-
Videoon 11/15/2018
Slowly introduce video effects (such as gamma) over time.
The Vegas keyframe interface is the "ultimate" way to change fX over time. However, when all you want to do is gradually go from one setting to another, a much faster way which also gives you a lot more control is to cut the event and use crossfades. 1. Cut the event at the point where you want the setting to begin to change. 2. Go to the second of these two events and change the setting to achieve what you want at the point where the change will be finished. You don't need to worry too much about doing this on the exact last frame, as you will see in #3 below. 3. Grab the right edge of the left event and drag it so that event overlaps the second event. The longer the overlap, the longer it will take for the fX (or multiple fX) to change. I use this quite frequently when it is really important to get the start and/or stop point exact. The keyframe interface has always been marginal, and when you try to adjust things down at a frame level, the keyframes have a habit of being off by at least a frame. They sometimes jump as well, as I found out a year ago when trying to keyframe dozens of side-by-side photos. It was a real nightmare. This technique has none of those problems. It also has the advantage that if you are keyframing half a dozen effects (like when you have multiple color and gamma correction modules applied) you don't have to create keyframes on each fX track (i.e., you don't need to enable "animate").
-
Videoon 9/10/2017
How to Remove just the background from a Video?
I sent you a PM at the email address you provided, and included the project file and all the media from the difference mask I created a few days ago. I suggest that you continue to post your questions here in this forum because there are far more people here who can answer more broadly than I can, and because I am not going to have much time in the next several weeks, as my daughter's wedding approaches.
-
Videoon 9/10/2017
How to Remove just the background from a Video?
P.S. Depending on what you're actually trying to do, you can also just use a simply mask (found in the pan/crop dialog). That's how I did this simple example that I posted in another forum for someone about six months ago: Wow, I just inserted that link, but first looked for a way to embed the YouTube video. Does this pathetic home-brew forum software not even provide for that? Why doesn't Magix just buy some decent forum software, like every other company in the world? This stuff has been around since the days of the BBS (remember Wildcat software?). There are dozens and dozens of really important features, all missing from this bad hack. that really improve the experience for the users who paid big money for this software and expect a professional forum for that expenditure. [edit] It looks like it sort of embedded, although it doesn't play in place like a normal embedded video. Non-standard UI is generally not a good thing.
-
Videoon 9/10/2017
How to Remove just the background from a Video?
Gosh, Vegas can do this. I'm surprised the old-timers don't remember the Vegas "difference mask". If this forum still contained a competent search engine (it doesn't) or if the archive search was competent (it is awful as well) you could find all sorts of great posts explaining how to do this. Basically, a difference mask allows you to use any static background in exactly the same way as a green screen. You can "key" out the static background and replace it with anything else you want. As I understand it, this is exactly what you want to do. The original tutorial on this subject, done by one of the Sonic Foundry engineers, is still up: Two Cat Demo It was really great, in the old days, where the engineers actually used the product and shared their really cool "secrets" with the user base. The "two cat" example is more complicated than what you want to do because he managed to composite two shots of the same cat into the same picture. Here's another example, from my own archive, that is exactly what you want to do. About ten years ago good friend and fellow entrepreneur (he's one of the best I've ever met) rented a function room in Vegas for his wife's birthday and invited a huge crowd. The show "American Idol" was in its 2nd or 3rd year, and at the height of its popularity. He wanted to surprise her by singing Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday" as an AI contestant. He locked down his camera and recorded himself singing in front of a doorway. No decent lighting, no nothing. He sent that to me along with a DVD of the first two seasons of the show. I then went through and found appropriate clips to intercut with his performance. I was able to create a background of the AI set by cloning out a long shot of one of the contestants. I used that as my new background (i.e., it was what I used to replace the walls and doorway in his house). Fortunately, he started the camera with no one in the scene, then walked into the scene, giving me a perfect shot of the background that I wanted to remove. Lacking that, you can Photoshop out the foreground object, but the background is then never quite perfect. Here is a link to my ancient use of a difference mask: American Idol "Contestant" You'll see a few places where the "key" isn't perfect. With enough patience this can be overcome with a combination of the median filter and garbage mask, both of which are explained in the tutorial. There have been a few dozen posts on this in the past, and if you use Google search on the archive of the old forum, you can find them by restricting the search to just that site. The search provided by Magix is totally incompetent and completely broken. If you want, I have a Vegas project file (Vegas 13) that I created just two days ago, using exactly this technique because I needed to remove the watermark from some stock video. I bought the video, but the purchased version didn't perform like the demo, and the company wouldn't fix the problem so, being under a deadline, I simply removed the watermark from the version that worked. I figured that since I paid for what turned out to be a broken version, I should be able to use the demo version, so I don't think I was violating any laws. Just PM me and I'll send the difference mask Vegas 13 project file to you. And, if you want the Vegas project file and all the media used in that Cat demo from all those years ago, I still have that as well. This is a fairly advanced technique, involving parent-child tracks, masks, track compositing, and other features of Vegas that you may not yet have explored. If so, and if you are willing to do the work, you will open up a new and vast expanse of capabilities and creativity that the original engineers loaded into the program, way back in version 4-7, when the program really came of age.
