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Videoon 3/28/2010
pan/zoom around background pic with elements
I may have to paste via a photo editor like you suggest if there's no magic bullet in Vegas to move events together like Track Motion while retaining the clarity of Pan/Crop. I'm not sure if I can fit all the elements onto the one image, so I may have to create multiple versions of the background/pasted elements & carefully swap them out between moves. Hmmm, gonna have to get smarter on my photo editor ... Thanks for the help, Kelly. Just talking through this here helps firm the thought up in my mind. I wonder why the Vegas writers made Track Motion so pixel-limited in the first place? If it was a memory limitation concern, I wonder if they'll ever "fix" that now that 64-bit is here? It seems like Vegas has a significant limitation when it comes to moving stuff in 3D space.
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Videoon 3/25/2010
HD capture - newbie
Wood- A lot of folks have had issues with the HD capture built in to Vegas. While it appears to capture okay, there may be some black frames. I run 8c & had this issue. If I remember, the first 2-3 frames of each scene (except the very first) were black. Seemed like something else was wrong, too, like the audio being slightly out of sync, but I can't recall. It was like Vegas had a hard time splitting up the scenes correctly with the compression associated with HDV. Maybe turning scene detection off would have fixed this. Dunno, I got fed up & switched to HDV Split. If Vegas capture works perfect for you--great. If not, run to HDV Split! You'll have to do a search on it to figure out how to set it up (someone wrote an awesome post here about 2.5 years ago, but I forget who). It's a free program. I used the recommended 2 pass method (one pass to capture from tape into one big file & a second pass on the file to split it into scenes. Sounds complicated, but it's not and that second pass is super-quick.). Brian
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Videoon 3/22/2010
Keyframes 0 > 100% Smoothness (Still Confused)
Sonic-- Ya totally lost me (though that's not hard). I'm not familiar with secondary centering within Vegas. I *think* I did what you are saying in my example. To test, I threw a "large tiles" generated media on the screen & increased the tile width until they were huge. My first keyframe was perfectly centered on one corner of a square (via the dot in the center of the Pan/Crop screen), and then each successive keyframe was successive corners of the square (perfectly centered). A smoothness value of 0 made the pan around the square nice & straight with 90 degree turns. Any setting above 0 made the pan progressively rounder & a setting of 100 made a perfect circle pan with that exactly touched each of the 4 corners on its 360 degree path. (note to self: if you create the keyframes before changing the smoothness setting you have to go change the smoothness setting on each keyframe. I just replicated this for my sanity & couldn't figure out why it was suddenly panning squarely with a smoothness set at 100. Turns out setting the very last keyframe only does effect much ...)
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Videoon 3/21/2010
Keyframes 0 > 100% Smoothness (Still Confused)
IMO, a smoothness setting of 0% is the best default. Back when 100% was the default setting out of the box, there were too many people (including me) that experienced unexpected behavior in their pans due to this setting. In the baseball diamond example above, with a smoothness setting above 0, not only will Vegas round the corner from 1st to 2nd, but the "runner" won't even stay on the baseline from home to 1st. The pan will start veering towards the stands in anticipation of the curve from 1st to 2nd. That's great in certain instances, but it seems like a special/niche need to me. *I* prefer my computer to do EXACTLY as I tell it (linear track/smoothness=0), and I'll change the smoothness setting the 1-2% of time I might need it to do something special. Your mileage will vary. As far as I can tell, the Smoothness setting has absolutely nothing to do with how smooth the keyframe setting of "Smooth" operates. I'm pretty sure the transition curves for the keyframe type (Linear, Smooth, Fast, Slow, Hold, Sharp) is predetermined & you just have those 6 options to choose from. Brian
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Videoon 3/11/2010
How to Create & Import a Dynamic Mask?
