[Dale Mcclelland]

As mentioned in the thread linked by Dave P., un-checking “Use Legacy Disk Drivers” in “Options/Preferences/CD Settings tab” fixed the problem for me. My LG Blu-ray drive is now seen by Vegas 10e’s “Tools/Burn Disc/Blu-ray Disc” dialog.

I have not tried to actually burn a disc, so I don’t know whether changing that setting fixes one thing and breaks another.

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks, Steve. I just tried your technique. As you stated, Vegas doesn’t flag a sync problem when doing it that way. So I can use your technique in the future, or use Excalibur.

I’m glad to hear that you could reproduce the sync issue when doing it the way I had been. Thanks for taking the time to try it. That lets me know that this is normal behavior for Vegas and it was a case me not doing it right. That means I don’t have something messed up in my Vegas installation, so I am happy.

[Dale Mcclelland]

In my last reply I said Excalibur wouldn’t add transitions. I just want to add that I figured out that Excalibur’s “Apply Transitions” tool only works if fades have already been added to the events. After adding fades (using Excalibur) then applying transitions (using Excalibur,) the transitions are applied and NO sync problem occurs.

However, if I add fades to the events, (manually or with Excalibur(, then drag the transition to the timeline (i.e. not use Excalibur to add the transition), the sync error occurs. So dragging a transition to the timeline apparently operates in a different manner than what Excalibur does.

Guess I’ll just use Excalibur when I want to use transitions.

Still, I would like to understand why dragging the transition to the timeline causes the sync error.

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks, Edward, but “Ignore Event Grouping” was toggled off (and the audio and video for that event are grouped together). All I did was drag the transition to the boundary between the two events. That caused the video portion of the event to “appear” to slide to the left — at least it looks that way based the video’s left event boundary location and its relation to left boundary of the audio, and to the cursor and timeline scale. This can be seen in the screen shots in my OP.

But the audio and video for that event both end at the exact same point in the timeline – their right boundaries align perfectly – even when zoomed in to get a close look. If the video had actually shifted left, then I would think the right edge of the video event would end before the audio ends. Further, when I play the event, it seems to be in-sync — there is a on-stage speaker and the lip sync seems right on.

I’m thinking that is not actually going out of sync, but for some reason Vegas thinks it is and turns the event pink. And it also thinks it is out of sync by the entire duration of the event (the number shown in red is the length of the event). Consistent with that is the fact that if I right click and choose Syncronize/By Moving, Vegas moves the entire video portion of the clip to the right in an amount equal to the duration of the event – so the video portion now starts right after the audio portion ends. So Vegas clearly thinks the out of sync amount is equal to the duration of the event.

I just tried the same thing in Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 and got the same results. It makes me think I have some setting wrong in both programs. I also tried it with different clips just in case the clip from the original attempt is corrupted. Same result with the different clips. I also tried a different transition and got the same problem.

UPDATE: Something may be wrong with my Vegas installation. To see if using Excalibur to apply transitions would result in the same sync issue, I just tried using to add transitions and it won’t add them at all. It does nothing when I click on the Apply Transitions button (after first selecting both events then adding a transition to the list with Excalibur’s “Add” button, which puts the transition name in the big white box in the Excalibur dialog, and check-marking fade in and fade out.

[Dale Mcclelland]

>>You’re using a cam that is 1280 x 720p60? or 1080p60?<< The main camera (the camcorder) is 1080i. The new digicam can shoot in either 1080i or 1080p. Based on what you said, it sounds like I should set up the Vegas project properties as 1080i since that is what my main camera shoots. In addition, most of the footage in any given project's time line will be from the camcorder, with only short clips from the digicam scattered here and there. Thanks.

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks! Both your suggestions are better approaches than rendering. I thought Vegas was treating the text and background as separate cameras because they are, in fact, separate video events on different tracks and therefore Vegas thought it was 2 cameras. I didn’t realize it was because they were on the same tracks as the camcorders’ video. I placed them on their own 2 tracks and now Vegas does not include them in the multi-cam track. What I now realize is that when Vegas creates the multi-cam track, it (wisely) does so only for selected tracks. I had thought it automatically included all video tracks.

Problem solved! Thanks again for your help. Having only recently upgraded from Movie Studio to Pro, I am new to multi-cam editing and am struggling with it a little. But I’m finding it opens up many new and exciting possibilities.

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks, John, for the thorough explanation. I will download the trial of InfinitiCam and try it.

For now, I tried to apply Mercalli v2 at the media level, but it doesn’t work. I right-clicked an event in the Project Media tab and selected Media FX, then chose Mercalli. When clicking on Mercalli’s “Start Analysis” button, it pops up a error message that says the video clip is not selected.

I get this message sometimes when using Mercalli as an event FX on a timeline event, but it is easily remedied by clicking on the video portion of the event and trying again. When applying Mercalli at the media level, there is no way to select only the video portion of the event because all that shows in the Media bin is a thumbnail. So unless I am missing something, the Media FX approach won’t work because of this Mercalli limitation.

So I ended up using your workflow — applying Mercalli as a timeline event FX, rendering to a file, then replacing the timeline event with the rendered file. That works of course, although it’s a bit time consuming when a lot of events are involved. And when doing the final project render, those events are rendered a second time, so I wonder about loosing quality.

Hopefully InfinitiCam will avoid the above limitations.

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks, Steve. I’m sorry, I should have provided more detail in my question. I don’t want to bypass FX just for preview window purposes. I want to temporarily bypass them to do a render without FX.

[Dale Mcclelland]

I just e-mailed proDAD support asking about the 64 bit SAL.

[Dale Mcclelland]

>You get links to both the 32 and 64 bit versions of the product, depending on your wants/needs.<

Mike, I bought it from DJ last night and received links to the 32-bit and 64-bit plug-ins. But for the stand alone Mercalli, I only received a link to a 32-bit version. Did you get a link to a 64-bit stand alone?