Interesting - the link below is to a recent comparison between Premiere Pro, FCP, Avid DV Express, Pinnacle Liquid Edition and Vegas 4.

Vegas came out top in the Chroma keying tests.

http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=8066

Vegas provides a lot of control on Chroma Keying.

He said Chroma Smoothing not Chroma Keying.
I add a little blur to get rid of it.

John

1. Thank heaven there is no chroma, luma, or stabilization attached to the codec. There shouldn't be. I surely don't want Vegas (or any other NLE) touching my media in ANY way unless I tell it to. It's a codec, not a process.
2. There are several tools that may be used to smooth chroma, and when applied, resampling will take place, and a new file results whether it's a temp file from a pre-render or a complete file as rendered. Take your screen shots from those.
Also, when using saved preview stills, are you saving as a jpg or a png. That's a huge factor in the scaling of the image and must be taken into consideration.
If you capture something from a cam or live source, Vegas does nothing to that file in any manner, until you apply a filter, title, or other edit process.
Which is exactly how it should be.

Whoa there,

Something like chroma smoothing is really a filtering operation, not something to be integrated within the DV codec. I don't think BarryGreen meant to CHANGE the DV codec, just add a option to allow this (eg. filter plug-in).

It's already there. While it's not the same name, chroma smoothing is effectively just a color blur. In fact, in FCP it's called exactly that. Deartificating, chroma blur, chroma smoothing.....it's all the same basic thing with various methods of doing it. Adam Wilt wrote a great script for doing this in FCP as well, because he felt their 'brand' of chroma smoothing wasn't good enough. As I said, this is a filter process, but the first line in the post is that the CODEC doesn't allow for this. That can get newbie's and others fairly confused very quickly.
Smooth=blur

BTW, for giggles, try this plug for Vegas.
http://mikecrash.wz.cz/vegas/vegas.htm

Whoa, Spot -- I agree with you on all counts, of course the codec should be as transparent as possible. But in my initial post, what I was asking was: Matrox allows for the OPTION, does Vegas provide a similar option? And as far as I know, that option is integrated into the Matrox codec itself, which was why I was asking if the Vegas codec did similarly.

With that said, if you look at the picture I posted, there's obviously room for improvement in how a DV image can be rendered for still shots, computer graphics, or up-rezzing. Matrox's codec does it nicely, as does Avid's. I just would prefer to do it all within Vegas instead of having to switch programs and render out from Premiere.

So what I'm hearing is that if I were to use some sort of color blur I should be able to get comparable results, which would be great. I saw Adam Wilt's script but unfortunately it's only on FCP. Which Vegas filter would provide for blurring only chroma but not the luminance channel?

I'll also give that guy's plug-in a try and see how that works.

Thanks!

For giggles? I don't think so. That plug-in is great. I had some underlit footage, which I boosted up with the HSL plug. There was a lot of grain as a result. I applied the plug-in to which you posted a link and, wow, it looks wonderful (relatively speaking, of course).

What other gems are floating around the Internet?

Thanks for the link, Spot.