Switching from Mac to Vegas questions

[Scott Francis]

1) I am only aware of the upgrade at Sony’s website.
2) YES, YES, YES! I upgraded and there is WAY better rendering and playback in Windows 7 64 bit. You can take advantage of more ram, and all in all it is way better.
3) I would look into the NewBlue FX…they have a lot of really useful fx’s and the cost isn’t too bad either. There is a trial download too if you want to give them a whirl.
Be sure to make your pictures only as big as necessary. I had a real issue with using pics for slideshows at their normal size. I use the pixel size at my frame size 1440×1080 (for HDV) and 72 dpi, maybe up to 120 dpi if I am zooming in quite a bit with pan/crop and keyframing. I also use PNG’s instead of JPEG’s so I can keep keep the transparent backgrounds…

Good luck!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Greg Barringer]

Thanks Scott, your advice will be very useful.

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve read that PNGs are better for video than JPGs and I convert all photos to PNGs in a batch job. I think that it has something to do with creating an alpha channel for them, which apparently JPGs don’t. I user IRFanview to batch them all up. I also use Montage Magic for some simple slide show transitions. My latest montage is for a folk singer named Mark Pearson of the Brothers Four. You can see the montage, linked from YouTube at http://www.markpearsonmusic.com. It’s not great work, but the budgets are small and it’s fun to just try different things out. This stuff on FCP would have taken twice as long to do.

It’s an interesting situation. I also have shifted away from FCP for a variety of reasons. There is much to like in it, and Vegas is not without it’s problems too, but you’ll find things are much faster to do similar jobs over here. I hear that lots of folks are trying Adobe also, but I’m trying to stay simple, and I’m not looking to have another complex mess to deal with to do simple 1 and 2 camera jobs.

And Sound Forge has been wonderful to work in. Maybe my needs are miniscule, but it’s a nice little package for sound editing also. I just recorded our band in a two hour concert, came home, ran a few processes in S.F., split everything up into clips, and cut CD’s for the band. Was done in about an hour. And I haven’t hardly read a manual on it. So nice simple but advanced tools. Why ask for more?

I did buy Boris FX, as the Sony Chroma Keyer is not very good. Edge control is lousy, and Boris’ is superb. And I like the Boris cartoon like add on. I don’t use it often for pro work, but it’s a fun little effect for some things!

If you have questions on how to do something in FCP in Vegas, ask here. If I’m online I’ll be glad to try and help, as I do use both almost daily, maybe weekly. My most recent work is a three camera shoot, one of them being a JVC shooting XDCAM wrapped in MOV for FCP based setups. So I’m on FCP for this one job. But you have to be able to say, “Yes I do run FCP” when a client or some other ‘know it all’ asks. There are so many people who believe that FCP is god’s gift to video…funny stuff. Then I take the time to show them that I can get the job done faster with Vegas. Since they are paying my hourly, they like that…

Alf

[Greg Barringer]

Thanks Alf, I’ll give .png a try. I did my best to like FCP but I’ve given up on it. I do like Motion though.