Chris Young
Forum Replies Created
-
Thank the Cow for helping us all! Good luck!
Chris Young
sydney -
A Z axis move is always a zoom of some type. The way I understand you is you want to move a pic on the Z axis but not start with a full size pic, is this correct? So I guess you want to start with a small pic in the distance and then move up to full size. If that’s correct use the Pan/Crop tool. Open the Pan/Crop window, drag and enlarge it if necessary, click in the window and using your wheel mouse roll the wheel backwards to see a larger area of your workspace. Making sure that your slider at the bottom is at the start of the keyframe window grab a corner of the pic on the little corner box and drag it outwards and your pic will get smaller in your preview window. If you want a two second move to full frame slide along the keyframe window two seconds and in the ‘preset’ window, at the top select ‘default’ from the drop down menu, this will create your second keyframe with the pic at full size. This pic will now move from small to full size over two seconds. Bear in mind that using Pan/Crop I think the smallest you can get the picture is 12.5% as a start point. To cover this I usually use a fade up on the pic as it starts its move.
Chris Young
Sydney -
Tip ~
We came from editing on Discreet’s edit*, still have it, and were used to separate AV and audio SCSI drives so know where you are coming from. Having used Vegas now for five years all I can say is don’t worry. If you have a fast raid system Vegas handles audio and video together without a problem. In fact I can’t even recall one problem in those years relating to audio and video being together on the same drives.
Chris Young
Sydney -
Vegas with native HDV seems to be fine on a quick box when it comes to straight playback on cuts and simple dissolves. Where I find the difference between native HDV editing and Cineform intermediate editing is the native files take a bigger performance hit when playing back with a variety of plugins such as C/Correction etc. Especially if you going to use the Magic Bullet Movie Looks HD which comes with Vegas. Magic Bullet Movie Looks requires comprehensive rendering and it seems to be quicker on my boxes when working with the Cineform avi’s as opposed to the native m2t files.
BTW, re rendering with certain plugins. Magic Bullet Editors Suite v2.0, the full retail version, takes advantage of GPU power if you go for a high end graphics card. My render times with v2.0 improved with an increase of around 10 to 20 times faster than those with Movie Looks HD, a MASSIVE difference. There again different people have different requirements but I still stand by my comment about the fastest box with the fastest raid being better and if you are going to use plugins like Magic Bullet 2.0 and Serious Magic’s Ultra Key which harness graphics GPU power get a beefy PCI Express card. Punch and crunch them pics quicker!
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Ah! I think I see what you are doing, setting your Z axis moves in the track motion window setting keyframes along the time axis, right? Personally I would not use Track Motion in this instance because by setting the Z axis move up on one clip using the Pan/Crop function means you can apply those parameters globally in one hit to all the other clips afterwards as outlined in my previous post. There again someone else might have a better suggestion but what I outlined works well for me.
Chris Young
Sydney -
If all keyframe transitions are the same for each pic try the following.
1. Place all your pics on the timeline with your chosen transition between them.
2. Set up your Z axis move on your first clip.
3. ‘Copy’ the first clip.
4. Use the ‘selection edit tool’, the arrow head shaped one, and drag a marquis box over all your untreated clips to select all of them.
5. Right click on your second clip and select ‘paste event attributes’.With luck all your pics now have the same Z axis move, quick and simple! Of course you can have various keyframe moves on various pics and using this ‘copy’ and ‘paste event attributes’ method you apply moves to any clip.
Chris Young
Sydney -
With regards to the specs on the Vegas site. All depends on what sort of performance you want out of your system. I first tried Vegas on v3.0 on a slow 500 MHz laptop. It was lumpy but proved to me that the program had merits and some great features even back then. I was prepared to accept some of the performance hits because they was offset by a system I grew to like working with. All I can say from my experience is that the quicker your box and drive sub-system is the better it performs and the less often it will drop back below normal frame rates when playing back effects and filters etc, especially with HDV. You make your choices. Making enquiries, as you are, I think you will find my comments about the faster the box the better will be endorsed. Lets face it, Vegas is a software system, given more horsepower the better it is to work with.
Regards monitoring. I don’t know of any PC monitor that has true SMPTE reference specs. The only way I can truly judge things for broadcast delivery is on a studio reference monitor and external WFM and V/Scope. As for monitoring audio as good as Vegas is it won’t tell you your audio phase and stereo width is so we use external phase and correlation meters to judge these. So yes Vegas can’t do everything, what system is perfect. From an editing workflow the more PC monitor real estate you have then usually the easier it is to work with. I like to keep one monitor for timelines only, everything else goes on the other. On the other hand I make do with a single 17″ laptop monitor if I have to work in the field. Some guys use four monitors on two dual head cards. Three for editing and one for vision output, all depends on what you want, or more accurately what you need to suit your workflow.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Phil ~
You will need the beefiest PC you can build to edit native mt2 HDV files in Vegas as it really does require a lot of CPU power to do this without being choppy on playback. I think you will find quite a few of us use the Cineform ‘Connect HD’ software which on a fast machine will convert the HDV files in real time on ingest to the Cineform avi wrapper. On a quick machine it is then much more like editing DV. Have a good look at their site as it explains the whole workflow to get the best out of HDV editing. They also have suggested system build specs to achive this. Since using Connect HD there is no way I would go back to trying to edit mt2 files natively. Once you are finished editing you can then render back to the Vegas HDV presets for print to tape or render for DVD etc.
As regards monitor size a few use the 1920 x 1080 capable Dell monitors for their systems but they are not the best if you want to use them as a reference output monitor. A large second monitor is definitely an advantage as it enables you to have a large preview window which I find works better than using the second monitor as a ‘windows secondary display’ which is a selection you can opt for under options/preferences. Monitoring HDV over firewire is not possible but you can monitor out in standard def over firewire with both the native mt2 files and the Cineform avi’s to an external monitor via a suitable vtr or camera.
Cineforem URL: https://www.cineform.com/products/ConnectHD.htm
Chris Young
Sydney -
Just got a reply back from Sony support re the TGA import issue. This may help others out there with the same problem. Quote from the reply:
“All versions of Vegas have a bug where Targa files that have a pixel height or width that is divisible by 256 will not open. Your file is 1024 wide…divides by 256, so it won’t open.
This has been fixed as part of Vegas 7.0b (to be released within a few weeks). The workaround for now is to resize the file to 1025 x 576 or any other number that doesn’t divide by 256 and it’ll open right up.”
Interesting!
Chris Young
Sydney -
Phew! That’s a hard one. I don’t have any suggestions other than the long winded one of manually going through all clips looking for the highest peaks, not a pleasant thought!
Chris Young
Sydney