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Videoon 3/3/2016
OT:Camera Move Question
Essentially its the same as tracking across a photo except the photo has movement in it. Yes, it's a move, and you might like it. It's not the same as a pedestal-up, and even farther from a crane-up, but that doesn't mean you won't like it. In some ways this might be more like a tilt up since your camera is always at a single elevation, which is what Peter's pointing out. One help might be to shoot it at a longer focal length to flatten it out a bit and reduce distortion. It sounds like you won't be able to compensate very easily for vanishing points but the farther away you can get the camera, the less you'll notice it. You would still want foreground objects that can move in and out of the edge of the frame but they shouldn't cross the center. Try it. Do some test shots.
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Videoon 3/2/2016
You Can NOT Test Catalyst Edit!
Making it expire X days after the first run is probably the simplest way of limiting a trial. Programming-wise it'd probably be very easy. A better way to approach it would be to give you 15 actual usage days, with a notice on each day you use it stating how many days you have remaining. Inserting a watermark might take a little more effort than either of those approaches. As far as "losing a customer" goes...the only way they're going to know they lost a customer is if you pay for the software and then demand a refund an hour later. Otherwise you're the customer they never had.
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Videoon 2/29/2016
System Low on Memory issue
If a codec you're using is 32-bit, or quicktime is 32-bit (and I think it is), then you're probably limited in that process to 2GB of RAM. Open Task Manager and watch what's going on. Another thing to look at is your dynamic RAM setting in Vegas. This takes memory AWAY from processing so you don't want to max it out. Rob
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Videoon 2/18/2016
4k playback kind of sucks Vegas Pro13
Certainly the fact that your partner has kept it within an Apple ecosystem might be helping. Another thing to keep in mind is that (if you're playing the media on the Vegas timeline) Vegas' timeline incurs quite a bit of overhead. For example, you'll find that Vegas's trimmer performance is a lot better than it's timeline performance. The timeline is doing a lot under the hood.
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Videoon 2/17/2016
4k playback kind of sucks Vegas Pro13
What application are you using for playback? What application is your partner using for playback? Rob
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Videoon 2/4/2016
Rendering Threads & Dynamic Ram
"Max Video Render threads Value 16 Default 16" is truncated in your view. The actual text is "Max Video Render threads (64-bit) Value 16 Default 16" Change the value to something larger. However, there are probably some things to think about. Set up a test project of something you would normally work on. Time the render with several preview RAM settings. Do a render to ram to fill the buffer before doing a render. Basically set up several test scenarios. How much are your cores being utilized before raising the thread count? Are they maxed out? Are some unused? Does this change after raising the threads setting? More importantly, do you get a faster render? Or is it slower? Speed is the only real benchmark here. Busier cores with slower renders aren't much good. Also, do you know how to flush your preview RAM? A Vegas restart should do it but another method is to change your preview quality setting. Watch memory usage in Taskman to make sure Vegas gave up a bunch of memory.
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Videoon 2/3/2016
Rendering Threads & Dynamic Ram
Caveats, caveats. Preview RAM takes memory *away* from Vegas and Windows. It's a frame cache. Uncompressed frames get cached to RAM and make things on the timeline that'd need rendering play back smoothly. That memory can't be used for other rendering and processing purposes, so it's a trade-off. Sometimes it speeds things up, until it runs out and slows everything else down. All this is to say that you need to leave adequate RAM available for Vegas to actually do its job. At 64GB total, letting the cache consume half your RAM is no big deal, but as a rule of thumb, the more preview RAM you allocate, the less is left for actual operations. That, and users who test this often say that renders are faster when preview RAM is set below 512 MB, sometimes even better set at zero. So what about threads? I just looked at task manager and noticed that there are over a thousand threads allocated at this moment on my computer. Vegas is not running. Would Vegas really need more than 16 threads? How much time would be spent managing threads versus actual rendering? Are Vegas and the two codecs you're probably using (a video codec and an audio codec) really *that* multithreaded? Would it make any sense to kill other processes to try to reduce the number of running threads Vegas has to compete with? If you have 64 cores (I'm assuming thats what you mean) then I guess you're running something like a quad-processor setup or opterons. Or something similar. Maybe you'd be better off running 4 instances of Vegas and have them all doing renders at once. Rob
