Vegas 5 Annoyances and work-arounds

smhontz wrote on 4/26/2004, 9:36 AM

Ok, I'm starting a new thread for people to contribute to - a list of annoyances found in Vegas 5 and any known work-arounds. By "annoyances" I don't mean "I don't like the look of the UI" or "Better media management" - I mean the little things that you run into where you scratch your head and go "huh?" - things that used to work and now don't, or work differently than you expect. I don't want this to be a thread where people debate workflow style, etc. - just a short, to-the-point list of things that you ran into and how you worked around the problem. And, just to let you know, I am a Vegas fanatic, use it every day, wouldn't use any other NLE, and think Vegas rocks. Ok, enough yakking - here's my first list:

- Save/restore displays doesn't work properly if window is a different size. I set up Alt-D-1 to be my full-size, standard Vegas layout (explorer, mixer, preview at the bottom.) I set up Alt-D-2 to be a vertical half-screen window with just the media pool at the bottom so I can copy from one Vegas to another. When I hit Alt-D-1 to go back to the first setup, the mixer and preview window are squished to the right side. Work-around: hit it again and they jump into place.

- Acoustic mirror/Wave Hammer plug-ins switched into Demo mode. They work fine in all my other apps (Sound Forge 6, Vegas 4, Acid Pro 4). I've run all the migration utilities but still no joy. Work-around - none yet, waiting til I have time to get with Sony tech support.

- F3/F9 no longer move cursor in keyframe controllers. This was nice because I could open an FX properties window, turn sync cursor on, and use my ShuttlePro to move the cursor in the keyframe controller back and forth. Work-around - have to use arrow keys, can't use ShuttlePro.

- Loss of Track Motion presets. Workaround: none yet, Sony said they will fix in an update.

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Comments

PAW wrote on 4/27/2004, 1:33 PM

didn't do it for me?

Paul

smhontz wrote on 4/28/2004, 6:12 AM

With the new "Allow edit cursor to be dragged" option turned on, you can drag the cursor in the timeline to scrub, or single-click and to change the cursor back to an arrow and drag a selection. In the trimmer window, however, single-clicking won't turn the cursor back into an arrow so you can drag a selection. In both places, however, you can hold the shift key to drag a selection.

farss wrote on 4/28/2004, 6:38 AM

Just a thought but Vegas 4 used Quicktime to decode those formats I think. Used to be woefully slow as well, I've been forced to convert to .png even though Vegas would open them.
Maybe your problem is with Quciktime, wonder if the V5 upgrade installed an older version of QT.

logiquem wrote on 4/28/2004, 6:39 AM

Ahhhhhhh! Thanks a lot Rosebud. What a hint!

logiquem wrote on 4/28/2004, 6:40 AM

You must restart to get these pref. changes effective.

BJ_M wrote on 4/28/2004, 7:27 AM

jpg and targa files are (at least they were) native vegas files and tiff was opened by QT

i hope to the sony gods that hasn't changed ...

dust wrote on 5/4/2004, 6:58 AM

About the F3/F9 problem from within keyframe windows (VideoFx etc), there is a workaround using scripting. You can write a script like

import Microsoft.Win32;
import System.Windows.Forms;
import Sony.Vegas;
try
{
var wshShell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
wshShell.SendKeys("{F3}");
}
catch(e) {MessageBox.Show(e);}

and assign it to some unused keystroke (using preferences/keyboard, use "Global" context). Make another script for F9 (replace {F3} by {F9} above) and assign this second script to another unused keystroke. Best is to deposit these script into some helpers subdirectory of script menu.

Now assign the 2 keystrokes you chose to your shuttle, instead of F3 and F9 (maybe use a second assignment). Now, in theory, it should work (don't have a shuttle at my office, but using keystrokes, that works now in keyframe window).

The downside though is it is much slower.

Good luck, dust

PAW wrote on 5/4/2004, 7:13 AM

dust,

perhaps you can help me, what would the syntax be to send a Atd+d+1 to change window layouts?