As a big fan of science, I can't allow this minor brain-fart to pass. The earth's shadow on the moon creates a lunar eclipse, not the phases of the moon. The phases are the result of seeing the dark side of a lighted sphere from different angles. Sorry ... I know you know that, Bob, I just can't let that go ... I'd refine Bob's suggestion with the following: - get a great picture of the full moon as suggested (lots of great pics on APOD site (google it)) - make a copy & mess with the brightness/contrast/etc to bring it down to a very dark version (as if illuminated only by earth-glow & starlight) - put the dark moon behind the full moon - key frame the phases -- I think a vertical line with 3 points (top, bottom, middle) & then connected around the moon would give you a "half moon" -- then move forward/backward as required & keyframe the middle point of the line at the full, 3/4, 1/4 & new moon phases, using the bezier curves to make resemble the sphere that it is I would think that Vegas would make a decent interpolation between your 5 keyframes to animate your phases. Throw a circular cookie cutter on both tracks to eliminate everything but the moon on both and I think you're there. Everything else just like Bob suggested. Brian
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Videoon 2/27/2010
3D IS THE "BRAVE NEW WORLD"
HDTV? You mean the thing that has better colors & better resolution and just looks better/more natural and you don't need to wear any special glasses for those benefits? If 3D was such a natural progression & so vital to the viewing experience, then folks would have pushed technology harder to improve back in the 50's/60's. Today's 3D is an improvement over yesterday's 3D, but once the novelty wears off and people get tired of wearing glasses and paying extra cash for only a marginally better experience (or worse experience for all the movies that overdo/overuse the 3D effect) it will likely run its course. Of course, anyone can make any brave proclamation he/she wants, but only time will tell. John - if 3D is still the rage in the movie theaters in 5 years from now (ought to be VERY well established then by your estimate, or ought to be fading fast by my estimate), then please contact me. I'll mail ya a NICE bottle of wine to help you savor your vindication! Deusx- yeah, the plot for Avatar was unbelievably predictable. Gorgeous environment, though.
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Videoon 2/26/2010
3D IS THE "BRAVE NEW WORLD"
I recently (finally) saw Avatar in IMAX 3D. Very beautiful movie & I was very happy that they kept the 3D effects subtle. However, I didn't feel that the 3D aspect really added anything to the story telling. Yes, we see in 3D, but even the best 3D movie is still just a projection in front of us. Until we get a truly immersive environment like a Star Trek holodeck, I don't buy the notion that 3D is the next natural progression. I don't care for the glasses and I sure don't care for the opportunity to pay even more for a movie. I, for one, hope this fad fades in the next 2-3 years.
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Videoon 12/30/2009
Farewell Apologies
Bud- I missed the rant thread. There are certainly permanent fanboys & detractors that launch into flames every now & then, but, IMO, this forum is still pretty civilized/unique. When I was searching for a new NLE, the quality of this forum swung me to Vegas (5). IMO, the forum isn't quite as dynamic as it was then, but maybe it's just because I'm not as new. Hopefully you stick around & help it improve. Anyone that is willing to apologize on a forum these days is relatively rare! Brian
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Videoon 12/6/2009
Digital Juice Xmas sale!
Jay - Too true! At least they are very consistent in their sale pricing, so if you're in the market there's no concern about waiting for a better deal until way, way down the road when they look to retire a product. Course - Yeah, not a fan of the overly-cute font look. I guess you can strip some of the gawdy layers off of the fonts, but still more than I'm looking for. I do need to find some good basic video fonts. The generic stuff on my computer is decent for Word, but not great for video. Hey, haven't been able to find the Motion Designer review you mention on this Vegas forum. Was it somewhere else? Brian
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Videoon 11/23/2009
title effects for Vegas?
Al- Click on Track Motion & then check the 2D Shadow box near the bottom left. Click on the word "2D Shadow" to make the control options for the shadow visible (if they weren't already). Now you can position the shadow relative to the original (i.e. set light direction) & change the fuzziness of the shadow (i.e. add to the height effect). You can change the shadow color if you're looking for more of a graphic effect instead of a pure shadow. The shadow will follow whatever shape you have in that track (i.e. a video will just have a rectangle shadow, but text on a transparent background will have individually shadowed letters). Brian
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Videoon 11/21/2009
title effects for Vegas?
