Chris Young
Forum Replies Created
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Two cents worth here. I use eTimer 1.5 and ZD Soft Screen Recorder. With eTimer you can run the clock up or down in various combinations of, h, m, secs and also display msec if you want. You can also choose the color of the timer numerals. Using ZD Soft Screen Recorder you can draw a region around the eTimer countdown/countup and record it to and avi file. This I then place on the top track and use track motion to size and place it where I require. The avi file made is quite small and the dimensions of the capture area are usually around 210 x 55 pixels and once resized into the corner of a screen it’s pretty clean. I find 12fps screen capture works well, keeps the file size smaller and makes the Vegas renders a bit quicker. Basically though the areas of the timeline that you render with the timer will near double the render times, well that’s my experience so far.
eTimer at:
http://www.barefootinc.com
Screen recorder at:
http://www.zdsoft.comChris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Using Connect HD with Vegas or Vegas on its own is like chalk and cheese. With the specs on the box you have you should be able to convert on the fly as you digitize with the Connnect capture utility. On slower boxes it’s best to capture the m2t files and then convert after they are in. Once you have the Connect files on the timeline it’s much more like editing with native DV files, way faster. I’ve found the quality to be very good. When finished render back to whatever you want for output.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
It’s called ‘Raylight’ from DV Film. Allows P2 MXF files to be edited in Vegas. Have a good readup at:
https://www.dvfilm.com/raylight/index.htm
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Yannis
Thanks! I’ve got MPEG StreamClip and use it a bit but in this case it still hasn’t sorted out my aspect ratio problem. I ended up letterboxing the 16:9 into a 4:3 job. Client was happy but I’ve gotta sort this weird conversion thing out. It only seems to happen with VOB’s from some domestic DVD recorders.
Chris Young
Sydney -
If you have Quicktime 7.0 with the extra mpeg codecs installed (about $20 extra) You can use MPEG Stream Clip v1.0.1 (freeware) which will very, very quickly convert your m2v files to mpeg2 files (without recompression) that Vegas can use. If you don’t want to spend the dollars with Apple download QuicktimeAlt which is a freeware alternative to Apple’s Quicktime. Make sure you tick the ‘extra codecs’ checkbox when you install QuicktimeAlt, this will allow MPEG Stream Clip to do the conversions for you. It can also demux out AC3 audio and encode very good looking H264 clips, very good!
BTW, to use the above combo you will have to unistall the ‘official’ apple Quicktime to run QuicktimeAlt. QuicktimeAlt explains all this in its documentation and can uninstall Apple’s Quicktime as it installs. I find it a better program as it doesn’t invade your system like QT and doesn’t have those constant annoying nag screens.
Proviso: Make sure you have the latest Windows updates installed as there is one which fixes some Quicktime issues (KB931398) and it is needed to run MPEG Stream Clip. If you don’t have it the install routine will tell you.
Links:
https://www.squared5.com
for MPEG Stream Clipand
https://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm
for QuicktimeAltChris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
First I would suggest that you check to see if the system is seeing all your physical ram. Go to ‘Start/Run’ and type in ‘dxdiag’. This will bring up a dialogue box who’s first page is System. Look on there to see if your total ram amount is listed correctly. If it is then the most likely problem is that your ‘Virtual Memory’ is low. To check this go to ‘Control Panel’ and look for ‘System’. Open this and go to the ‘Advanced’ tab, under this look for Performance and click ‘Settings’. This opens Performance Options, click the ‘Advanced’ tab. Under that you will find Virtual Memory, click ‘Change’ and see what your settings are. There are a lot of opinions as to the optimal settings for WinXP and video editing in particular but many feel, and it works for my three units, is to set your virtual memory to the custom size selection and enter for both fields, ‘initial size’ and ‘maximum size’ the same value. That value being twice your physical ram. In your case both fields would read 2048. Click ‘Set’ and ok your way out. You will have got a prompt that the computer needs to be restarted. That’s normal. Re-boot and see if you still get the same problem. Also in Vegas set your Options/Preferences/Video Dynamic RAM preview to 16MB to get the optimal use of the ram by Vegas. The only time I bump this up to much higher levels is if I want to build a dynamic ram preview of a complex timeline section to see it play smoothly. After that it’s reset back to 16MB
Chris Young
Sydney -
Mike,
Ah well! I have run into another couple of issues. Used the import media from ‘Camcorder DVD Disc’ function in Vegas and it did a great job of converting the DVD VOB files to MPEG2, pretty quick as well. Great! I thought, won’t have to render in DVDA so very quick project preparation. Problem is that the original video that was captured on the DVD recorder was 16:9. Now the VOB’s when converted by Vegas come in as 4:3 aspect ratio MPEG’s. Put these into a 16:9 DVDA project and what happens? The menus appear as 16:9 but the resultant MPEG files are 4:3 ratio but the images are full height anamorphic, tall skinny people. Still thinking this one through! If it comes to the worst I guess it means going the long way around, capturing the original AVI’s and doing the full render bit in DVDA or ProCoder. I was just trying to short circuit the render times involved as some of these AVI’s are three to three and a half hours long. Thanks for the suggestions anyway, always open to ideas!