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Videoon 1/28/2016
Comment on my youtube tutorial
At this point I think I'm listening to it after compression, but you have a nice mellow voice and a little bit of southern is good. Heavy accents steal attention but light ones give a sense of place and a little context to the voice. I'd probably play it through a little with your eyes closed and just drop markers where you hear stuff you might want to fix. There are spots when the audio is low, and spots where there wasn't much space left in the cut so your sentences are crowded close together. Easy fixes. Maybe change up your arrows once in a while. If the arrow always points the same direction a viewer could blink when it moves and miss it. Letting the arrow come from another direction would be a bigger cue that it had changed. Getting some closer screen views when there are details to see would also break it up and maybe add a little clarity. But overall it's pretty good. It's at a point where a client would be happy even if you wanted to improve it. Rob
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Videoon 1/19/2016
OT Lighting
Sometimes the theatrical colors are what's available if you have college or community theater in your area, so if B@stard Amber looks okay, use what works. My perspective is from working in crews. It's better to have the expected gel rather than making sure everyone knows to use a certain theatrical color. Standardization helps people hit the set running, especially when crew composition changes frequently. Here's some gel marking trivia for those who don't know. It's useful to mark gels with a sharpie to show what it is, especially if it only has a number. For theatricals I write out the name but for color correction I use a common shorthand. Mark it with a zero or circle and draw lines though it like a pie or pizza. One line is a "Half", two is a "Quarter", four is an "Eighth". Very quick to write, very quick to read, and you don't need to spell out the color since that's obvious. And only the color correction gets marked that way so you don't mix them up with theatrical colors. This is the set electrician's way to do it. Camera folk, being more literate, still write it out long hand. Electricians sometimes miss it since they're looking for the shorthand. Rob
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Videoon 1/19/2016
OT Lighting
Here's a layman's article on color rendering in consumer LED lamps: Without knowing what the OP is using for an LED source, you can't really make a guess about what the problem is. Yes, it's good to know that many non-tungsten/non-daylight sources have holes in their spectra that make them just unusable. Sodium vapor lamps are a great example where some colors can't be seen by the naked eye. What the OP says is that his lights look a little blue. Usually this is countered with a little CTO gel, often just an eighth CTO will do it. Tungsten sources usually vary between warm (orange) and cool (blue). This is fairly natural looking and is easily tolerated if it's a little off. All other sources vary in warm/cool and ALSO in Magenta/Green. Magenta/Green looks unnatural and you usually want to correct it. Correction is hard if you don't either have a good color meter OR a properly calibrated field monitor. Both are rare for hobbyists. For fine tweaks I usually keep an eighth CTO (Orange), an eighth CTB (Blue), an eighth MinusGreen (Magenta), and an eighth PlusGreen (Green) in my kit. I also keep the other heavier grades of color correction gel but the eighths are as fine as you can usually go. I generally buy Lee because they look best to my eye, but whether you buy Lee, Rosco, Gam, or other, you should stick to one manufacturer. Their products don't look alike even when you'd think they should. Bast@rd Amber is a theatrical color and not really what you want for color correction. Keep the theatrical gels separated from your color correction gels if you want to save time. White balancing your camera is something you ought to do as a matter of course, but you should do it based on one good light source. Like the sun if there's sunlight in the shot, or like your key light. Since LED color will vary from fixture to fixture, you need to set your balance to just one and then correct the others. You want the WB source to be whichever fixture is lighting an object of known color. We know what color people are (within reason) so a key light is a good candidate. Last tip. Four sheets of eighth blue does not equal a Full Blue CTB (Lee 201?). Every sheet has a little bit of off-ness to it and when you stack eight sheets you multiply that off cast eight times. It's much better to use the right gel than to stack halves and quarters. Also, watch your gels to make sure they aren't getting damaged by heat. It's much less of a problem these days but you should keep an eye on it anyway. Colors change as gels cook. Rob
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Videoon 12/30/2015
Sony Vegas crashes when I import many video files.