-
Videoon 9/8/2017
Strange forum happenings...
Yes, my post got deleted. I have to moderate a neighborhood forum, so I totally respect the Magix moderator's right to remove rants, unhelpful posts, etc. My past contributions mean nothing here, and again, I can't blame them because they have hundreds of posts each month and cannot possibly look up everyone's past to perhaps better understand where I was coming from, or find out that I have a depth of understanding of this product that lets me see things that a "newbie" would not. I won't disrespect the moderator and repeat all the things I said. The basic nature of the post was that Vegas 13 let me down while I was creating the most important video I've ever done, a tribute to my daughter and her groom to be shown at their wedding in two weeks. The essence of my rant (and yes, it was a rant, so I won't even put that word in quotes) is that I would have been finished two weeks ago if Vegas 13 "behaved." But it didn't. I'll leave it at that. For those of you who remember any of my thousands of past posts, I am king of the "workaround" and I eventually was able to get everything done, late last night after five nights with less than three hours of sleep each night. As I said in my original post, it will be my last project because I am too old to learn anything else, and because my heart and soul have always belonged to Vegas, one of the most amazing pieces of software ever created. I don't have anywhere else to go, or any other product with which I could ever be as creative or productive. Thank you all for your support in this thread. I miss the old Sonic Foundry camaraderie, and fondly remember all the things I learned from all of you over the years.
-
Videoon 7/26/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
--> But John's post is not trying to solve the problem or even present it in how it impacts most users. He also states that it could generate other problems - classic general to specific argument which is almost always wrong. He tone is argumentative rather than supportive... Wow, you clearly didn't read this entire thread, starting with my initial post that was made several years ago. Also, you obviously have no clue about the threads to which I referred where Nick Hope, MusicVid, farss, john_dennis, Craftech, amendegw, and many others tried to get to the bottom of some of Vegas' problems related to deinterlacing, downsizing, and rendering. Here is one of those threads. It has 167 answers: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/interlaced-hd-to-dvd-again-some-test-renders--84017/ Your last two posts are so completely wrong, that you might want to delete them. In particular, if you think that all of us were "not trying to solve the problem or even present it in how it impacts most users," then you clearly are not comprehending what you are reading. I am mentioning that thread, and linking to it, because I already referenced it several times in this thread, and much of the discovery done there impacts what I posted in this thread. You need to understand a lot more about what is going on now, and what has gone on in the past. I've been using Vegas every day since version 4 and posted thousands of times in this forum before giving up, for the reasons I already posted. I am a software designer, videographer, and media restoration fanatic. I am a piker compared to those who I already lauded in previous posts, but I actually do know a thing or two about software and, as most people here will attest, have done nothing BUT try to help people. Do a search for Deshaker Vegas Script, and perhaps you will find some of the threads in this forum where I shared a complex script that completely automated the process of stabilizing footage, long before Sony incorporated a scaled-down version of Mercalli into Vegas Pro. But, if you want to continue to make comments about people, rather than the topic at hand, go right ahead. It won't bother me because I just changed my preferences so I will no longer get emails every time people post. It was that preference that sucked me back into this quagmire, and boy am I sorry I "took the bait," to use your phrase. Sheeshhh.
