Trouble adjusting playback rate in vegas.

[Mike Kujbida]

“Isn’t there an easier way?”

Yes there is.
After adjusting the playback properties, stretch or shrink your timeline by dragging left or right it until you get a V-shaped dip in the top of your timeline.
This dip indicates the new end of the clip.

“Ideally I wish there was a method to gradually increase speed.”

That’s what the Velocity Envelope is for.

“…and have it gradually and smoothly increase to 10x…”

The problem with the Velocity envelope is that it’s restricted to a 3x increase.
Start a new instance of Vegas, apply the envelope to the event to speed it from normal to 3x.
Save it as a veg file (to avoid rendering and possible loss of quality).
Import that veg file back into Vegas (this is called “nesting”) and apply the Velocity envelope again.
It will now go from normal to 9x as you’ve already sped it up 3x previously.

If that’s too much work for you, check out Veggie Toolkit 3.0 for it’s Time Bandit feature.

[Cameron Watkins]

Thank you for the reply, the velocity envelope, and nesting, is exactly what I needed. I still have 2 issues though.

1. You said after adjusting the playback properties, to stretch or shrink the timeline. Did you mean stretch the clip, or the actual timeline? If you did mean timeline, then how do you do that, and wouldn’t it affect other clips in the timeline?

I’ve been attempting to stretch the timeline with no success. I can zoom in, move it around, etc but nothing that has any effect on the clip length. I’ve also trying to stretch/shrink the clip itself, and it does seemed to halfway work. For example a 15 minute clip, set to 2x playback rate, when I shrink it, it stops itself right at 7:30. However I have never seen the V in the timeline that you mentioned. Also when I tried setting playback to 3x, it didn’t work the same way. It should shrink the clip to 5 minutes, but for some reason it wants to shrink it to 11:15, which doesn’t make sense.

2. Basically the same thing, but with the velocity envelope. I applied a velocity envelope with 100% in the beginning of the clip, and 300% at the end. However it just doesn’t seem to take effect, the clip is still the same length, and the preview is still playing at normal speed.

[Mike Kujbida]

My apologies for using the wrong term.
I did indeed mean to say clip/event, not timeline.

Here are some screenshots from a clip that I changed project properties to 2x on.
I’ve highlighted where the dip is.

After applying a velocity envelope, you have to look for the dip and shorten/stretch the clip to that point.

[Cameron Watkins]

Thanks again for the reply. I see the V now. For some reason 2x works fine. It puts one V, and when I shrink the clip, it stops at that V. However 3x actually puts 2 v’s, and 4x puts 3 v’s, and it does not correctly shrink down to any of those V’s, is there a way to get it to work with other speeds besides 2x?

When using the velocity envelope, it does make a V, that seems to be in roughly the right spot. However when I try to shrink the clip to that V, it runs away. Basically it shrinks with the video, the more I shorten the video to try and catch the V, the further it runs. I tried documenting where the point was originally, and shrinking the video to that point, but it just seems to make the entire video playback faster, the same way it would if there was no velocity envelope. The velocity envelope seems to have no effect.

[John Rofrano]

[Cameron Watkins] “However 3x actually puts 2 v’s, and 4x puts 3 v’s, and it does not correctly shrink down to any of those V’s, is there a way to get it to work with other speeds besides 2x?”

That’s correct. The “V” is the loop point. 3x puts two v’s because it loops 3 times, 4x puts 3 v’s because it loops 4 times. [1v2v3v4] = 3v’s

[Cameron Watkins] “However when I try to shrink the clip to that V, it runs away. Basically it shrinks with the video, the more I shorten the video to try and catch the V, the further it runs.”

It sounds like you might be holding the Ctrl key while you are dragging. Don’t do that as it will change the playback rate which is why the v’s are moving. Just trim the event by clicking the end without any other keys pressed.

Optionally, place your cursor at the “V” and press the “S” key to split the clip. Then just delete the part to the right of the split.

~jr

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

[Aleksey Tarasov]

V just indicates that the clip will be looped at this point, i.e. it will start playback from the beginning.
Keep in mind that changing the speed of a clip does not change the event length, so you should change it manually.

