoundry.com
jcjewell wrote on 6/15/2001, 1:12 PM
DaveH,

Thank you for your offer to answer questions.

I sent it, but don't know if you've received it as I've not seen a reply.

ChrisL, previously, had asked what settings I am using. I used the defaults, and the template for NTSC DV but have not seen high quality output on the PC.

Any suggestions?
jcjewell wrote on 6/18/2001, 12:29 PM
I've not seen any response from DaveH, of Sonic Foundry (although I've emailed directly as he suggested I could), or from anyone else at Sonic Foundry.

I have what I believe is a fairly straightforward problem. I am trying to make a decision on whether to buy Vegas Video 2.0 or not. I have the demo version, but the renders (aside from the black logo page with buzzing noise that is inserted every 5 seconds or so) are of very poor quality.

I have used the defaults, and have also used the NTSC DV setting, and nothing comes even close to the quality that I see from Ulead Media Studio Pro 6.0's demo software.

If someone at Sonic Foundry can't respond to this question, I will be going with the Ulead product and will post my results accordingly to rec.video.desktop.

Or are there any other USERS who have seen the same problem? I would expect it's just a settings issue, but I'm surprised that the defaults would not render properly. My input is DV.
SonyEPM wrote on 6/18/2001, 3:40 PM
I have parked a sample DV file here:

ftp://porker.sonicfoundry.com/

user:dude
password:sweet

This is a basic DV project using source material shot on SP betacam, transferred into Vegas using a Sony DVMCDA2 media converter thru a Pyro 1394 card. Rendered using the NTSC DV template in Vegas 2.0g. The footage is a little soft to begin with, but you can get an idea of sharpness by looking at the title. This file is ready to go for printing to DV tape using SF VideoCapture.