-
Videoon 7/26/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
--> I hope you will stick around and explain why you say it is "probably at the core of some of the biggest problems in Vegas" OK, one last post. The reason I made that statement in the first post in this thread, and then again earlier today is that Nick Hope, Musicvid, and dozens of other people created some of the longest threads in this forum's history trying to figure out how to get better renders from Vegas when creating DVDs from HD source material. Nick, in particular, uncovered all sorts of issues, but they all seemed to point at how Vegas was handling interlacing. We collectively came up with all sorts of "workarounds" using MeGUI or Handbrake, fed with video that was frame-served out of Vegas and then through various AVISynth scripts. It was great stuff, but hardly what the average user wanted to go through. While some of the issues uncovered pointed to weaknesses in a few of the rendering engines inside of Vegas (Handbrake/MeGUI still do a much better job for low bitrate MP4 encoding, for instance), it was (and is) my belief that some of the problems simply had to do with how Vegas was handling field order changes. I proved this with an example, posted many years ago, where I rendered some HDV (TFF) interlaced material to DVD using the default (at that time) BFF setting, and then rendered the same thing after changing the default field order in the Render As MPEG-2 setting to TFF. The TFF setting (which matched the HDV source material) was noticeably better in every way. To be clear, the issue is not field reversal, something that results in unwatchable, horrible, "vibrating" video, but instead the issue looked like badly-done deinterlacing. I obviously cannot know exactly what goes on "under the covers" inside of Vegas, but it definitely had that feeling. What bugged me at the time -- and still does -- was the glassy-eyed response from Sony who never seemed to have any sense of what was important, and what was not. The vast majority of enhancements in Vegas, from release 9 onward, were to adapt the program to new video and audio formats. Bugs were also fixed, but in a rather haphazard fashion, with many bugs (and this one is a bug) never addressed, or not addressed for many releases. This forum is filled with posts, after each new release, with users amazed that some of the better-known bugs were not fixed. I have run three software companies and so I know about how bugs are prioritized and also know that in a major commercial program there are literally hundreds of bugs on the the "fix it" list that will probably never be fixed because there just isn't time in the day to get to them all. That is just the way it is. However, the difference between a great software company and a lousy software company is the development team's ability to understand what is important, and what is not. It usually comes down to the product manager, and if that person is involved, and if that person uses the product every day, and if that person is passionate about his or her work, then good things happen. On the other hand, if that person is none of those things, the product languishes. IMHO, from Vegas 9 onward, the product languished.
-
Videoon 7/26/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
--> Also IMHO titles to posts often color those who read them and your title does read like click bait and the really helpful and knowledgeable forums members can sense those. Thank you, D7K, for reminding me why, after almost 10,000 posts in this forum, I no longer post here. I expose a bug that is probably at the core of some of the biggest problems in Vegas, some of which you cannot "work around," and you think it is click bait. I only came back because they guy who necro'd this thread emailed me. However, after a pleasant few days re-connecting with some old friends (and temporarily taking my original thread OT) I am, once again, outta here.
-
Videoon 7/25/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
Wow, if I was planning to return on a regular basis (which I'm not), I'd suggest we put together a "wall of fame" for great members, past and present.
-
Videoon 7/25/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
--> A tear is coming to my eyes. 😀 ...Jerry Me too! For those who don't know Jerry, he is one of the finest nature photographers in the world. Jerry am Ende -- National Geographic Photos He is one of the few people I know who can actually take photos and video as stunning as what you see in the amazing Netflix series, "The Hunt." We've sure had some great talents pass through this forum over the years: Douglas Spotted-Eagle (Spot) with his Emmy-awarded music, and his skydiving videos (which damn near killed him); Nick Hope, specializing in amazing Thailand underwater photography, and who knows more Vegas tricks than the rest of us put together; Bob Grant ("farss") who knows more about film than just about anyone; GmElliott, the finest wedding videographer that I've ever seen; and Glenn Chan, who knows more about video color space than the engineers who designed the NTSC video standard. That's just off the top of my head, from memory. I'm sure I'm leaving out many other amazing talents. In its heyday, the Sonic Foundry forum was the best I've ever had the privilege to join.
