[Chris Young]

A few program and plugin suggestions.

Programs:

Cayman Power CG
Photoshop
Zaxwerks Pro Animator
ProDad Heroglyph
Particle Illusion
Bluff Titler
Cineform Connect

Plugins:

Aav6cc
Velvet Matter
Pixelan Spice Master and Spice Filters
Magic Bullet
and soooo many more! Use ’em all plus some!

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

Ron ~

Good to see you over here in Vegasland. If you want a titler very much like Inscriber Titlemotion Pro (Oh those halcyon edit* days!) integrated into Vegas look at Cayman Graphics Power CG Plus. Closest thing I have found to do those quick on the fly lower thirds, supers etc. Just works as a plugin. Make any changes in Power CG’s GUI and they update straight away in Vegas as soon as you save. For day to day program work it’s a good tool.

On the old edit* forum you may recall after edit*’s demise, seems a long time ago now, that I said that I was using both Vegas and Edius. Back then I found Edius to be very ‘clunky’. I didn’t use it much after v3.6 because Vegas was a much more sophisticated, capable and satisfying editor to use. Because of a particular client I have lately revisited Edius with v4.6 and in many ways it has improved out of sight since the GV takeover and input. Still much prefer Vegas but Edius has a place in my arsenal. With multi-cam switch it’s way faster and doesn’t drop frame rate like Vegas. Dread to think of trying to do a multi-cam HD job in Vegas. Haven’t tried it yet but I feel pretty sure Edius would kill it in that area.

At any rate great, to see you over here.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

Brad ~

Super fine ‘Grading’.

Just a little exercise might make it clearer. Create a new instance of Vegas. Have your Vector/Waveform/Histogram up. Select a bright sunny outdoor clip to make it easy. Look at the waveform monitor and most likely the peak video levels are around 110 on the scale. On the histogram these levels might be around the 255 level. Now install the Sony Color Corrector plugin on this clip. Next slide your cursor back and forth in the histogram window until you have the highest peak of the histogram under it. Up in the top right corner of the histogram is a figure that will change when you move the cursor. For this example lets say it says 53 at the highest point of the histogram.

Now use the ‘Gain’ slider in the color corrector and adjust the peak video level down to 100 on the waveform, 1 volt peak in broadcast video terms. You will notice that the picture gets a little darker overall due to the reduced range. Now look for the histogram peak level and it may be down to something like 46 at the highest point. Now adjust the ‘Gamma’ slider in the CC until the histogram peak point comes back up to 53 or thereabouts.

The result is a picture with the correct peak levels but that didn’t darken up too much when the peaks were reduced because you adjusted the gamma peak back to what the histogram originally displayed, 53. This adjustment will also lift the black threshold slightly usually giving you more details in the dark areas of the picture. If you want to keep these areas dark the careful adjustment of the ‘Offset’ slider in conjunction with the ‘Gain’ and ‘Gamma’ sliders will enable you to fine tune a picture that looks good but meets all broadcast specs re levels.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

John ~

If you have a host of volume envelope nodes that you want to adjust to a fine degree you can do the following:
On the audio track header click on the ‘Automation Settings’ button. It looks like a small spoked bulls-eye. Select ‘Show automation controls’. Also make sure ‘Automation write (touch)’ is selected. Now you can click directly on any one of the nodes on the volume envelope in that track and you can adjust that node precisely down to around -60dB with the volume slider button in the track header. Making the track header longer by dragging it out makes adjustment even easier! Or if you want you can type in a dB value by double clicking on the dB number to the left of the volume slider. Just make sure you click right on a node before you adjust. Conversely you can position your cursor anywhere along a volume envelope and the second you move the volume slider it will insert a volume node. Either way when you are finished just uncheck ‘Show automation controls’ under the automation settings button.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

Geez! Sad to hear that DSE. Yes I know what you you mean ‘out of habit’, ‘cos of that I am still a big Waves user. Guess I should drag myself to look at some of iZotope’s plugs sometime.

Cheers
Chris
CYV Productions
Sydeny.

[Chris Young]

If the original material is DV/DVcam and you are not going to be doing much in the way of chroma keying and complex DVEs and CC then I would bring the footage in as DV/DVCam and edit native in the DV domain. Once the job is finished you could render back to either an uncompressed avi or PAL SD YUV. The presupposes that you have a Decklink or AJA card with SDI out to go back to Digi-Beta to get maxim mum benefit from going down this path. If you are going back out in fire wire to DV/DVCam then just complete the whole project native in the PAL DV widescreen template. I you have a fair number of graphics, color grads etc in the program then selecting the 32 bit floating point setting in your properties will improve the final render.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

For broadcast where you really need to be able to deliver reapeatable results time and time again I find there are two tools I cannot live without. I think DSE may say the same. They are audio plugins from the ‘Waves’ collection and they are the L1 Ultramaximiser (comprises the L1 Ultramaximiser and L1 Ultramaximiser +) and the C1 Parametric Compander. There are a host of good audio plugs out there but these two have almost become the standard as they are extremely good at what they do. Not cheap but but once you have learnt how to use them they will enable you to deliver broadcast quality audio levels consistantly. DSE might be able to suggest some others as audio is a big thing with him.

Check out the Waves plugs at:

https://www.waves.com/Content.aspx?id=279
and
https://www.waves.com/Content.aspx?id=237

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

Theo ~

Re scopes, vectors, etc. This primer should give you a good starting point:

https://www.seanet.com/~bradford/ntscvideo.html

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

Mike ~

Under ‘View’ in the menu bar you will find ‘video scopes’, just check this item. Once open you will find a drop menu with a variety of options. To the right of the drop menu there is a button which when activated performs ‘update scopes while playing’. Use them all the time for exactly that, color correction.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Chris Young]

I know we had this problem with MXF files from the XDCam HD clips. Sony finally fixed this in v8.0b. Although there is a ‘gottcha’ involved here. I upgraded to 8.0b and still had the problem. Sony support suggested a complete uninstall and reinstall of Vegas. Did that and sure enough all fixed an working ok. Might be worth trying the uninstal/reinstall route to see if you can get it to work. Don’t forget the ‘prefs’ save region markers thing though as on the reinstall it will be back to the default ‘unchecked’ state.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney