UltimateS: montage w/ stills/video, audio

Curly wrote on 8/8/2005, 9:21 AM
I'm using Ultimate S (v1, haven't installed v2 yet) with Vegas 5 to do a montage with still photos and video clips as well as a music track. The video has associated audio, so there are 3 tracks in total: 1) music track 2) video track with the stills and video events 3) audio track that has the audio associated with the video events.

After I fill out the check boxes with the various settings for the montage and click the button to execute everything it all works fine *except* for the fact that the video events are no longer lined up with their associated audio. Setting auto ripple or trying to group the video events with their audio does not make a difference. Is there a way to keep the audio events lined up with their respective video events?

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/8/2005, 10:48 AM
> Is there a way to keep the audio events lined up with their respective video events?

Not directly in Photo Montage. What you can do is highlight all the video events, start Ultimate S, go to the Audio tab and select Find Missing Audio, and new audio events will be created on a new audio track that sync up with the video events.

Photo Montage was originally meant to be used will still images. I realize people use it for video, and if you use ALL video events and select both the Video and Audio tracks, Ultimate S will keep everything in sync. What it does not do is check if a video event has associated audio and the move the audio with it.

I could add that as a future function, but right now it makes no assumptions about audio. Just run Find Missing Audio as a workaround for now and it will bring the audio back.

~jr
Curly wrote on 8/9/2005, 9:28 AM
Tried the "Find Missing Audio" like you said and that did the trick. Thanks. Another audio question: I started the montage over again. For the music track I put 2 different mp3 files on the same audio track. I shortened the 1st music clip to trim a long silence off the end. Then I took the 2nd music clip and overlapped it on the end of the 1st music clip for a cross fade. When I ran the montage script the music track got altered: on the 1st music clip the last few seconds of silence I had trimmed off were put back, then the little mark or divet appeared at the top of the track indicating the 1st music clip was recycling to the begining. The cross fade I had put between the 2 music clips was still there, it just occurred after the "recycled" beginning of the 1st music clip played for a few seconds. The 2nd music clip continued along ok after the cross fade, but the end of the 2nd music clip got truncated - by the same amount of time (it looks to me, although I didn't check precisiely), that was added to the end of the 1st clip by tacking on the recycled beginning.

Is there any way to avoid this? I was assuming that the music track would be untouched, that the script was just looking for the total length of the music track to adjust the durations on the video track.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/9/2005, 1:13 PM
> Is there any way to avoid this? I was assuming that the music track would be untouched, that the script was just looking for the total length of the music track to adjust the durations on the video track.

That’s absolutely correct. Ultimate S does not touch the music track. It just gets the length and uses that to calculate the duration of the slides.

It sounds like you either had the music track selected and had the Select Tracks / All Events option enabled, or you had the Options All Tracks / All Events enabled in Ultimate S in which case it thought the music track was part of the montage too. Make sure you have your Image Source set to the right selection and you select only what you want altered. Try using Video Tracks / All Events.

~jr