Some Suggestions for future VMS's

AmigaMan wrote on 7/19/2010, 4:09 PM
I've had Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.0 Platinum (Whew! What a mouthful!) for about a month and I have to say I really like it a lot. I also own Pinnacle Studio 10, Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 and Corel Video Studio Pro X2, and I put VMS on top of all of them (Pinnacle Studio would be a close second if it could run for more than 10 minutes without crashing...)

Anyway, I have some suggestions for future version (Or maybe they are already in version 10 - which will be my next upgrade - or even in my version 9, but I don't know about them! LOL)

1) Hierachical Pan/Crop:
I've been experiementing on a split screen effect: Using my Canon HD camcorder, I film two scenes at 1920 x 1080, one with me on the left and one with me on the right. I place one scene "on top" of the other and use pan/crop to reveal part of the "back scene" (Make the crop box cover only half the screen and turn off "Stretch to fit"). Looks great! Ok, so now I want to use pan/crop to move a virtual camera of 720 x 405 (a 16:9 ratio NTSC resolution) within that scene so that it doesn't look like it was filmed on a tripod. Right now, the only way to do this, as far as I know, is to use Tools/Render to New Track to create a new video event and then use pan/crop within THAT event. Works good, but requires an extra, possibly lengthy, step. The ability to use pan/crop on an already pan/cropped scene would be great (I tried creating an "empty event" on top of the pan/cropped one but the result was a black output.
On the same subject of pan/crop...
2) The ability to have the pan/crop "window" follow a path that I can edit, so that I can more easily tweak its movements. Key frames are great, but you can't actually see them in any tangible way except by the on screen results.
3) Also speaking of pan/crop... A toggle switch that would keep the pan/crop window from being moved outside the video area could be handy, so that black areas outside the visible screen could be avoided.
4) The cookie cutter visual effect is very useful. The ability to separately adjust the x and y dimensions of the cutter would be really cool and useful. Right now, there's only one size slider.
5) The ability to have VMS stop at the end of the timeline automatically when it is played. Right now, it seems to keep going even after the end! There's got to be a setting somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

Well, that's about it (for now...LOL)

Russell Jones

[EDIT] I just thought of one more: It would be very handy to have a feathering/border-blurring capability on the pan/crop'ed video, so that the transition between the front and back video events would be smoother (I know cookie cutter can do this, but cookie cutter is not always appropriate).

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/19/2010, 6:35 PM
1) I've always thought that the pan/crop tool should have two rectangles. One would be for cropping and the other for positioning. Normally they would move together and be identical to the current tool. With the click of a button they could be separated and adjusted independently. That would make the tool much more flexible and useful.

4) The cookie cutter could use a lot of improvements. In addition to separate x/y sizes, i would love to be able to import my own mask. True, in the Pro version there's bezier masking and much more powerful composite masking, but even then the cookie cutter is just faster, easier, and simpler. It's only big lack is the extremely limited selection of mask shapes. Let me import a shape in a b&w image file and cut with that and it'll be nearly as powerful as bezier masking, while being easier to use.

5) This one has always baffled me. Vegas obviously knows where the project ends on the timeline. Click the "end of project" button and the cursor jumps there. Why doesn't it know to stop playing there? OK, i do know one reason, which is that various audio effects sustain the sound past the end of the event. Even the longest reverb just barely hits 10 seconds though so why does it keep playing much longer than that? On the other hand, after so many years of using Vegas it's something i really don't care about anymore. The number of times i've wanted the cursor right at the end of the project after i've played it are quite small, and in those cases it's only a single mouse click to put it there.
Markk655 wrote on 7/19/2010, 7:16 PM
Once we are discussing wishes for upcoming features (some of these are in Vegas Big Brother...

- true panning (Front to Rear) on an individual audio track
- ability to separate Photoshop files into component layers
-ability to delete files on an SDHC card instead of importing or just after importing. This would be a way to add more functionality to device explorer
-saving most used effects/transitions in another folder for easy access or even grouping them (for example, a NewBlueFX>MSPS folder view)
-access audio fx similar to the way videofx are listed (or is that now possible with the new flexi-interface?)
-Use of GPUs for rendering that do not have CUDA (older NVidia, ATI, etc...)
- Shut down computer automatically after a successful render
Byron K wrote on 7/20/2010, 1:15 AM
I also used Corel Video X2 but I commend Vegas Studio for implementing some of the features I requested like additional tracks and especially stabilizer. The auto white balance is nice though it doesn't work in all situations.

I agree that the cookie cutter is quite crude even in Vegas Pro. The biggest thing that Video Studio and Pro really needs IMHO is a GOOD de-noise filter like neat-video but I have a hard time justifying paying another $100 for just a plugin. I use the de-noise filter from New Blue but very sparingly. This filter can easily make the video start to look cartoonish.
AmigaMan wrote on 9/7/2010, 8:09 PM
I think VPro has a JavaScript interface (in addition to a full SDK API), so that you can partially extend the functionality of the program. If this interface were available for VMS, it would allow the users to add most if not all of the features we've mentioned here.

Of course, this may cut into VPro sales.... Or not, since many people only use VMS on a hobbyist level, and can't really justify spending $600 for the whole enchilada.

Russell