-
Videoon 7/24/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
I am truly blessed that I can afford to do that. Me too. I've been shooting HD for twelve years and still have not had my first request for Blu-Ray (or for any other HD format). Amazing. And I live in Carmel, CA which is supposed to be "high end." I did deliver an HD version of those two weddings on a memory stick, just to ease my own conscience. I know the DVD will last longer than anything else, but as good as DVDs can still look, they obviously don't hold a candle to real HD. I'd love to get a 4K camera and use that as an acquisition format, but the workflow is too complicated and slow. I have no interest in 4K to watch (I don't have a big enough living room to get a screen large enough to show off the increased resolution).
-
Videoon 7/24/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
Ah, two familiar, friendly faces. Thanks for the kind thoughts. Everything is fine here. I am still doing lots of media restoration and also still doing event videography. I did two weddings a year ago, with four cameras and an audio recorder with just "moi" operating them all. I gave both productions away as wedding gifts (actually, you could not pay me to do a wedding -- too many things can go wrong). I also taped another Nutcracker, making it thirty-six straight years I have taped at least one production (I used to tape two performances, plus the dress). So, not much has changed here. I hope you two are also doing well. ------------- FWIW, some samples of what I've been doing (nothing earth shattering) I cringe as I watch my wedding music video however, because I remember, back when this forum was great, reading and watching the things posted by "GMElliot" one of the greatest wedding videographers of all time. You can see his current work here: http://www.httcord3films.com/ Wow, wow, wow! To quote "Waynes Word:" I am not worthy. I remember asking him how he got his shots, and they were all hand-held without any post production stabilization. Those are some seriously steady hands. (I tried to provide a live link to Cord3Films, but it kept copying one of the above videos ... great forum software ...)
-
Videoon 7/24/2017
Another nasty, latent Vegas rendering bug
I think it was this thread that caused me to give up posting in this forum over three years ago. The total lack of response from Sony (and now Magix) to such a fundamental bug was stunning. The issue wasn't so much whether lots of people were seeing the problem, but rather that it exposed a major underlying problem in the software which was very likely to show up in other ways as well. One example is that many of us spent hundreds of hours (collectively) trying to get better rendering when downsizing from HD to DVD. After months of tests and workarounds, I found that simply changing the field order in the MPEG-2 render so that it matched the source made a huge difference in quality. This explained a lot because, back then, Vegas always defaulted to lower field first when rendering to DVD and, of course, most interlaced HD formats use top field first. Therefore, because Vegas was not properly handling the simple task of changing field order, not only did this field reversal bug happen, but I suspect some of this same bad field code also was at the root of why DVDs looked so soft when rendered from TFF HD material. You will notice that a few versions ago, Sony quietly changed that default in the MPEG-2 (and probably other) rendering templates so the default is now TFF. Of course if you are rendering from SD NTSC sources you will have to remember to change it back. So they put a band-aid on the problem, but did not fix it. Field order should not matter. It is trivial to render either way, if the code is correct (the simplest is to just drop the first field ...). It is a bug, and it should have been fixed. ----------------- Finally, this is my second post using this Magix forum software and boy is it awful!! There is absolutely nothing good about this. The old Sony forum software was also a home-brew, but at least they got the basics right. Why doesn't Magix simply buy some forum software, like every other company on the planet, and use that instead? You could actually have a decent search engine, much better formatting and linking, and ... oh heck, I don't care enough to go on. I still use Vegas every day, and am still writing scripts and discovering cool stuff. Up until Sony sold the software, I still lurked in the forum to read posts by some of the gurus, but most of them have left the building. That's too bad because I sure learned a lot here fifteen years ago when I first joined. Wow, I just looked for the "preview" button so I could preview my post ... there isn't one!! Good grief, how incompetent. I just looked for a "submit" or "post" button ... there isn't one!! In fact there isn't even an actual button ... do any programmers study UI design?? I have to click on some blue text labeled "comment." Comment??? Comments are what you leave at the end of a blog. "Posting" is what you do in a forum. There is a difference. Words matter. UI matters. Field order matters. Grmpphhh.
