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Technique advice please on a project with 10,000 subtitles
On this video
https://vimeo.com/180135440
you can see a subtitle sequence showing the position and altitude.This data comes from a GPS (Oziexplorer app) which logs to a track log in textual format. Then I got a friend to write a little prog in C to convert this into SRT. This is then loaded into Pro 13 via the Vegasaur route, and it uses the standard Sony Text FX to generate the subtitles. At the time of loading into Pro, the text font etc is specified using a custom template in the FX config. The position of the text is specified (when all the titles are loaded) using the track motion feature (the subtitles are loaded onto a separate track, obviously).
All this works…
The problem is that I get a subtitle every 3 seconds and for a 7hr flight that is 8400 subtitles 🙂 Ideally I would like it every 1 second.
Vegas becomes totally unusable with this lot loaded on the timeline. It does still work, but
– any operation hangs the program afterwards for about a minute (while Vegas is reallocating 8400 memory blocks, etc)
– it is rather fragile, and about the only safe operation is to just render the job and exit Vegas
– the Vegasaur plug-in works only once; you have to exit Vegas after the subtitle loadSo I do a render of the two tracks (there is usually no audio), to an intermediate mp4, set to a high quality of 50mbits/sec, and import that for the next stage.
The input project is 1080P 50FPS, 25mbits/sec from the camera (Sony FDR-1000V). The output is 1080P also, with the final result, heavily edited to remove boring footage, being 25mbits/sec.
While doing the intermediate render I also do
– contrast up a little (sony fx)
– a little bit of colour correction (sony fx)
– NewblueFX lens correctionThe problem is that this intermediate render takes about 100hrs! My PC cannot be used for certain things during that time (as posted in the other thread; any video related ops corrupt the rendering).
Is there any way around this?
One way I can see is to render the subtitles to a single video file and drop that onto the timeline. But in Vegas that will still take best part of 100hrs. (Maybe a lot less because one isn’t doing any FX on it, and the output file could be low res, since it is just the line of text). Or one could render it externally with e.g. Handbrake https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35164&sid=7f069f95c2e9522a042a5dbfea60800a using the enhanced SRT method (I could get my C program changed to do that) and that could be run on some old PC. And there are things like ffmpeg (?) which can convert text into a video track.
If I rendered only the final-cut version, the render would be maybe 5hrs only. The basic issue with this is that Vegas is not usable for any editing with the subtitles loaded… also I am not sure if I can crossfade multiple tracks (probably can).
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5 Replies
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Vegasaur 2.7 can generate one text media with 10000 keyframes instead of 10000 text objects. This might help with your problem…
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Thanks for the tip.
I haven’t seen that option in the SRT import menus in the Vegasaur I bought a couple of months ago.
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Download version 2.7 here and install. It’s free update for you.
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OK, will do when the current render is done a couple of days from now 🙂
Is such a track with multiple keyframes editable, in the sense of grouping it with the video track (which itself comprises of about 20 4GB chunks, each about 20 mins long) and then cutting bits out from the whole lot, with auto ripple, and (manually) doing crossfades?
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Well, Vegas crashed in the render at 51%. I was getting about 10 black frames and 10 good ones, repeating. No idea what started it, but it was something I did on the PC; maybe browsing some website with Chrome.
So I downloaded the latest Vegasaur (not the one which needs Pro 14) and I can see that feature. And yes it does work – much faster than the previous SRT import method! And the resulting event can be edited, bits cut out from the middle, etc. Impressive.
My only slight problem is that I cannot actually use it right now because I have done a lot of edits to the previous project, before importing the 12000 or so subtitles, and I have that .veg file saved, but if I delete the subtitles (or delete the whole track carrying them) Pro 13 hangs for ever. So I have no way of testing this method on my existing project, without throwing away the edits on the video. I guess I am working right on the limits of Pro 13, despite having 24GB of RAM. I used to see this on Pinnacle and Premiere Elements all the time (useless tools really) but never on MSP11/12. But then I never tried importing that many subtitles into those.
So I will have to just render the project as I have it (about 100hrs) and save this new workflow for new ones.
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