[Cameron Watkins]

So if the issue is with the multiple velocity envelopes being nested, could I get around it by rendering each time? As in do one linear velocity envelope, render that, and then use the rendering for the next velocity envelope, and so on?

I know that normally this will degrade quality with each render, but considering this doesn’t need to be production quality, and considering nesting doesn’t work, perhaps its my best bet? For me the linear speed accuracy is most important.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Cameron Watkins]

Transcoding the videos with the huffuv lossless codec did work, as far as getting those motion jpeg avi files from the mini camera to work. Its just a pain that you would have to do that for a common file, takes time, and you wind up with a file about 20 times the size.

As far as the red frame thing, no I haven’t specifically tested the hard drive, but I’m 99% sure its fine, and vegas is the issue. Since restarting vegas makes them come back. I also have experienced glitchy transitions, both in the preview, and final render of videos. Restarting vegas fixes that issue too.

Its a pain that such expensive software is so buggy, but I’ve made it a habit now to always restart vegas before rendering, and it so far hasn’t given me problems.

[Cameron Watkins]

Stephen: The codec of the footage that was not working at all at the moment, according to gspot is Motion Jpeg.

I finally got it to work by using the huffuv lossless codec to convert it to a non compressed avi, although its a huge pain, time consuming, and the file sizes are now about 20 times as large.

Lance: The hard drive I’m using is a western digital caviar black 750gb, its a highly rated hard drive that’s given me no problems before.

I still on occasion thoughout my use of vegas have files that work initially become red, usually a restart (or two) of vegas makes them come back, but its just a pain. I’m just frustrating that such expensive software has so many issues.

[Cameron Watkins]

Well, I guess that all makes sence. Although there is one thing I’ve always wondered for a long time, after having so many headaches with the .mov format. Since .mov is an apple format, and also such a pc nightmare, why do so many HD cameras/camcorders use it? Cameras that are not targeted towards the mac audience, or in any way affiliated with apple. Why don’t they just use h.264 MP4 instead?

I have 2 1080P cameras and one uses the h.264 mp4 and playback/editing is a breeze, and the other (which was newer and more expensive) uses h.264 .mov and it is a pain.

The reason I never wanted to install quicktime is primarily apple’s poor and dirty business practices. If anyone doesn’t know, a little google searching should bring up a lot. They constantly try to sabotage pc users. They have even been caught including viruses in the PC version of itunes to sabotage pc’s. Or they intentionally write poor, slow, shoddy software for pc’s, making it run poorly intentionally for the sole reason of saying “look the software runs fine on our macs, pc’s aren’t very good”. And the way apple software seems to just like to completely leech itself into all sorts of parts of your system.

That’s why I never wanted to have anything to do with apple, but for some bizarre reason all these cameras want to use .mov format, why?

[Cameron Watkins]

I suppose thats a good point, that its supposed to be aimed at professinals, and thus they figure professionals wouldn’t use some of those formats. I still find it very disappointing though. Afterall, VLC plays ALL formats whether they are arbitrarily considered professional formats or not. If VLC can do all that for free in a small simple package, than it seems like the creators of sony vegas must just be lazy.

Afterall, even professionals need to be able to deal with all formats they are given. it wouldn’t be very professional if someone gives you some video to work on, perhaps with a deadline, and you have to spend all day just trying to sort through codecs and conversions before even beginning work.

Also, I’m sure .mov is not considered a professional format. However it is extremely common, there are so many video cameras out there, even HD 1080P ones, that record in that format. It just seems absurd that vegas does not have built in support from the get go, without having to install seperate 3rd party programs.

PS: Does anyone know if installing quicktime alternative does indeed allow you to edit .mov files in quicktime, or do you have to install the official quicktime with authoring tools? I’ve just been doing lossless reencodes on all the .mov files, since I don’t want to install garbage from apple. I would however be willing to install quicktime alternative. I just haven’t because I heard it didn’t work.

[Cameron Watkins]

Thanks for the tips, they are appreciated. But does quicktime alternative actually work for importing .mov’s to sony vegas? I know it works for simply playing .mov files, but when I spent hours researching it in the past, everything I found indicated that the only thing that would work for sony vegas was the official version of quicktime authoring tools.

Also, while I am interested in finding the solution. I’m still interested if anyone knows the actual answer to my question of why the comparability sucks so bad? I mean, for a ridiculously expensive $500+ program, I don’t think I should have to be downloading ffdshow, extra codecs, quicktime alternative, etc. It should already come with every codec it needs, and only ever need an update if a new codec comes out. I mean look at VLC media player, it is completely free, under 20mb for the whole works, and it plays absolutely everything. I have never personally had any video file that would not play with VLC. So why is the $500+ sony vegas such a failure at compatability, even with such common formats?