Some positive notes on V6

fultro wrote on 4/20/2005, 1:39 PM
Allright I am pretty upset here with things that don't meet expectations (somewhat my problem), things that don't work as advertised and things that flat out don't work at all. Almost all my observations / reservations have been confirmed here and I can only hope with the rest of you that many of these things will get ironed out soon.
But because I have some new clients coming in tomorrow I have been running this program non-stop since very early this AM, trying out all the things I know I will need for the project.
And I have to say that the only crash I had in about 8 straight hours now was due to an already questionable VST pluggin.
But otherwise Vegas seems to feel a bit snappier, VST plugs work fine -lots of them at once --finally VST support in a major audio mixer - what a concept-- .but it remains to be seen if this impementation takes advantage of VST tempo mapping.
My rendering times are roughly 7% faster (complex composites with audio and plugs) on a 3GHz 1G ram P4 HT. By the way after testing all the threading options (1-4) of the Pref/Video tab - 2 is fastest.....
Though its a drag that the framerate of nested vegs is so slow - you can at least right click on it to open up a new instance for faster preview and I still find the feature useful for batch rendering - can someone please tell me if there is a better built in batch renderer - the script that comes with Vegas only seems to handle one veg at a time to multiple file formats...

And something I have yet to see mentioned that I am really happy about - my firewire to monitor conection is way improved - no longer finicky and causing temporary freezes (or crashes) as in V5 - big plus here
Personally I find Media Manager a waste of resources - everything has improved for me without it
I like the Save Project Path in Rendered file option - saves me time when wandering around Windows explorer looking for stuff...
Looking forward to the Secondary Video Display when I get one - by a few accounts here it is one thing that seems to work...
And sorry to end on a sour note when I wanted to keep this upbeat - but I just remembered something that is just too absurd to ignore: WTF Sony - it is the 6th incarnation of what was once a dedicated DAW if only a patial one now, and we still do not have a working metronome? Dewdskis -- Have some mercy on our weary audio souls ----- David

Comments

Nat wrote on 4/20/2005, 3:04 PM
For batch rendering, try either this or this
fultro wrote on 4/20/2005, 3:36 PM
thanks for that, Nat - I have an e-mail out to the Batchrender Pro developer asking if he is sure it works with V6. Seems he doesn't offer a demo - do you know otherwise?
David
Nat wrote on 4/20/2005, 3:44 PM
I don't think so, check out the second link though, looks more powerful...
Marco. wrote on 4/20/2005, 3:52 PM
Yes, Veggie ToolKits Batch Renderer is great - and it works with V6.

Marco
PDB wrote on 4/20/2005, 4:10 PM
DVDA 3 looks Amazing!!!

I still believe in Sony Support. I still Believe in this community. I still believe in the companies that support this community. V5 is still there, as is V4 etc....

I just bought V6 + DVDA 3, BTW.

Look forward to Vegas 6b....!
rmack350 wrote on 4/20/2005, 9:14 PM
On the poor playback of nested veg files issue, Others here have pointed out that this is a problem with parent/child composites. Does that sound right to you?

Rob Mack
chaboud wrote on 4/20/2005, 11:42 PM
Rob, this actually stems from the final output quality of the nested project and will be resolved for 6.0b.

This is not a bug, per se, but we plan on further optimizations for this workflow in the near future.
mwkurt wrote on 4/21/2005, 4:03 AM
Does anyone know whether Frameserving can be used for either of these batch render utilities?
Thanks,
Mark
tharris wrote on 4/21/2005, 6:07 AM
Can you elaborate on the problem stemming from the final output quality of the nested project? Are you referring to the playback settings for the video window?
rcrawfor42 wrote on 4/21/2005, 7:23 AM
After reinstalling the demo last night, I spent the evening working with V6. No problems. It wasn't noticeably slower, no crashes, no oddities. I even used a "master project" with eight nested projects, and the only thing even annoying was the time needed to rebuild the thumbnails.

I think part of that is how long the subproject is. I'm working on a concert video; originally I had ALL the video and sound for each band in the subprojects, with regions marking each song. I'm a bit farther along now, and can start thinking about the final target DVD. At first I had each band's project in the master project -- and that was about 30-40 minutes of video for EACH one. The rebuilds caused problems because they took so long.

Then I went through and cut out the pieces I won't need -- the preroll before the band's first song, the trailing bits, the occasional entire song that won't make it for time reasons. By now, each band's project is down to 15-20 minutes, and the rebuilds are just an annoyance.

I like V6. Maybe I've just been lucky, but it's doing what I need and it's made it easier to do it, too.
PAW wrote on 4/21/2005, 8:27 AM
tharris

I think he meant the project that is on the timeline, if you open the veg file and look a the File -> Properties dialogue box there is a setting for full resolution rendering quality.

