Feature film on Vegas Pro

[John Rofrano]

As I’m shooting in 24 frames 1080P, the files are of Mammoth sizes. My hard drive is filling up very quickly and when you do a take 10 to 20 times, all these clips are damn large.

How big is your hard drive? You need to calculate your storage requirements for the project based on how much footage you plan to shoot. 2TB hard drives are not that expensive. For a feature film I would get an ESATA RAID 5 or RAID 10 enclosure and fill it with 2TB drives. in a RAID 5 configuration 3 x 2TB drives would give you 4TB of storage with redundancy.

So my question is: What’s the best way to edit such a large project and keep files not only in order but protect the Vegas project from overload.

I would convert your source files to Cineform and work with that. Coneform is an outstanding intermediary format that is near lossless and edits smoothly in Vegas. In medium quality mode Cineform uses approximately 400MB/min, so you can store about 87 hrs HD of video on a 2TB drive. When you convert them is a good time to catalog them and rename them into the scenes and shots so you can easily find them later.

Also what is the recommended amount of RAM, I’m running a 2.8ghz dual quad core Xeon 64 Bit PC with 8 gigs of RAM, but I still get lot’s of crashes.

The recommendation is 2GB of memory per CPU. If you have 8 CPU’s you should have 16GB of memory. This may be why you are having memory problems.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[David Keslick]

You may want to try DVFilm EPIC. It enables realtime playback without transcoding. It also has been tested with 500 clip projects and has proved to increase stability when editing large numbers of quicktime files in Vegas.

Hope this helpful,

Dave Keslick
DVFilm.com

[Carlton Rahmani]

Let me know how this works out for you, since I’m looking to try putting a ‘feature’ together using Sony Vegas myself. (I mean: If it can handle 4k, why not?) And Kudos to you for not being afraid to take a risk.
As for other features. . .according to Wikipedia, “Paranormal Activity” was edited on Vegas. There’s also this other movie called “Cavite” that was edited on Vegas 4, I believe. I haven’t seen it yet–it’s on my netflix queue–but the reviews I’ve seen for it are pretty good, particularly owing to its ‘gritty’ style.
And seriously: good luck to you. The more I read and work with Sony Vegas, the more I think it’s getting a bum rap, particularly in how FCP is coming to dominate the more ‘independent’ markets. But not because it’s so much better, but just because everyone’s falling for this hubbub about What a ‘great’ program it is. Figure it’s time for some intrepid people to demonstrate this isn’t the case.

[Joel Mielle]

No problems, I’ll keep you posted. I’m still struggling on the best way to tackle this. Should I break it up and create a different project for each script and later import it into one final timeline? Should I attempt to edit everything into one timeline, it takes for ever just to load each day’s shoot and I’m not even half way. I have all my sound files separate, plus all my takes and some are over 20 takes for one scene, all on 1080p, you can imagine the size of the project on a shooting ratio of around 15:1. I definitely need more ram. I’m also using two sata drives that have been stripped, everything plays in real time even with color grading but it stills crashes quite often. I think the ram (8gigs) is the issue. I’ll probably upgrade to 32gigs. I would also like to invest in “Movie Looks” for color grading, but I don’t think it supports Vegas 9 in 64bit just yet. I’m not a big fan of the color correction in Vegas unless someone can prove me otherwise. I’m aiming completion around end of August and plan for the big screen. Keep an eye or our https://www.sixlovers.com/ to see our progress! Cheers!

[Carlton Rahmani]

I’ll admit that I’m talking way out of my league here. . .but I’ve been thinking about your issue–how to go about editing the film: all at once, or in takes/segments–for a couple of weeks now, and consider this:

After hearing that it can take days to render a feature film–which makes complete sense when you think about it–and considering a dilemma similar to yours, I’ve been wondering, Why not just render small, finished segments at a time, have those transferred to film individually, then splice those segments of film together for your final product?
Oh, yeah. . .I understand that this is probably cumbersome, and that there are matters of continuity that you gotta be concerned about, like color. (It sure would look weird to have a dude’s green shirt shift from ’emerald’ to ‘seaweed’ in the course of a couple of frames.) But I also figure that people who know what they’re doing know how to ensure such things without having to reference one point to every other one throughout the film.
And even though I am a newbie–I really am–I HAVE spliced together separately edited moving sequences rather seemlessly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx1EutTUXaA

The titles and intros and ‘epilogue’ and what not were all edited/animated separately, but in the main body the material before and after ca. 0:50 were two separate projects which I rendered individually, then ‘spliced’ together in the final project. (I also did the audio in another program, just because I was new to Vegas and didn’t know really how to work with it like that.) Unless you’re looking real hard, you can’t really tell.

I’m not boasting here; I’m just saying that I’ve done it and haven’t been disappointed by the results, particularly since the scene/shot is identical. And I believe that if you take your time and know what you’re doing (unlike me), you’ll come up with even better results.

I followed the link to your trailer, and the only criticism/piece of advice I have to give is that you try and tweak your effects–the ‘TV’ and ‘beam’ effects–a little bit so they don’t look so ‘default.’ I like Vegas and its effects, but it kind of bugs me when I can instantly tell, with my relatively untrained eye, that This was produced with Sony Vegas. Maybe that’s the case with all post-oriented applications and I just don’t know enough about them to spot the difference. I dunno. . .

And again, I’m pretty new, so take of this what you will.

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