And of course some new TV programs actually put the shake & bake into them for drama I think---CSI, Law & Order, ETC.

JJK

And of course some old TV programmes. I think Hill Street Blues was probably the first.
Very Annoying.

>> #1 - Pro-footage: We should produce as steady as possible video and NOT look for a stabilizing software, within Vegas, to do it.

We got red-eye reduction in Vegas 7, didn't we? Seems like we inherited this from Vegas Movie Studio. And it could probably be said that users of VMS might be good candidates for use of a motion stabilisation plugin. And the pro version of Vegas could inherit this too.

Do any Vegas users who consider themselves pros go on vacations and use a small handheld camcorder to capture the experience? And maybe the wife doesn't want them renting a production van to carry their 5 kilo tripods, dolly systems, and braces? Maybe when you are walking a lot and touring museums you don't want to carry a full system (or they wouldn't let you bring it with you)?

Or maybe your wife or relatives (who aren't pro shooters) give you footage because they know you are a great editor, and they aren't using tripods and dollies?

My point is, it's not a sign of weakness or incompetence that you have occasion to use stabilization software. And sometimes loss of resolution isn't so bad (for example if you start with HDV and then output to SD, where you can afford a bit of zooming).

For my own part, I occasionally use VirtualDub + deShaker. The biggest thing I see in this thread that could be good for us is opening up the Vegas architecture for plugin developers.

I think where i was coming from is Sony would only have to develop the current plug architecture to allow third parties to provide all sorts of plugins by passing the timeline information to the plugin

This would allow all sorts of enhancements from one development in the application, motion tracking being a good example but there are others.

The third parties who develop the plugins then produce them for their target markets from Professionals to Amatuers, that's their call and if there is a demand for their market the development of Vegas continues with a larger installed base.

The thing I like about Vegas is the output options even down to iPods and mobile phones where the quality just has to be good enough, it's still a rapidly growing market for media.

In a nutshell develop the plugin interface and everyone wins :-)

How cool is that

Paul

Ps. All the best for the Christmas and the New Year

Sorry Grazie forgot to say that little window you have to type posts in always make me forget

I still stop by just never get the chance to post, usually read yours though i'm sure you were an author in past times

if you put all your posts in to a book it would be a great read ;-)

This is a kind of an interesting thread, it shows the breadth of expectations of Vegas users. Just for a bit of a laugh I went and priced a copy of DF, $5K, add a few neat 3rd party plugs like Ultimatte and not much change out of $10K. Now that kind of took my breath away, if I'd acted straight after NAB I could have saved a bundle but then another thought entered my head from another recent thread.
I can cover that $10K by dancing with the devil and shooting one wedding!
Better still, 4 or 5 weddings and I can afford an F350 AND good glass.

I know I'm being flippant but it does kind of show the problem, we've got people here for whom $10K isn't a large slab of cash and others for whom it's the national debt and they each have expectations to match.

Laurence, SteadyHand works quite well, does it? I notice they have a bundle on the GooderVideo website.. Steadyhand + Motion Perfect + Slow motion all for $99.66. Sounds like a good deal. My wife's looking for something to buy me for Christmas.. I might just give her the link to that page.

"And again it doesn't answer the WHY. Why can't Sony make a Video stabilizer plugin? "

Grazie - I'll take an educated stab at this based on my decades as a software engineer in another lifetime....

Remember, this is conjecture on my part.....

The reason that no general-purpose plug-ins work with Vegas is because of the fundamental process used by Vegas in it's editing approach. Vegas is non-destructive. The media files never change, but as you do your work on the timeline, Vegas only needs to remember your step-by-step instructions in the veg file. You can back up an entire editing history on a floppy disk. (This is also how Vegas can do an infinite number of un-do's).

Other editors like Pinnawful and Premire are destructive editors. They apply your editing commands directly to the media file as you edit. You make a mistake on one of these editors and you have to reload from a last known good backup or cancel your current editing session. (It's been years since I had to use any other NLE, but that's my recollection).

The main difference is that with other NLE's, the plug in has access to every frame of the video. In vegas, the plug in can only add editing commands that Vegas doesn't directly support.

What about preview?

Preview is just supposed to be a preview of the editing setps up to the current frame. Every preview frame is rendered, but not saved.

That's my guess.

Steve M.

Thanks Steve. Notwithstanding your "conjecture", do we therefore have an answer for our friend here?

I think that's pretty close to the mark although I suspect the original question really was of a "why don't they" than a "why can't they" nature.
The issue as addressed here though could be solved the same way as it is with the SF interface, the 3rd party app returns a rendered take. Except no doubt there'd be issues with that as well, like having to copy the source video to a new file (think disk space, render quality, resampling etc).
And in the end that's not much different to us doing it ourselves anyway, render out a portion of the T/L and open that in the 3rd party app, render it out of that app and then drop back on T/L as a take.

If you want a simple "why?" I'll give you one....

"We are not a plug in company. We're a software company that focuses on our software, not plug in tools for our software..." C Palmer, CTO of Sonic Foundry, now Sony. I've paraphrased him, but the bottom line is, other than Noise Reduction, Sony/Sonic Foundry *never* has been about plug ins.