Paul

Randy Brown wrote on 5/4/2004, 7:21 AM

Thanks Rosebud!
Randy

PAW wrote on 5/4/2004, 7:27 AM

Strewth, I worked it out for myself. Now I can assign window layouts to toolbars as scripts :-)

Paul

import Microsoft.Win32;
import System.Windows.Forms;
import Sony.Vegas;
try
{
var wshShell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
wshShell.SendKeys("%{d}+{1}");
}
catch(e) {MessageBox.Show(e);}

Randy Brown wrote on 5/4/2004, 10:42 AM

Thanks to Rosebud I found another way cool thing: I often have a hard time determining where a short clip is on a long timeline (with lots of other short clips) when selecting "select timeline events" from the media pool. Well by changing the value from 0 to 20 under "event selection outline thickness" I can see that tiny clip even zoomed all the way out on an hour long timeline!
Thanks again Rosebud,
Randy

Nat wrote on 5/4/2004, 11:10 AM

This little modification will correct the bug that the tabbed windows aren't always at the good place :

import Microsoft.Win32;
import System.Windows.Forms;
import Sony.Vegas;
try
{
var wshShell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
wshShell.SendKeys("%{d}+{1}");
wshShell.SendKeys("%{d}+{1}");
}
catch(e) {MessageBox.Show(e);}

SonyTSW wrote on 5/4/2004, 11:24 AM

BJ_M,

> i have noticed that some jpeg and some tiff and some tga files no longer open in V5 , though they do in V4

We really didn't change the QuickTime plug-in all that much from Vegas 4 to Vegas 5, other than bumping the minimum requirement to QT6 or greater. The format name is static text in the Render As dropdown so now it can appear correctly as "QuickTime 6". This was a source of confusion in Vegas 4 when you had QT6 installed but it was listed as QuickTime 5.

Can you provide us with an example of a problem jpeg, tiff, or tga file? This should be working in Vegas 5.

WJK wrote on 5/4/2004, 11:55 AM

I received my Vegas 5.0 last week and found that when the Event Pan/Crop window is opened icons are to be displayed on the left side. My copy does not show these icons. Can anyone help.

BJ_M wrote on 5/4/2004, 1:32 PM

i installed now qt6.5.1 latest version , and so far they all open (so far), i dont have the origianal files i had problems with becuase i had to convert them all.

... though opening a large dir of targa or jpeg (50,000++ images @ 1080p) directory will take some time (like 10 minutes) ... the first time anyway ..

the images i had problems with before were created in AE on a mac ...

i thought IN Vegas4 that tga and jpeg were native opened by vegas , not QT ?

is it now that every format is opened by qt ?

Randy Brown wrote on 5/4/2004, 3:27 PM

Rosebud, what could I have done wrong?; the selection of audio with video was working fine before and now it's not. Yes, it's still set to "true", "ignore event grouping" is off and I have re-started.
Thanks to any suggestions,
Randy

Randy Brown wrote on 5/4/2004, 3:52 PM

Here'a an annoyance I REALLY was hoping V5 would resolve for me; As some of you may recall, I've bitched about V4 locking up (for lack of a better term) in the past to where it just stops responding and I have to shut down Vegas in the task manager. It seems to always happen when the focus is on the timeline. Right now V5 just did it with the master VU frozen (as usual) but this time I've noticed there seems tpo be two instances of V5 open in the task manager (both showing "not responding") but I only have one instance open. Another factor is that the (P4 3 ghz, 1 GB memory) PC doesn't seem to be affected at all during this Vegas "lock up". I can open and run other programs etc.
Does anyone else ever have this happen to them?
TIA,
Randy
Does the following tell anyone anything?
The MS report sent has these details :
...LOCALS~1\TEMP\WER1B.tmp.dir00vegas50.exe.mdmp

and

...LOCALS~1\TEMP\WER1B.tmp.dir00\accompat.txt

Hans Nyberg wrote on 5/4/2004, 4:21 PM

I've had the same thing happen a couple of times.