This setting will determine the framerate of the event (the nested project) within the master project.

I have tested it with the different settings and with the nested project resolution set at best I get 7-8 FPS, at Good it increases to 15 and at preview I get the full 25 FPS

A workaround for now would be to set the nested project to preview until you are ready to do the final render then change them to good/best as suits then complete the final master project render

The slower timeline playback is not that big an issue for me at the moment as if I need to work on the nested project I open that project.

Within the master project I am doing the titles, titles between neste d projects etc and any other stuff around the event/nested project

I "think" thats the workflow that works for me

It will be good to have the preview faster regardless of setting but I don't think it is the show stopper I first thought it was

Paul
BrianStanding wrote on 4/21/2005, 8:33 AM
This seems like a no-brainer to me. If you're not getting full frame-rate preview on a project in its own timeline with preview set to Good/Full, you can't expect it to get any better as a nested project. (Unless, of course, you pre-render.)

"Preview" mode always works well for me except for critical color correction.
PAW wrote on 4/21/2005, 9:06 AM

Not sure I understand your comment Brian, I'm getting full frame rate within the project but when it is nested into a master project you don't.

The frame rate acheived is determined by the setting in the nested project

Paul
BrianStanding wrote on 4/21/2005, 9:09 AM
OK, I misunderstood. Got it now.
tharris wrote on 4/21/2005, 9:12 AM
PAW -

Thanks alot for the clarification. This is one of the main features I am looking forward to using as I have several segments of wedding videos to assemble and this should work way better than copy/paste from one project to another as I tended to lose some settings along the way.

I was concerned about all of the negative feedback surrounding this feature especially since my upgrade will arrive tomorrow.....
PAW wrote on 4/21/2005, 9:21 AM

no worries Brian probably the eay I explained myself

tharris it's great for the wedding stuff thats what I have been doing

I turn off the media manager as the performance hit is too great even on a dual proc system that is well specified

the bit I like is you can open the nested project in a seperate session by right clicking the nested project and picking the option or i have the veggies listed in explorer and just double click the nested project and open it in the same session and then double click the master project to switch back - less windows to work with and it is quick in V6

I would buy the upgrade just for this feature, the whole copy and paste thing could easily get out of hand :-)

Paul
rmack350 wrote on 4/21/2005, 9:26 AM
Yes . The problem is that the framerate for the nested projrct is quite a bit less than it would be in the original.

I guess I just took people's word for it that compositing was the issue.

Rob Mack
fultro wrote on 4/21/2005, 9:36 AM
thanks to you all for the ideas on how to use the nested vegs
this feature is really growing on me now with these useful suggestions
jlafferty wrote on 4/21/2005, 11:06 AM
It's understandable that nested veggies could run a bit slower, however I think the framerate issue is too pronounced with compositing veg's. Regardless of whether it's a "bug" or a "feature," it makes nested composite veggies imossible to work with. I haven't tried creating any lower thirds and dropping them on the timeline like Spot suggests in his article, but that might not make the issue evident -- just drop the "cube w shadow" .veg (available from Sony) onto the timeline as if it were media to see what I mean.

Unless there is a way to right-click a .veg on the timeline and downres the output quality in the properties dialogue there, I think expecting people to rely on this setting to make veg's play nicely is asking a lot -- you'll have to go into each individual veg, set it up at a lower quality, then save it, then re-open it... then remember you set it this way when you render it on its own...

Good to read that Sony's listening and working on improvements.

- jim
tharris wrote on 4/21/2005, 11:30 AM
PAW -

I know what you mean about the copy/paste routine - I've had to do that in Vegas5 and while it is nice to be able to have more than one Vegas app open at once and work on them at the same time, I was losing attributes when moving clips from one to the other (especially keyframes for SpiceMaster transitions) and it was a huge pain to go back and correct it.

So, that was the main reason I am looking forward to nested projects and was concerned about the issues. I ordered my upgrade Tuesday and was becoming increasingly concerned about the playback problems.

I can live with the workaround for awhile but I hope the playback speed gets fixed real soon...
BrianStanding wrote on 4/21/2005, 2:25 PM
Have you guys played with the "save project file info in rendered files" feature? This does involve rendering out a file and then putting the rendered file in a timeline.

However, once the rendered file is on the Vegas timeline, you can right click the file and re-open the project file that created it in another instance of Vegas, just like you can with nested projects. After re-rendering, changes are automatically updated on the first Vegas timeline.

Obviously, this isn't quite as instantaneous as nested projects. But for complicated compositions where full framerate playback is crucial, I find this method works pretty well.

Oh, yeah, and it looks like this works with files rendered in Acid 5 and Sound Forge 8, too.