"Ultimate S" by the guys at VASST.com also does lower thirds stuff. You can look to see if their pricing/options work for you. I've never used the lower thirds, so can't comment on that, but Ultimate S does lots of other outstanding things to save you editing time. Digital Juice has tons of lower thirds options, most of them animated graphics, which might be more than you're looking for. Look at their Editor's Toolkit or Toolbox for your "kitchen sink" option, or their Editor's Toolkit Singles (one theme only) for as cheap as $6 (gray rings current price). Digital Juice has also got some outstanding training videos on their site. Highly recommend you search this forum for "lower thirds" & you'll find tons of other useful info! P.S. You can build very simple ones yourself inside Vegas using media generator for a solid color/gradient/whatever & the cookie cutter tool to reduce it down to your "lower thirds" size. You could also build a little more sophisticated lower thirds graphics in whatever graphics program you have (Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, etc) and then export them as a PNG file for Vegas. Don't forget to add a shadow on your lower third track to give it a little depth above your video. Brian
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Videoon 11/21/2009
OT: Dead drive recovery service recommendations
John- Congrats on fixing your drive. That's outstanding! For anyone else reading this thread, I had the EXACT same experience as JRazz with Aero Dr & ESS two years ago. My drive was an older Seagate (7200.8, I think) drive. Pretty sure mine was a full head crash, as it was making bad noises. ESS was able to recover almost all of my data, thankfully. Still in the hunt for a good NAS solution to make sure this doesn't happen again! Brian
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Videoon 9/13/2009
Smooth Start/Stop in Pan/Crop
Yes, the default used to be 100%. That setting gives you some strange motion results if you're doing anything more than panning from point A to point B (i.e. multiple pans around a picture creates more of a bezier curve to the motion instead of going from point to point to point). Used to drive folks new to Vegas crazy trying to figure out the problem. I'd say anything other than 0 is something you only use for specific situations; much happier with the new default! Brian
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Videoon 6/7/2009
Video FX
Darkstar- Also note that there are separate Vegas Pro & Vegas Movie Studio forums. While many features are exactly the same between the two, some are not. You may find settings/techniques on this forum that you can't replicate in Movie Studio, and you may have questions that Vegas Pro users won't be familiar with. You may also find that folks on the Movie Studio forum are posting about things that you are also running into just because of the experience level. Many of the users here are professional video guys (note: not me) that have been doing it for years & years and have completely different issues. Vegas Movie Studio forum Brian
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Videoon 6/4/2009
opening multiple windows of vegas 8
Each instance of Vegas is independent, you can render & edit to your heart's content. I've only got 2GB RAM & dual core, but I've had 3 instances rendering (SD, not HDV) without any issues.
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Videoon 5/22/2009
OT...barbed wire FX
Wow! Is it possible for you to share the .veg file for the barb wire sequences? You could strip out the audio & all the other video info. It'd just be nice to analyze how you did the "basic" effect. Thx, Brian
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Videoon 5/12/2009
Aarghhh - the HDV capture bug is NOT fixed in VP9
Vegas Capture was also off by a few frames on HDV from my HC1. Using HDVsplit to capture first without scene detect & then a second pass on the mega file to split it by scenes has worked like a champ. The second pass is very quick, so minimal hassle. Brian
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Videoon 4/12/2009
Noob Joining the Vegas Community
If you're going to edit quite a bit, folks seem to be adamant about using the Contour Shuttle Pro -- seems to make editing much, much faster. Do a search on this forum and you won't find a single negative remark. I own one, but my editing time available has dropped to nothing & I haven't really used it much. I can say it's very well constructed, though. Website is: http://retail.contourdesign.com/shuttle/shuttleprov2/ The scripting programs Ultimate S or Excalibur will save you a ton of time, also. I have Ultimate S, and though I've only edited a couple small projects it was helpful. The built-in HDV capture program in Vegas isn't all that wonderful. I've had much better luck with a freeware program called "HDVsplit". Search the forum for a good post on how to use it. Someone wrote a very detailed post about it (maybe by "Blink3times"?), but what has worked well for me is to use HDVsplit to capture the entire tape into one continuous file & then use HDVsplit again on the file to chop it up into the different time sequences. The built-in capture program always seemed to miss the clip divisions by a couple frames ... very strange. Search this forum A LOT! There are tons & tons of great ideas & helpful hints on here. Try to ignore the grumps that seem to take everything personally. Get used to the inevitable SINE wave of emotion that happens two months before & after each major release (i.e. "I wish the next version of Vegas had this ..." followed by "Vegas hasn't improved substantially since version 4" followed by "I heard a 256-bit version of Vegas is being released at NAB next week" followed by "Vegas is a dead product" followed by "The new release of Vegas is here & it gives you a back massage while you edit!" followed by "The new release of Vegas has major bugs & should be cast into Hell." followed by "Halleluia, the 'A' update to the new Vegas fixed my bug!" followed by "... but not MY bug ...") and then it loops all over again. Get used to it. Vegas is great; this forum is great; but they both have their limitations. Try to figure out which posters are wheat & which are chaff. Go ahead & put me in the chaff column ... I'm not a major player! Welcome to Vegas! BTW, NAB is next week & I heard Vegas Pro 9 is going to be out & has subliminal messaging to make viewers believe ALL of your camera/editing work is masterful ... Brian
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Videoon 3/24/2009
Stopped Capturing HD???
