those who downloaded NAB vid, bug test

ibliss wrote on 4/22/2004, 6:16 PM
Hi,

Been playing with the DVDA2 video stream from NAM, provided by the forums very own Liam - it's a 90meg, 49 minutre WMV file.

Put it on the timeline of the Vegas V5 demo.

Split the event anywhere before the 6-minute mark, drag to create crossfade, no problems.

Do the same after the 6 minute mark and the crossfades appear on the timeline, but the left-hand event (the event fading out) snaps out at the start of the crossfade. The right hand event fades in correctly.
So instead of a smooth crossfade you get the video going completely black and then fading into the new event. XFade length makes no difference.

Is the a V5 issue, a WMV issue or my pc?

Anyone else confirm this?

Comments

ibliss wrote on 4/22/2004, 6:17 PM
Okay, I just tried it in Vegas 4e (full version) and the video does the same thing. So I guess it's either something to do with WMV or....?

ibliss wrote on 4/22/2004, 8:21 PM
Ok, definitely the WMV file, though don't know if it's the format or this particular file.

Rendered the file to NTSC DV and the new file plays and crossfades properly.

Now, I'd already put around 80 edits in the original sample project I was trying out in V5, so I wanted to do a straight swap for the fixed media. Went to media pool, right clicked on the WMV media and chose 'replace', selected the new DV file and it was done. Wicked. (note, I know this isn't a new feature, just a very useful one :)
farss wrote on 4/23/2004, 12:46 AM
WMV can be difficult to impossible to edit. The lack of keyframes causes any NLE major grief. I tried to work on some WMV that only had one keyframe in 12o mins of video. Soultion was to restream it rhrough WME with keyframes every 2 seconds.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 4/23/2004, 12:52 AM
What <are> you doing with that video?

Glad the video is giving you something to do and all. I consider it "public" property but nevertheless I would like to see what you are doing with it. sometime.

-Liam
ibliss wrote on 4/23/2004, 3:57 AM
Liam,

Could you email me (so I can email you back) and I'll reveal all!

Thanks

Mike

email addy edited out by me!
GmElliott wrote on 4/23/2004, 6:20 AM
Maybe he's color correcting it. I found the contrast to be way to low, and the colors unsaturated. I tweaked it a bit and it looks 10x better. Granted I know it wasn't created to be "pretty"...after all it started as a stream. Though with some carefull tweaking it can make up for "some" of the detail lost in the high compression.

Another thing he might be trying to run on it is "super-sampling"!
Liam_Vegas wrote on 4/23/2004, 8:53 AM
Color Correction/Contrast

Yep... we thought about doing that but decided against it as if we had used any color correction FX it would have taken a <lot> longer to render than it did.

Of course... I have the original vegs, and the original DV files still on my hard drive and I am intending to do some additional work (sometime soon) to create a DVD that I was going to give to some people at Sony who asked for it.
rmack350 wrote on 4/23/2004, 9:04 AM
It's a worthwhile exercise just to get the stream up on the web as quickly as possible. Conferences can be murder because you've got a lot of time wound up in shooting and then capturing.

It would be best and fastest to get the best color at shoot time and not worry about fixing it later. Had screen cam been color balanced it would have been ideal. Still, I'm really pleased to have the file playing on my IPAQ. Cool!

If I were going to tweak it I'd break it up into sections so I could view the topic I wanted. I know there was a feedback form but since I downloaded it I haven't really seen that form since then.

Rob Mack
Liam_Vegas wrote on 4/23/2004, 9:39 AM
Remember we were capturing this off the projected screen... which was quite low contrast in comparison to say an LCD screen. We tried various settings but this was actually the best color balance we could obtain in camera (in terms of it looking like the projected image in terms of color).

The projected image was a little washed out... and I could not find a way of making it look better in-camera (but then we only had a few minutes to setup our cameras from the end of the prior seminar to the start of the first one we were capturing)..

Again... as I think "cheeshole" said in a prior post and I will repeat here for added effect. "It is a LIVE thing".
rmack350 wrote on 4/23/2004, 10:48 AM
Oh yeah, I know that. The way to get the contrast up was to do something impossible-Turn off the room lights. Fat chance.

Believe me, I'm aware of the problems as I've lit these sorts of events for a while. In addition to spill washing the screen out you also have a mix of floro overheads and a bluer than daylight screen.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy and I've got the file playing on my PDA. It's just years of production work that make it hard for me to view without trying to think how to make things a tiny bit better. I'm even worse attending live theater!

Again, I really appreciate the great work you guys did!

Rob