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Frustrating week with Vegas 10…
So, most of the time I’m doing video work, it’s either for personal projects or on-the-side freelance stuff — not the day job, in other words. But last week, I was asked to do a short animation for my company’s “back to school” promotion.
FYI: This is on an AMD 1090T (6-core, 3.2GHz) with 16GB DRAM and a good 480GB free on the project drive. Resources are not much of an issue.
So anyway, great… I haven’t done animation in a year or so, but it’s fun. And while I did get the result, I ran into a surprising number of weirdnesses, which I figured I’d share — I don’t usually get to be the one complaining around here.
First one: nested .veg projects. When I do a simple animation, it’s always built up from simpler animations. So I create a number of animated objects, load those into a larger animation and then keyframe-animate those, etc. In the past, I usually either saved things off as intermediate video files with green/blue-screen or alpha channel transparency. Neither is perfect — chroma keying can be imperfect, while I have yet to find anything that preserves 32-bit (eg, with alpha channel) other than RAW… which, at 1080p, gets really big, really fast.
So I initially tried just doing all of my sub-animations using nested .veg files. Lots of them. This worked just dandy on the first day. Next day, I went back to one of my projects with lots of nested .veg files and Boom! Crashed on load. Came back to the second, same thing. I eventually discovered that it’s kind of random, and managed to get one of the two projects to load. I quickly worked to generate intermediate files to replace the .veg files, everything was dandy after that. But a big fail on nesting .veg files here. In practice, I’ve rarely used more than one or two nested projects, and never seen this. I do wonder how well Sony’s testing this stuff.
Next was some problems with Cineform. I’ve been plagued with issues between Vegas and Cineform ever since I upgraded to Vegas 10, then CF Neo 5.x, so this was no big shock. I had long-time-tested templates for 1080/24p and 1080/60p.. but Cineform was giving me something that looked like it was making a half-assed attempt at giving me side-by-side stereoscopic video… only with interlacing. I’d see about half the lines pretty much where they belonged, then the other half in an extended portion of the screen. Didn’t completely double, but it had me using .mxf (and raw, for that transparency thing) for intermediates. I later went ballistic and erased all Cineform templates, then re-created them. They work now. So I have to assume that at some point in time, whatever specific I had in the presets went south (maybe due to the quality setting, not sure…. I’d normally write it all down, but I did have a deadline).
And finally, just weird rendering from Vegas. I rendered most of the intermediate stuff at 1080/60p… make it easier to scale speed without re-rendering. Target was for the web, so more likely 1080/24p-ish, whatever YouTube’s actually doing these days. So I rendered test versions out at 1080/60p, everything’s cool. But when I rendered the very same project to 1080/24p, Vegas pretty much lost its mind, but only at the end. If you look at the final project, you’ll see there’s a computer + devices graphic, it spins out, and then I have a morphing logo. That morphing logo is a transparent raw file, sitting over a white background, nothing else in that last few seconds in the project but that video clip. When I render 1080/60p, all is well. When I render 1080/24p, I get random single-frame images of the computer scene, mixed into that morphing clip. No explanation for this, but it sounds like maybe the same kind of things I’ve seen reported (but never experienced myself), renders with random black frames showing up.
Anyway, here’s the video:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/lCrUrOQkJSw”Incidently, the software’s pretty good to have lurking on a laptop… lets most Windows 7 laptops work as wireless hotspots, for internet connection sharing, file sharing, etc. I didn’t work on the software itself (I’m usually the hardware/firmware/FPGA/photo/video guy).
-Dave
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2 Replies
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-Dave
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