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Videoon 1/31/2007
Filters to smooth grainy gain noise?
If you have all the time in the world, I cannot recommend highly enough the free open-source filter from greycstoration. Earlier thread here. Basically, you have to batch-export every frame as a png, then run this filter on every single frame (batch tool; I use cygwin), then import the results. I've used this tool on a 60 min project for subtle noise-reduction and it worked out great (as well as requiring 40 days computer time). I've also used this tool on some moonlight time-lapse scenes that were practically unwatchable noise after I bumped the brightness. Again, amazing results
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Videoon 7/3/2006
OT grazie ameican football & yours
I played rugby from when I could walk until I was 14. I played one game of rugby in the US and quit forever. A huge guy who had obviously flunked out of "football" put his head down and speared me head-first. I saw him coming from 10 yds away and was so stunned I froze and let him run me over. I got up, told him he was going to be a quad if he kept that up but I wasn't going to join him, walked off the field, and never touched the ball again. Of course, I never said I wouldn't continue to drink with them :-)
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Videoon 3/17/2006
saving internet video
Try this
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Videoon 3/16/2006
OT: Done with Norton - anti virus advice?
In case it wasn't clear by now, AVGfree. Used to use ZoneAlarm until it interfered with some other apps. Never a single problem with AVG. Used it for yrs. Great app.
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Videoon 3/10/2006
Now, for your LEAST favorite feature of Vegas
>In fact I have a few scripts that try to adress this issue, if you'd like to try them out. Love to, CDM. rich at clevercaboose dotty com
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Videoon 3/10/2006
Now, for your LEAST favorite feature of Vegas
>I don't like that "Save As" automatically renames the project's media. I would like to option of using the same names when saving off to another location I don't care about the renaming (in fact I like it). Its that I cannot "Save As" to the "current" directory, have all files outside that directory copied into that directory, and have all files inside that directory (or subfolders, or perhaps this could be optional) REMAIN UNCHANGED. After all, why would I want to duplicate a file in the same directory?
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Videoon 3/9/2006
Constraining timeline during clip movement
jetdv, that's huge. Much obliged.
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Videoon 3/9/2006
OT-NJ Bill to ban anonymous posts
>Will those who have been harmed by an anonymous person or persons please raise your hand? Since you obviously use the internet, go ahead and raise your own hand. Denial-of-service, causing web sites to go down. Spam traffic, slowing down all data and increasing prices for all. A virus that hurt you, your company, or a company that you're involved with (if you did anything besides getting out of bed today, the answer is yes). And that's the short list.
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Videoon 3/9/2006
Googles' gdrive...
>There is a way around the 10mb file limit as you would use a third party utility to upload your files. I can use winrar to zip the files into 10mb segments, but that is a hassle. I use gmail, which is terrific (until google releases its own tool shortly), but does not solve the 10mb limitation. Are you talking about some other tool?
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Videoon 3/9/2006
Googles' gdrive...
>You could always store up to 2GB of files in your Google gmail area, using a freeware app. 10MB per file, max. That's a bit of a hassle for us video guys :-)
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Videoon 3/9/2006
OT-NJ Bill to ban anonymous posts
John, I agree with you, but you forgot some crucial aspects: Rudeness is not the problem. Criminality is. Denial-of-service, etc... Major problems exist because of anonymity. I would love to see an internet where anonymity is not allowed. The technology exists in software today. Doesn't require any hardware changes. OTOH, we won't solve all the problems. In particular, zombie computers. Computers which are not anonymous (i.e., would pass any bill or technology restrictions applied), but are remotely controlled by a criminal. Still, I'm 100% for it. Not that we'll get the legislation "right" the first few attempts.
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Videoon 3/2/2006
OT: Free Open Office Suite (Word, Excel, PP)
>there's non-adobe PDF makes but they all cost $$$. Not as convenient, but try ghostview and gsview.
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Videoon 2/22/2006
OT: what do you think, would this succeed?