I had a problem capturing in both HDV & DV that suddenly sprang up. Had some error message about "Microsoft a/v device ..." Tried everything, but finally used a tip I found from searching this forum. Turned the preview on (in Vegas Capture), turned my camcorder from playback mode to record mode such that the live video was shown in the Capture preview window & then returned to business as normal. Don't know why it worked; can't remember who passed on that tip. Hope it fixes your issue. Brian
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Videoon 2/3/2009
OT: Serious security caution Windows 7 Beta
Course- Yeah, I attempted to get my folks to switch over to Mac (even though I run Windows), but it was too much change for them. Fear of the unknown & all. Too bad, I think it's probably a great noob/geezer OS! Sorry about his passing. Certainly brings home the need to enjoy every day! (I'd say "make the most of each day", but that seems awfully ambitious ...) Brian
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Videoon 2/2/2009
OT: Serious security caution Windows 7 Beta
MS sure does love to leave open doors (or Windows?...) for viruses with new "features" don't they? I'm thinking back to the entirely new class of viruses they spawned with the Macro feature of Word. Surely this "feature" is really only used by a small niche of folks & hardly worth all the trouble it caused. Security is definitely a mindset, though. Kills me how my father, who religiously secures his house/has a safe & doesn't trust anything from any branch/level of the government, will click on every link & piece of trash file sent to him without a thought! Geez, Dad ...
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Videoon 1/15/2009
Tape is finally dead.
Yep, gotta believe it's just a matter of time. Go buy a 4TB version of the Western Digital NAS (Network Attached Storage), put it in RAID 5 mode, which gives you extra speed & complete data backup (but brings you down to 2.7TB avail storage, apparently). That amount of storage is roughly equal to 200 DV/HDV tapes. At $4/tape that exactly matches the prices for the NAS ($800), however you have instant access to all of your video, extra speed & backup, and you can also use the drives for your normal computer data storage while you're filling them up. What's not to like? Drive capacity is only going to increase & prices decrease. Gotta think camera battery life is much improved saving to solid state instead of tape, too. A cheap way to hand raw footage to clients? Okay, got me there, but what's to keep you from shooting on flash, saving to hard drive & using an older camera to transfer to a DV/HDV tape for the client? Surely you don't hand over your original tapes now, do you? The technology for this is only getting cheaper/better. I see widespread adoption in the next two years! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136308
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Videoon 12/29/2008
hard drive went AWOL and I got it back but????????
Can't say if this is your problem, but I had an internal drive that had access problems. Any time I tried to transfer a relatively large amount of data it gave me an error ~5% of the way through and the computer required a reboot. Turns out this was the final days of that drive (a Seagate). I bought some hard drive software in an attempt to salvage data, but it was too far gone (head crash). Cost me $900 to retrieve my data (though only ~98% successful). Since you've had problems with the drive both internally & externally, it makes me think your drive is heading in the same direction. If you need/want any of that data, I'd advise completely disconnecting that drive (power & data) & buying some drive software (I used Acronis Disk Director) to attempt a low-level recovery of data (copying to another drive). The drive is likely to get worse the more you continue to use it. Brian
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Videoon 12/22/2008
OT: SAMSUNG HARDDRIVES OPINIONS
Switched to Samsung about a year ago after being a Seagate fan for 5+ years. I don't have any cosmic, stressful setup, but I'm 2 for 2 with good Samsung drives. Can't recommend enough a semi-regular backup regimen. Spent over $900 to get (most of) my data recovered after my Seagate bit the dust. I hadn't backed up in over three years, so I had a whole slew of precious photos to recover. Brian
Tattoo
Offline, Member since 6/20/2004