Hans

BJ_M wrote on 5/4/2004, 8:45 PM

I had problems with many dx plug-ins working as well as an error msg on start up ... the fix in knowledge base didnt work..

but i got everythig working ..

delete and uninstall all SF and Sony apps .

remove all SF and Sony refer. in the registry -- there are MANY all over the place ..

reboot

install dx9.x and latest qt

do registery fix in mentioned in knowledge base (i dont think nessessary now)

reboot

install all sony and sf app - but in new dir off root (i used "SONY") in short form (no spaces, 8 charactors) , plugins installed in ./sony/plugs,
vegas in ./sony/vegas , dvda2 in ./sony/dvd , soundforge in ./sony/sound

install any new dx plugins -- ones already installed will work also now ..

start up apps and register and all is working properly ....

most likely some of the steps above are not nessessary - but i had to do everything above to get everything working ...

vitamin_D wrote on 5/4/2004, 9:27 PM

...though it'd sure be nice if we didn't have to jump through so many hoops to get V5 working properly :/

This update is quite the mixed bag, eh?

BJ_M -- how are you enjoying net rendering? Other than the render que on a single machine, have you gottne much use out of multiple nodes?

Thanks again,

- jim

BJ_M wrote on 5/4/2004, 10:33 PM

i have renders going all the time ... now that i dont have to worry about the vegas rendering engines not starting when im not around - plus i was getting to the combining stage and 50% of the time they were failling as all of sudden the veg file would disappear .. so far , havn't seen that happen after the big re-install.

its nice that you can start a render node any time and the host will detect it and right away pass work ...
also -- dont forget there is an option in the renderer for number of frames per segment (default 150) , making this larger for larger projects saves some time (i think) ..

now if only the temp files were not in the same drive as the final output.

screenshot of network rendering in action on one of three machines using dual rendering nodes (dual cpu machines) per machine.
http://www.simex-iwerks.com/images/desktop.jpg

dust wrote on 5/4/2004, 11:05 PM

congrats, guess you don't need my help anymore then :-) Yes, this should work. There is one potential problem though: sometimes Vegas "skips/forgets" some of the keystrokes put on queue, so it might happen that not in all cases Alt-D 1 is sent, maybe sometimes it only gets Alt-D or only 1. This happened to me in another context. Probably this isn't too bad because if it doesn't work one time, you can just repeat the script, and if it doesn't happen too often, it shouldn't be a real problem. And of course, maybe the problem doesn't occur in V5, I experienced it using V4.

If the problem should still be there and become a problem, there's also the alternative of using AutoIt.dll where you can - besides other things - send keystrokes to Vegas as well, but have the additional possibility of setting a delay in milliseconds before the keystrokes are sent and in between keystrokes (eg between Alt-D and 1). This made it mush more stable in V4. I didn't try it out using V5 yet though.

dust

Randy Brown wrote on 5/5/2004, 7:49 AM

"delete and uninstall all SF and Sony apps .
remove all SF and Sony refer. in the registry -- there are ..."

Thanks BJ, but I don't think all of this would help in my case as I completely reformatted the OS drive (due to the same behavior in V4) and re-installed V4 only a month or so ago. I had really hoped it was something that would magically go away with V5.
Thanks again,
Randy

SonyTSW wrote on 5/5/2004, 8:04 AM

BJ_M,

> i thought IN Vegas4 that tga and jpeg were native opened by vegas , not QT ?
>
> is it now that every format is opened by qt ?

The QuickTime plug-in will read TGA, TIFF, MOV and anything else that QuickTime supports that none of the other Vegas format plug-ins are able to identify and read.

JPEG is read by the stills plug-in (stl2plg.dll), this is a "native" plug-in. This plug-in supports JPEG, PSD, BMP, TARGA, and PNG.

You can see which plug-in Vegas will use to read a particular media file by right clicking on the file in the media explorer and selecting Properties. Look for the "Plug-In" section, you'll need to scroll down to the bottom. The QuickTime plug-in is qt5plug.dll.