[Cameron Watkins]

Thank you very much. That was the issue. I’ve always used ctrl to stretch/shrink videos in the past, but guess you don’t need to for this method. I thought the V was just a placemarker, didn’t realize it was actually the video looping, now it makes perfect sense.

That would stretch/shrink the video, although not the audio. What I did to solve that was ungrouped the audio and video, cut the video at the correct V, then shrank the audio with ctrl to the same length as the video. I’m guessing this is the easiest way to do it?

Unfortunatly I couldn’t find a way to sync the audio to the velocity envelope. I already did some research, many people asked this question, and there seems to be no way to do it. You would think that with this professional of software that sync’ing the audio with the velocity envelope would be an obvious need, I mean, who would ever want out of sync audio? But I guess sony doesn’t care.

[John Rofrano]

[Cameron Watkins] “You would think that with this professional of software that sync’ing the audio with the velocity envelope would be an obvious need, I mean, who would ever want out of sync audio?”

I can’t think of a single instance where I would want the audio to follow the video velocity envelope. When this technique is often used, it is to create a dramatic effect on the video and is usually accompanied by a sound bed or narrative. For example, like on the Survivor show when they zoom quickly into the island, slow down for a few seconds to take in a scene, and then swiftly zoom to another location. The show Burn Notice does this at the beginning of scenes as well to zoom around downtown Miami. This is what a velocity envelope is great for (establishing shots). You would never want the audio to follow such a path in this scenario.

[Cameron Watkins] “But I guess sony doesn’t care.”

Sony does provide a way to speed up the video with the audio in sync and that’s when you Ctrl+Drag. If you make a timeline selection before you drag it is easier to know how far to drag. Since you didn’t know to do this, you though it was very difficult in your original post, but now you should see that it is extremely easy to do.

So the software does provide a way to adjust the speed of playback with video and audio in prefect sync. Velocity envelopes are just not the way to do this. BTW, you won’t find any NLE that will adjust the audio as cleanly as Vegas can with the Elastique stretch technology that it uses. In fact, if you have Sound Forge you will be able to automate the time stretch of elastique audio to match the velocity envelope in Vegas.

~jr

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

[Cameron Watkins]

[John Rofrano] “I can’t think of a single instance where I would want the audio to follow the video velocity envelope”

What about any clip where you want to smoothly slow down a dramatic moment, with the audio preserved so you hear all the slow motion impacts, or shapnel, or crashes, or whatever (the real sound, not hollywood style sound effects added in), and then smoothly speed back up and continue the scene? Perhaps even do something like that multiple times in the scene. Theres pretty much no way to do that right? I mean, I know you can split all the parts, and ctrl drag resize them, but it won’t be a smooth transition.

I see scenes like this all the time in movies where things will gradually slow down, almost to a stop, then suddenly speed up, and slow down, and speed up. Generally they use added sound effects on top of music, but for the sake of dramatizing a real life event, it would be nice to do this with the true audio.

[John Rofrano]

[Cameron Watkins] “Theres pretty much no way to do that right? I mean, I know you can split all the parts, and ctrl drag resize them, but it won’t be a smooth transition.”

You can do this with Sound Forge. You just can’t do it in Vegas without splitting things up as you said.

[Cameron Watkins] “I see scenes like this all the time in movies where things will gradually slow down, almost to a stop, then suddenly speed up, and slow down, and speed up. Generally they use added sound effects on top of music, but for the sake of dramatizing a real life event, it would be nice to do this with the true audio.”

Movies don’t use “real” audio. As I said, this is a sound bed with lots of things going on. You could very easily slow down the audio in Vegas. You just can’t do it gradually without using Sound Forge. How much of that movie effect uses a gradual slow down of audio? Probably none. The video probably slows down in a fraction of a second and then the audio is slow, which can be done in Vegas very easily by just changing the playback rate of the audio.

Hey look, I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be great to just place an envelope on the audio and control it’s speed. I’m just saying it’s not something you use every day and it can be done with Sound Forge. You made it sound like “how can this professional software miss this basic function?” when it’s not a “basic” function at all. It’s a special effect that would rarely be used by many if at all and is not found in any other NLE. That’s all I was trying to point out.

You should probably look into buying Sound Force Pro 10 if this effect is important to you.

~jr

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