[Dave Felder]

Thanks John, I found it.

I kept double clicking on the text clip in the timeline to put it in the source window, and as you know, that doesn’t work.

[Dave Felder]

> I looked in the Sony Vegas folder but didn’t see anything like a temp folder. Is there an unusual name for that folder?

FROM:
Re: Vegas Pro 8.0 Using Lots Of Disk Space When Rendering
by Mike Kujbida on Apr 12, 2008 at 11:49:22 pm

Unless you’ve changed the file locations in Vegas, the default is C:My Documents.
If you have a small drive C, it’s easy to fill this up.
The 2 file location options are in Properties (File-Properties – Prerendered files folder) and Options-Preferences (Temporary files folder.

If you have a corrupted prerender somewhere in your project, you may be able to flush it out by: TOOLS > CLEAN UP PRERENDERED VIDEO.

Sometimes, when I’ve had render problems, I’ve prerendered the project in pieces before doing my final render to WMV or MPEG2 or whatever you’re using. To prerender your project in pieces, select a portion of your timeline, then TOOLS > SELECTIVELY PRERENDER.

As a work around, you could always render portions of your project, then bring those rendered pieces into a new project to complete production. I know that’s not an answer to your problem, but at least it may get the program completed.

> I tried a test on just 25 seconds of footage with the same Chroma Keyer effect and the exact same rendering settings…and it worked fine! I tired rendering the whole video again, thinking maybe something had given, but the program crashed during rendering.

Are you saving to a media disk or your C drive? OS drives get fragmented very quickly, have you tried a defrag? Maybe run chkdsk (usually in c:/Windows/system32) to make sure there’s not bad sectors that haven’t been properly flagged by Windows.

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

I’m using Vegas probably ten years, but I’m really intrigued with the Encore feature that will render your project to FLASH for the web, with all the interactive buttons converted from DVD to FLASH.

I hate having to learn an entire new interface, but as my clients are looking to do more and more on the web, I think being able to deliver working hunks of interactive web pages will be a worthwhile feature.

3D isn’t a big deal for me – half my Corporate clients don’t even have HD yet.

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

Maybe try opening a new project and just run a short single clip with a greenscreen effect, just to verify the plugin isn’t corrupted?

Some thoughts: Maybe your hard drive is getting full? Not your media drives, but the TEMP workspace that Vegas uses. Or maybe you’ve got a lot of small deleted files, leaving no contiguous work space on the drive and Vegas is having a problem with that?

You didn’t say if you were using Vegas’s green screen effect or a plug in. I sometimes use Boris EFX, and it leaves an INI file that often gets corrupted and will stop everything from working. Try renaming BFX.INI to BFX.OLD and see if that’s the problem (if you’re using Boris Effects, that is)

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

When we do multi camera shoots without genlocked timecode, we just use an old fashioned film slate with a clapper.

It’s not much effort to put each camera’s clip on a different track, and the waveform from the clapper makes it very easy to sync the footage in your timeline.

You probably have figured it out, but make sure your audio waveforms are turned on. . . .

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

The only problem with using the Drop Shadow effect on the track, (unless I’m missing something) is that the drop shadow isn’t affected by keyframes, so everything on the track ends up having the drop shadow.

If you can set up your project so all your graphics that require a drop shadow are on the same track, that would work perfectly. When you’re doing a 20 minute video with several hundred clips and graphics, it becomes a logistical effort to keep track of. Not that there’s anything wrong with an editor being forced to think ahead and plan a project in advance (and I wonder how many editors actually do that), but it would be useful to be able to just apply an effect to a clip instead of a track. Almost every other effect in Vegas can be applied to an individual clip, not just the entire track.

Just my 2 cents. I think the solution of adding the drop shadow in Photoshop will ulimately end up with a less crowded timeline. And, of course, in my case, using Wingding arrows in the Text Generator was the easiest and most efficient method.

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

What’s the Drop shadow function? I haven’t stumbled upon it.

[Dave Felder]

Thanks Mike,

I thought about using wingding arrows about ten minutes after my post and it works fine.

If it wasn’t an arrow, if it was something that I needed to create custom, is the only way to put a drop shadow on a chromakey’d figure by putting it on the entire track, and if so, is there a way to turn the shadow on and off using a keyframe?

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

Following up:

Similar situation, except I am chromakeying an arrow over footage.

If I use the track motion to put a drop shadow on a chromakeyed arrow, it appears to affect everything on that video track. In other words, the 2D shadow button doesn’t appear to be turned on and off by keyframes. Is that correct?

I’m working on a 20 minute training video and it’s already got 8 video tracks for titles, picture in picture effects, etc. Do I need to add another video track just for one drop shadow on one graphic?

Is it possible to add a character to a CG font?

Ryan Video Productions Inc. Rockaway, NJ

[Dave Felder]

I just did a test capture from mid-tape and the TC works fine.

When I did the capture, I was in a rush and I remember rewinding the tape, hitting PLAY and then CAPTURE VIDEO almost immediately afterwords.

Someone on the Vegas forum on the Sony website mentioned that sometimes VidCap gets confused trying to picks up the TC from the top of the tape, and TC will then be out of wack. That appears to have been the case here.