>There is money in them there hills. No kidding. My wife is a public speaker. If you're *good* and can handle being on the road, $300K/yr is reasonable. (Darn babies conspiring to keep her at home :-) And people are willing to pay a lot of money for the extras. Even in the "lower" bracket of public seminars (where a company like Skillpath Seminars will present a full day training seminar and the public will sign up to attend), a good speaker can sell $50/person in audio/video/book extras. And those extras mostly suck in quality. The audio tapes are badly recorded, the video is VHS, the books are in-house printed. Yet they're very useful to the buyers. Consider the "in-house" seminar, where a company might be paying $3K for the speaker plus traveling expenses, and the day's salary of 20-200 attendees. The message of the seminar is short-lived unless the audience practices and reinforces it (everyone leaves with inspiration and the next day they're back doing the same old thing that led them there in the first place). An extra $50/person is nothing to a business when that employee can re-live the seminar by listening to the tape on the way in to work. Self-help is big business. You might get resistance from the big seminar companies, but I bet individuals would love to have you recording them and selling the day's seminar as a DVD. Its extra money in their pocket. Some things would change. If my wife knew a company was going to video her seminar and distribute it to the employees, she would charge differently (higher). But that's something to work out, not something to scuttle the deal. One risk is that some public speakers *don't* want to have "promo" video material around. (1) Who needs to go to (pay for) the seminar if they have a video of it? (2) Companies will ask for a demo video before hiring the speaker. My wife always refuses because (a) each seminar is custom tailored to the audience and (b) video/audio demos act more to reject the speaker than hire them (long story but true). If you're serious and want to pick my wife's brain, email me at rich @ clevercaboose dot com and we'll hook up. Kansas-based. Make sure you mention the Vegas forum in the subject header so I don't lose you in the spam filter :-)
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Videoon 2/17/2006
Radio Shack Closing Stores
>I grew up shopping RadioShack for my electronics hobby. Me too. Then again, the week before XMas, I was watching TV with my 5 yr old daughter and we saw a Radio Shack ad for an indoor helicopter. We both went "wow" simultaneously and that was what Santa bought her :-) It was a very cool toy but it only lasted 2 days then a rotor started slipping. Took it back and every store has been out of the helicopters since then. Too bad. They finally get something great and now they can't get any more. P.S. Daughter's quite happy with her replacement scooter.
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Videoon 2/1/2006
Best video noise reduction ever - and free
>I tried to install Gimp on my PC. But during the installation process, I got a warning message and the program asked if I wanted to replace a dll-file with the same name as one of my existing dll-files. I quit the installation because the existing dll-file is used by my anti virus / firewall program (Panda Internet Security)! This is common. Gimp had the same issues with my CVS dlls. I'm not concerned about this because its usually two apps using the same 3rd-party app and Gimp is very good about using the latest updates. Most of the time, both apps continue to function just fine. Also, Gimp renames the conflicting dlls, so as long as you write down their names, its very easy to back up if you do actually run into a problem. Simply delete the new dlls and rename the dll.old files (or whatever they're called), then restart/reboot the app. BTW, while it is disconcerting that Gimp has these conflicts, consider the alternative used by most other apps: Overwriting the old dlls without telling you :-(
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Videoon 2/1/2006
Best video noise reduction ever - and free
> I can give you links to probably fifty different noise filters that run with different programs ... Even though I probably have those links already, I concede the subject title is a tad overblown :-) My type of noise is invariably low-light from a digital cam. I'm also currently mixing a project from a good 3-chipper and a cheap 1-chipper and I need to smooth the "color noise" from the cheap cam. As for spatial vs. temporal noise reduction, you're probably right. The free filter from Mike Crash does great things when used in moderation.What I like most about it is that it tends to preserve the details. The one thing I cannot stand about the gaussian et al. filters is how they soften the important details (like eyes, etc). I have not explored the higher-end temporal filters, although I am somewhat familiar with the doom9 site :-) On my current project, I've already done the stills-export -> batch smoothing -> stills-import procedure with a grain reduction filter. Much improvement but it created a new problem: You have to train the grain reduction filter on a single still, then reuse the settings on the entire clip. (Impractical otherwise.) The result is "flashes" of noise, where some frames are smooth but a few remain noisy. Visually off-putting and actually makes you notice the noise more. I'm convinced this new filter will eliminate that problem, since the default filter settings do an excellent job on a wide variety of noise problems. I'll know in a day or two. BTW, did you check out the math from the link? Solving a PDE is a very elegant formulation of the problem and I give the author great credit for that alone. Nice PhD work. I am going to stick to my guns and claim that this new tool is as good as it gets for enlarging the still (HDV potential from DV cameras?). Definitely superior to bicubic interpolation in all situations. I'd like to see a comparison with the fractal expanders, though. Back to the "stills-export -> batch filter -> stills-import procedure": What does this mean for interleaved source and what settings should we be using to get the best results? Seems like an important topic that hasn't been fully explored in this forum.
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Videoon 1/24/2006
Auto-Levels / Mike Crash / Better approach?
>Are you really looking for something to do the equivalent of in-camera automatic exposure? Oh I already have in-camera automatic exposure ... its just not very good :-) I've only tried the auto-levels on one project: low light, changing light, and changing scenery. I wanted to see what it would do. What it did was "bounce" the brightness up and down very rapidly, which is very noticeable. So I put the filter away. Then today I discovered a new capability that had never occurred to me. It turns out to be a well-known technique: a google search on "histogram equalization" shows that. And when I thought about it a bit, it seemed like (1) a possible "auto-exposure" filter for lazy camera operators as you queried, and (2) maybe very important for color matching. If (2) works, and some quick reading says it does, then more "scientific" then "mere" color curves and color correcting filters. Uh, given that color correction is in no danger of becoming pure science :-) So I thought it would be interesting to bring up for the group's analysis. I'm sure others have already used such a filter (not in vegas). Does it work? What are its limitations? For its power, it should be quite simple to write as a vegas plugin.