Actually, Bob, the title was "Why cant . ." and then the question was "Why don't . . ".

Thanks Douglas. That should clear a few things up for our friend here.

Steve M.
I don't know of ANY NLE software that is destructive to the media. Pinnacle, Premier, Avid,Final Cut, etc. all just store edit commands. A "road map" if you will. The media files are never actually edited or changed in any way.

Dave T2

>Laurence, SteadyHand works quite well, does it? I notice they have a bundle on the GooderVideo website.. Steadyhand + Motion Perfect + Slow motion all for $99.66. Sounds like a good deal. My wife's looking for something to buy me for Christmas.. I might just give her the link to that page.

It works for DV format SD footage. It only works on HD resolution if you render it uncompressed first. That makes it quite unpractical, but it does point out that it's just a Cineform compatibility thing that could probably be easily fixed.

Anyway, as is, I can recommend it for SD DV codec stuff, but not for HDV because of the format issue.

Spot,

Sony/Sonic Foundry *never* has been about plug ins.

What about Cinescore? Sure it was released as a standalone software product, but now I have Vegas 7 I never use anything but the plug-in.

I personally think that if Sony wants to compete at the consumer level they have to develop a stabilizer plug-in for the movie studio product line. If this happens I can't see why it wouldn't be integrated into Vegas.

CineScore can be seen in Vegas and DVD Architect, but it's not at all a plug-in by virtue of it being stand-alone.
I'm not arguing that it would be nice, but Sony would likely do better acquiring a company that makes stabilization software. Given that there aren't any in the low-profile realm that are worth anything...and I don't see Sony acquiring Boris...don't expect it to happen.
To do stabilization well, it's no small feat.

Geez, it's not that difficult to hop out of Vegas and do video stabilization in Virtual Dub. It does a great job and it's free. I don't completely understand why the focus in this thread on the one thing that Vegas doesn't do natively and why the loss of sight of all the things that Vegas does do.

John

John,

Vegas is a fantastic software program, but ....

If a plug-in for Virtual Dub can be made available for free, why can't the same happen for Vegas?

One of the things I do in my business is convert old VHS tapes to DVD’s for customers and I include the ability to stabilize the footage if needed. I use Virtual Dub and deshaker more often than not and it works great. I just wish there was a way to stabilize footage inside of Vegas; it would save me a lot of time on many occasions.

Zstevek: We appear to be getting “there”. You have uses for Vegas, I have uses for this NLE.

“I personally think that if Sony wants to compete at the consumer level they have to develop a stabilizer plug-in for the movie studio product line. If this happens I can't see why it wouldn't be integrated into Vegas.” – Quite. Please read on.

Spot: “I'm not arguing that it would be nice, but Sony would likely do better acquiring a company that makes stabilization software.” – OK, so in “principle”, you feel it would be a good thing, that’s your “nice”. However, as you imply, Sony could go about the business method by rather having stablizing “talent” in-house. You’ve made two separate, but most interesting valid points.

And I do appreciate your observation that: “To do stabilization well, it's no small feat.” – I suppose you are saying that this would mean something more full-on than just making a plug out-of the existing “offerings? Yes?


John: I agree. And presently I do, do this WHEN I wish to apply SteadyHand.

Onto your next point, I don’t think I’ve lost site/focus on the actual question, and that was this “Why?” And, John, what is the “it” that Vegas does do that answers the “Why?” - I don’t understand? And yes, Vegas IS an amazing package. But as our friend IS asking about the “Why?” then, our friend, has “other” expectations of Vegas that is different to mine and maybe yours too? Managing expectations of its Customers/Users is often a major piece of work for any corporation, and ironically, often as a result of successful product/service!! And here yah goes, this is evidenced by Zstevek’s comment: “One of the things I do in my business is convert old VHS tapes to DVD’s . . . I just wish there was a way to stabilize footage inside of Vegas; it would save me a lot of time on many occasions”. So, yet another User - with another wish. “How dare they!??? How very dare they!!” - Lol!

And there we have it, good people. We have a colleague, who after deciding to USE Vegas as his preferred method of preparation and authoring, he (?) would then like to have a more efficient/faster way of DOING that business. So this has nothing to do with the PROS and CONS of using stabilizing hardware – trips, dollies, braces. It has EVERYTHING to do with another segment of this Vegas market - and that is our friend’s needs.

For me, if this thread has done anything, it has once again underlined the need to appreciate just where a particular Vegas user is “coming” from. Having such a broad church of usage, must be a real “challenge” for the Sony Marketers.

I'll have to disagree.
I don't see how having this functionality built into Vegas would improve anyones workflow, in fact I'd suggest it could dramatically slow it down.
Remember these tasks are very CPU intensive and given how Vegas works everytime you playback the footage that needs stabilising all those calcs get done again, and again, playback slows to a crawl.
Conversely, doing it outside of Vegas, heck even doing it in another Vegas project (assuming Vegas had an image stabiliser), and rendering out the stabilised footage seems way faster to me.
If Vegas worked differently with background rendering then yes, things might be different but that's a whole new can of worms for another thread.

Bob.

Bob, with whom are you disagreeing? - Me? Or Zstevek?

No one in particular,
I'm disagreeing with the idea that it'd improve anyones workflow.
Bob.