-
Scriptingon 7/10/2017
Cuts-only editing scripts
Actually, these scripts do something quite different than anything Vegas has ever provided. I've used Vegas since version 4 and, unfortunately, the "core functions" have not been upgraded much since then. As a result, these scripts are still quite valid, useful and, in my experience, will let you get through a "cuts-only" editing session, using a single timeline, in about 1/5 the time it would take using Vegas' native editing. I haven't posted here in three years because of Sony's neglect of the software and, more recently, because this forum software is so awful (why the heck didn't Magix just purchase forum software, like every other company??). I am only posting now because I got a PM asking for the scripts. Here is a link to the latest versions which, unlike those I posted years ago, will now ripple markers as well as events. Cuts-Only Scripts As I described in my various earlier posts, which you probably can't find because of this forum's incompetent search capabilities (grumble, grumble), these scripts are designed for the simplest situation of doing cuts-only edits on a single track of video and its associated audio. All operations are based on the current location of the cursor and do not depend on which event is selected or not selected. All deletions and trims are also based on the cursor location, thus eliminating one problem with the Vegas UI which, under many scenarios, will give you the surprise of finding that you deleted an event that was selected from a previous operation, but no longer in the current timeline view. That can't happen with these scripts. These three scripts are useless if you have a multi-track editing project. -------------- (Wow, I wanted to preview this post, to make sure the link works and that the formatting is the way I want, and realized that there is no preview feature. I've been doing online forums since dial-up BBS and, later, Compuserve and AOL. This forum software is a joke!! What button do I click on to post?? OMG, I click on "Comment?" Really? The word "comment" is a noun as well as a verb, so it is an ambiguous and incompetent choice. Is there a problem of using the word "submit," like most other forums? Also, neither "comment" nor "cancel" are formatted as buttons and therefore the user has to rely on the text color to know that it is something that should be clicked. Obviously, once you know, you can get it to work, but why throw out twenty years of UI convention?) After I quit posting three years ago, I still read the forum almost every day, but after Magix took over and installed this incompetent forum software I quite doing that because the formatting, flow, and topic selection is so goofy and stupid that I can't quickly scan and determine what to read. What is really sad (for me) is that I can no longer find anything that I wrote in my 7,000 posts, nor can I easily find posts from the great gurus from the past who wrote wonderful things that I often want to find in order to remember some insight or trick. Oh well, I've moved on and have figured out how to make older versions of Vegas work great with modern video, so I can still get lots of work done.
-
Videoon 5/16/2015
This is simply sensational !!
Very cool: a selfie drone. However, lack of obstacle avoidance would, I think, make it impossible to use for a large number of situations.
-
Videoon 5/16/2015
So OT: A Grammar Question
This takes me back to 7th grade (early 1960s) and diagramming sentences. Both sentences are grammatically correct, at least as far as subject/predicate noun/verb agreement: "loss" is singular and requires the verb "were," and "losses" is plural and requires the verb All other parts of the sentence are qualifiers and can be ignored. "Net" has nothing to do with anything because adjectives don't affect (not "effect") the noun/verb agreement. Finally, if you are concerned about whether "net loss" or "net losses" is correct, that is not a grammar question but instead depends on what you are trying to say. If you are describing the sum of all losses of a single type (like a profit/loss statement), then it would be "net loss." If you are describing multiple independent losses, then "net losses" might be more appropriate. Most situations would probably be better covered by using "net loss." [edit]Atom12 posted while I was writing, and I agree with his "loss" vs. "losses" statement.
-
Videoon 5/11/2015
correcting overdetailed / sharpened footage
I'd have to see a clip to offer informed advice. However, most sharpening works by putting a thin halo around sharp light/dark transitions. Over in the doom9.org AVISynth forum, quite a few people have developed "dehalo" scripts that attempt to eliminate these halos. They do work, but only to a modest degree.
-
Videoon 5/9/2015
Removing or minimzing background voices
I can't say for sure without listening to a sample. You should certainly try iZotope RX and Spectral Layers. However, my instinct says that Kelly (Chienworks) is right on the money: cut out the sections with the voices, and then mix sound from adjacent sections of the clip to file the gaps. If the airplane noise is fairly constant, you'll be done right away. If the noise is from airplanes at a show, and they are moving across the field of view, creating a change in both volume and pitch (Doppler effect), then it will be trickier.