Chris Young
Sydney -
Hmm! Can you use a combo of one of your micro links plus cable for some of the way, or can you cable the distance? Either way you could use something like the Kramer line drivers which can push a composite video signal, if that’s what you are sourcing from, up to a 1000 meters at close to broadcast. These require mains power or you can run them off a 12v/120v inverter. If not they have other units that can be 12v powered and can drive up to 500 metres, these could be used in series at a push. All units have line gain and eq adjustments so you can just hang a WFM and Vector scope off the downstream end and adjust for correct levels. The best thing with these is that they do this by using cheap Cat 5 unshielded twisted pair telephone cabling between the TX and RX units. Small, quick and easy to use and keenly priced. I have used the smaller 12v units and the signal quality is very good for the distances involved. The typical delay is around 1 microsecond per 100 metres so on a 1000 metre run you are going to loose around 10 microseconds which is, if you in NTSC, about 1/6 of a TV scan line, negligible in other words, easily compensated for with timing at the receive end. The units to look at are the TP-1xl and TP-2xl which are the mains units and the 704 and 705 12v units. Made in Israel but have a US distributor. The mains units are here:
https://www.kramerelectronics.com/indexes/item.asp?desc=108
and the 12v units are here:
https://www.kramerelectronics.com/indexes/item.asp?desc=36
There are various other brands of twisted pair interfaces around but can only speak from experience on these Kramer boxes. At the high end you have the Telecast Copperhead fibre optic units which you may be able to hire, go for miles those babies. Other than that it’s a chopper microwave link, phew! Expensive! Good luck.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
Tricky one Kevin! If I understand your requirement correctly I don’t know of anything that is going to give you full video/audio bandwith over the net with minimal delay that is going to give you a quality feed to switch with other cameras. From your question I gather this camera feed is going to be switched with others at the output end, correct?
Couple of questions. You may know all this in which case all that follows is redundant. Is this remote cam at a venue, sporting facility, conference centre, large hotel or something like that? If it is most of those sorts of venues have ‘head ends’, video and audio feed points. These are full bandwidth fibre optic lines that allow for camera and OB feeds to networks or to wherever there is another head end. Usually in a case like this we find the nearest head end feed point run our AV cables through a proc-amp into the feed point. Check and adjust levels then book the time slot required with our Telecomms provider and get their TOC (television operations centre) to patch it through to the point where we are taking the AV feed from. This then goes to a framestore sync unit which is genlocked to the BB generator at the production point where you are running your switch from and then the signal is timed into the vision switcher and treated just like any other camera during the switch.
The current versions of Windows Media Encoder can take a live feed from a camera or switch and feed a high quality signal to the net to a designated server IP address for IP streaming of a WMV encoded stream but it’s not something you could use in a switch. There are other proprietry hardware systems that can do the same to the net but again not giving you a full bandwidth feed for what you want to do.
If you do discover anything that can do it post back.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
No it doesn’t. Sometimes you can get away with a reasonable screen shot, if the PC has a CRT monitor, when you change the display settings to 60Hz to match the camera. That is if you are shooting at 60Hz NTSC. PAL obviously is 50Hz. Some PC cards can deliver this refresh rate. Trial and error I’m afraid.
Chris Young
Sydney