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Videoon 1/24/2006
Auto-Levels / Mike Crash / Better approach?
>Pinnacle / Avid Liquid Editon has some great colour correction tools. One of them is called Histomatch (if I remember correctly) and this filter can match the colours in different clips using the Historgrams. Is this what you are looking for? Yes, exactly. Well, that would work for one frame at least. Now if we could apply that to an entire clip...and add user-configurable (keyframeable :-) controls to dampen the adjustments...
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Videoon 1/4/2006
OT: Att Gunnar Thalin (DeShaker)
Gunnar does not read this forum. You can reach him at the virtualdub forum at vdub forum. AFAIK, there is no way for him to redo it in 1 pass. The technique requires lookahead, and the software doesn't allow a plugin to access the future frames. This applies to both Virtualdub and Vegas. For Vegas to handle this, I suspect this lookahead requirement will require significant work. P.S. I've written a virtualdub script that helps automate deshaker. It does the 2 passes plus a 3rd to cut out the extra 30 frames. Lately though, wth the latest versions, this is not consistent. Sometimes I get 30 frames and sometimes I get 60 frames. Do a search in this forum on my name and "deshaker" and you'll find the script.
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Videoon 12/27/2005
OT: Cuts, dissolves, transitions - an article
Thanks for the article. I agree, well done. A classic book I don't see mentioned very often: "The five C's of cinematography" by Joseph V. Mascelli. Among many things, an excellent chapter on cutting. And written in the "pre-MTV" era :-)
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Videoon 12/8/2005
Anyone have the Mike Crash plugins?
I've never figured out the auto levels, plus I can't find a tutorial anywhere. All I got when I used it was "flickering" where the brightness jumped up and down as the scene changed. A bad result. Any tips or know where I can find a tutorial? TIA. P.S. Everyone got the filters who need them? I have them as well.
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Videoon 12/5/2005
Film Grain Reduction
>Do a search on this board for "Grain Surgery" or search using my name and then search on the term "grain." Grain Surgery is a photoshop plugin, and one idea was to export, frame by frame, to Photoshop and do the cleaning there. Then, put the individual frames back into an AVI file using the import image sequence feature in Vegas. I've never tested this because all my work is interlaced, however, I can't think how this wouldn't work for your 8mm. Believe me, "Grain Surgery" is an absolutely incredible tool. Incredibly slow, but incredible results :-)
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Videoon 12/2/2005
sata PCI controler card... best/worse?
> My guru buddy says that controller cards have a "tendency" to loose things. Not sure about that. But I can guarantee you that the on-board RAID options pose a danger. (1) They take a CPU hit. Usually low, but reportedly up to 10%. (2) BSOD crashes can cause the bios to lose one of the two raid drives. You may be able to recover; you may not. I've had this happen to me (total failure, requiring a new format and OS install) 3 times in 2 yrs. Granted the BSODs were because I had bad RAM, but a crash should not cause you to lose a drive completely. My system is on-board RAID-0 SATA. I love the speed of RAID, but next time I'll be getting a good controller card.
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Videoon 11/30/2005
OT: hard drive backup tips wanted
>Retrospec has been totally unreliable for me. Unable to safely backup my files with it... Give it up after 3 unsuccessful attempts... Wow. Retrospect has done many pita things for me -- very slow to support CD/DVD, DVD burning on a 4x burner is only 110Mb/min, autoload turned on can trash a new DVD because other software interferes, files unreadable by any other software, it can balk at switching blanks (e.g., changing from 2x brand X to 4x brand Y in the same backup set) -- but its never failed and I've been using it since the first Mac release 15 yrs ago. I archive all my video work to DVD through Retrospect (900 GB and counting) and backup my hdrive. I've recovered my videos countless times and restored my system 4 times in the last 2 yrs. Not a single problem. One great thing about it is that once its backed everything up, it can go back and verify the backup. Another great thing is that all my archive video is viewable through a single "virtual folder", even though it was incrementally archived at different times, and to restore it I simply select items in the folder hierarchy and push a button. Having said how useful it is for me, its also very clear that the company has been resting on its laurels for years. They made a great initial product, but now its just a money-maker they don't bother (need) to work very hard on. Plus, its expensive.
RichMacDonald
Offline, Member since 11/22/2001