-
Videoon 5/9/2015
New Version: Neat Video v4.0
I prefer to use no more than 15-20%, when necessary for noise reduction, to avoid a plastic look. Sometimes it's possible to preserve tons of detail but the overall image still looks plastic. Yech. That is precisely my gripe: plastic. For a spatial denoiser, Neat is one of the best, but the temporal portion has never seemed to me to be even close to what I can get with other tools. Every Neat-treated video (as opposed to still shots) I've ever looked at seems to suffer from this same artifact. But, the noise sure is gone.
-
Videoon 5/7/2015
Search by Name of Active Take Information
Did you click on that little "button" in the upper left corner of the Edit Details dialog, like I described in my last post? If you don't do that first, then Ctrl-C won't do anything. I would be very surprised if you can't copy/paste from that dialog, if you do what I describe because, as big as your project is, I've actually worked on projects that are much larger, including one that had 14,000 events. That was a long time ago, and it actually did almost bring Vegas to its knees, and I eventually had to simplify the project to get my work done.
-
Videoon 5/7/2015
Please Help! Can I flip half of video?
If I correctly understand what you want to do, I think it is very easy. 1. Duplicate the track that contains the video. 2. Go to the Track Motion control in the header of the upper of these two tracks, right click on the main area of this dialog and flip horizontal. 3. Use the cursor key to slide this flipped video right or left, depending on which side you want this flipped video to appear. The original, unflipped video, will show through as you move the upper video. Adjust the upper video X position until it is back in its original position.
-
Videoon 5/7/2015
New Version: Neat Video v4.0
OldSmoke, That is pretty good looking, although some of the detail on the boy's sleeve, just above the elbow, is gone. Having said that, there is always something I can find no matter what tool is used. It is why I keep looking and why I'll definitely try Neat v4. I still think we should find a really good test clip, and have various people take a whack at it.
-
Videoon 5/7/2015
Search by Name of Active Take Information
The following workflow works, although it does involve more than one step for each search. 1. Open Edit Details --> Events. You will see your Active Takes names 2. Click on the blank "button" at the intersection of the row and column headers (in the upper left corner of the Edit Details spreadsheet. This will select everything. 3. Press Ctrl-C to copy the spreadsheet. 4. Copy the result into Excel (or your spreadsheet of choice). 5. Sort the spreadsheet by Active Take name. 6. In the spreadsheet, search for the name you want, and then move the cursor over to the the Start column, press Ctrl-C to copy. 7. Switch back to Vegas, press Ctrl-G and then immediate Ctrl-V. Press Enter. Your cursor should now be at the beginning of the take you want. For each new search use Atl-Tab to switch back to Excel, perform the search, and then repeat steps 6 & 7. Once you have it set up, it is almost as fast as doing it all in Vegas, although you do have to switch to Excel to do the search, and then you have the Ctrl-C, Ctrl-G, Ctrl-V to actually do the search. Finally, if you don't need the search capability, you can do everything in the Edit Details window. Just click on the "Active Take Name" header and it will sort the Edit Details spreadsheet by take name, and you can simply scroll to where you want to go, move the cursor over to the start time, press Ctrl-C to copy the time, click on the timeline. press Ctrl-G, Ctrl-V, and Enter.
-
Videoon 5/7/2015
New Version: Neat Video v4.0
Looking at the results that Grazie posted reminds me of why I have never warmed up to Neat. Yes, the noise is dramatically reduced, especially in the dark sky, but so is all the subtle detail, most notably in the grass on the rights side of the frame, near the horizon, and in the animals themselves. They now look like a watercolor rather than a photograph. As I've posted many times, there is a difference between noise reduction and noise elimination. I can show you many, many tools that can eliminate noise, but which do terrible violence to the detail. Here is a somewhat similar noise reduction project I did for a forum member last fall. Here is the original: Here is that original, after I applied color curves and color correction: And here is that same frame after I applied noise reduction: Note that there is very little loss in detail (I am hard pressed to find any at all), although a small amount of noise still exists. You can right click on this link and download my "after" version to see what it looks like in motion: Noise Reduced I also was not impressed with the dirt and scratch removal of the new plugin shown on the Neat site. However, despite my negatives, I really do need to download it and see if I can get better results than what I'm seeing so far in the posted examples.