I have a PVR Rocket that I use to capture BIOS screens from. IMO, some of your problem stems from the Rocket but is really severely compounded by the way you're using Vegas. Your first step should probably be to make sure your firmware on the Rocket is up to date. I had to apply an update to get video files out of it that played well in Vegas. There may also be an update to the capture program itself. You could update both of those and hope they improve playback performance rather than making the video files totally unusable in Vegas. The next thing to look at is using the Hauppauge Capture app to convert it's native TS files to mp4 files. Vegas *might* like one better than the other. Having said all that, loading 10 hours of video onto the timeline is a recipe for misery. If you insist on doing that then you might try loading the files one at a time. Vegas is probably reading each file and maybe making proxy audio files. If Vegas has to decompress your files and they are big long takes it might be choking on their uncompressed size (any video you can view is uncompressed frames. By definition. Compressed video files must be decompressed into RAM when you play them.) Vegas makes it a little too easy to just throw all your footage onto the timeline. Many people ignore the trimmer. However, the conventional way of dealing with masses of footage is to load it in the trimmer, select the in and out points of what you want, then load that little section onto the timeline. I imagine your viewers really only want to see somewhere between 15 seconds and 15 minutes of gameplay, not 10 hours. The timeline really is for your edits, not for trimming raw footage, even though it's very easy to do on the timeline. You might find that this approach works better for you, assuming your raw clips will import into the project at all. The trimmer gives you two organizational tools in addition to allowing you to add parts of clips to the timeline. It also allows you to create Regions and Subclips. Regions was the earlier feature, Subclips were grudgingly and half-@ssedly added when users on this forum requested it in numbers. Regions have an advantage when you have very long media files in that you can view a list of the regions in Vegas Explorer if you set the right view mode. So, if you have a file consisting of one long game session on one level of the game, or one long interview for a doc, or whatever, then all the regions will be displayed when you select the main clip in the Explorer. It's a good organizational tool for long media clips. The disadvantage is that you have to use the Vegas Explorer window rather than the Project Media window. And since the Vegas Explorer was rewritten a few versions back I've been reluctant to leave it open. Maybe it's much more stable now than it was at first. Another advantage to Regions is that they don't have hard starts and stops when you add them to the timeline. Subclips have definite beginnings and endings. Subclips have the advantage of being browsable in the Project media window, and might offer some advantage to certain filters if they benefit from having a hard start and stop to the media. I can't think of any filters that need that off the top of my head. The disadvantage to me, and the last time I bothered to check this was 5 or 6 versions of Vegas Pro ago, was that if you applied a custom name to the subclip and then copied it to a new project, it'd lose the custom name. So, update your PVR Rocket firmware AND the Capture app. Then try either TS files or MP4 conversions from the Capture app to see if one works better than the other. Finally, make a habit of loading media into Vegas Project media without dumping it all onto the timeline. Use the Trimmer to select what you want to put onto the timeline. Rob
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Videoon 12/14/2015
Re: No Vegas Pro 14
£100+ for a program is a lot of money for something I'm not making money from. Fair enough. I submit that people pay MUCH more for home woodshop tools but the value proposition is clearer. In the end you get a usable bookshelf, at least, and the shop tools will last a lot longer than software. I think I'm just saying it's a matter of perspective. Knitting would be a cheaper hobby, woodworking would be a lot more expensive.
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Videoon 12/8/2015
My initial impressions of Catalyst Edit
Hi Travis, I think many here in this thread are looking at Edit as the eventual replacement for Vegas Pro, especially since it seems there will be no further versions of VP. In contrast, you're saying that Cat Edit is a basic cutter (possibly something you'd use in the back of an ENG van) with Vegas being a candidate for finishing a project. I'm not sure anyone here is seeing that workflow as realistic, mainly because they can do the basic cutting in Vegas. So, since Vegas will not be moving forward they can only look at Edit as an eventual Vegas replacement. Probably what you guys need to do is market the products more clearly and really hammer home what Cat Edit is for. Rob Mack
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Videoon 10/7/2015
Problems importing many media files at once
(Didnt realize i was replying to a 3 year old post. A waste of effort.) Rob
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Videoon 10/2/2015
OT: Asus Proart PA2xx: What do the USB ports do?
They're a hub. You need to run a USB-B cable from your PC to the back of the monitor for these to have any function. Rob
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Videoon 8/28/2015
OT: on set protocol
It *may* apply to every workplace, but I don't think people can maintain an on-set ethic on a daily basis. I know when I moved from freelance grip-electric work to a day job I was very frustrated with the people I encountered. A production crew is willing to be wrung a lot dryer than people in it for the long haul. The thing about job-to-job production work is, for most of us, every day is a first day on the job. You want to be good, you want to make an impression, and normally you haven't had enough time to start seeing it as raking leaves in a perpetual autumn. You want to excel, and if you've got experience that's what you do. It also helps that the people on the crew are constantly shifting from job to job. You get lots of variety in production. It's a good job for creative problem solvers with short (but not tiny) attention spans. It's a lousy job for people who don't notice details. <Edit>I didn't really explain what frustrated me about people with regular jobs. It's hard for me to put my finger on it but I think production people have more of a "Can do!" attitude. And the workplace politics are different when you know you'll move on to another gig soon, and you're going to get hired tomorrow based on your reputation today. There's certainly butt-covering, but you don't have to do it for decades, only days. Rob
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Videoon 8/25/2015
OT:augment principle live-action photography.
Provide broadcast-quality digital computer animations (e.g., avatars, caricatures, stills, First off, I doubt that the person who wrote that had a clear idea of what they were asking for. I've run into that in the past where someones client asked that photography match the "caliber and quality" of some other shooter's footage when what they really meant was they wanted the two to cut together. They were trying to sound smarter than they were. When responding you should define "Broadcast-quality". You may see it as passing QA, they may see it as looking like Nova. As for animations, I'd interpret "Principle Medium" as Bambi and "Augment principle live action" as Dick Van Dyke dancing with penguins. Again, the author may not be sure what they mean but might come back to you to claim you agreed to make Avatar. You probably need to nail it down a bit. *** Edit: Oh Good Grief. That was D i c k van D y k e ! *** Rob
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Videoon 8/19/2015
Hey Old Guys!
Given the time spans written on the box I'd go with 1/2 audio tape. Does your PD happen to know if it's audio or video? If audio they'd spin it real slow to capture a lot of time. That sort of reel pops onto a hub on the deck and then you pull/twist the outer part of the hub to secure the reel. To me, it looks like audio mainly because that's what I was using in school in the early 80's. Probably what my sister was using at Pacifica in the late 70's too. Audio is going to be a lot easier to recapture. There were probably a thousand reel to reel audio decks manufactured for every reel to reel video deck. And if you can't match the transport speed you can still capture and then slow it digitally.
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Videoon 7/31/2015
Projection screen colour?
any thoughts on the older style 'bead' screens, still have one rolled up somewhere? Are those old style? It's a glass bead screen. Normally they're brighter in a narrower area directly in front of the screen. They have less falloff to the sides, spilling less light on the sidewalls of the theater and delivering a brighter picture to the seats. Usually an old one rolled up somewhere has some major spotting on it and is a disappointment when unrolled. This page mentions gray screens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_screen#Other_screen_types
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Videoon 7/7/2015
Issues editing on a 4k external display
"Stop doing what" What I have in mind is the Windows Control panel that changes text size. On Win7 the path is "Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display" and the largest setting is 150%. You probably want to zero that out for the moment. This setting might not be specifically what's wrong, but a 28" screen at 4k should be showing tiny little screen fonts and widgets. My guess is that anyone would try to change that to make the 4k screen usable. There might even be something built into the 4k monitor to make it act like a "Retina Display". For example, my Samsung tablet has an 800x1200 screen but an "X Factor for DIP" of 1.33~. This controls how apps fit themselves to the screen. Looking at your screen shot, it seems weird to me that all three screens have a taskbar, and that the taskbars repeat. Should it be that way? Rob
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Videoon 7/7/2015
Render time keeps increasing...
Rs170a's note about preview RAM is certainly a possibility because a high Preview RAM setting takes RAM away from general processing. If you have it very very high you can force Vegas (or Windows in general) to start caching to disk. A reinstall would've set the preview RAM setting to its default value. Your profile says you're running with 32GB of RAM. It seems illogical that Vegas would hit a roadblock there but if you run into this again you should consider resetting Vegas to it's default RAM Preview value, then rebooting and testing your render time again. Just because you have 32GB doesn't mean that Vegas is using it. Rob
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Videoon 7/7/2015
Render time keeps increasing...
You could archive the destination drive and reformat. Drives write faster at the edge of the disk than closer to the spindle, and perhaps files aren't being written sequentially anyway. Normally I'd assume that a destination drive doesn't need huge performance but if you were starting with a 1:1 render time then you were writing pretty fast. Or it could be anything else. Maybe it's the source drive slowing down, for the same reasons. Rob
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Videoon 7/7/2015
Issues editing on a 4k external display
Time passes... So I took the dimensions of your second screen grab and scaled them. It looks like the original was 7680 x 2160. Given that, Vegas is scaling your preview across a width of the 4K monitor + the adjacent 1920 screen. the bottom third of the image is just being sent off into limbo, and in fact it's the bottom 2/3rds where the image is on that 1920 screen. Two things I'd look at. One is that your GFX card may be combining those two screens into one, perhaps indicating that your card or driver can only handle 2 discrete screens and is just creating a super big display space for those two screens to share. If that's the case then what you really want is for it to treat the 4K screen as a discrete screen and the two 1920 screens as ganged screens. That might just be a matter of connecting the 4K screen to the first output on the card, if there is such a thing. Second, since your output is spanning what amounts to a screen and a half, that makes me thing that output to the 4K screen is being enlarged by 150%. That seems pretty likely to make it usable when not a preview screen. Stop doing that. Those are my guesses. Rob
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Videoon 7/7/2015
Issues editing on a 4k external display
What are the dimensions of the second pic before you scale it down? If your screen layout were side by side by side then I guess you'd get a (3840 + 1920 + 1920 = 7680) x (1080 + 1080 = 2160) screen capture, with two 1920 x 1080 black areas under the screens of that size. That's not what your screen grab shows, though. (Or maybe it is since part of your preview output is playing on one of the 1920x1080 screens). So, you could compare this with a screen grab when Vegas is not doing external preview to see how the display and layout changes. You could also start taking monitors away to simplify the problem. To me it still seems like Vegas sees your 4K screen as part of the adjacent 1920 screen. I assume Vegas is doing that because that's what the GFX card or driver is telling it. Rob
rmack350
Offline, Last login 7/16/2022, Member since 8/23/2016