[D. Eric franks]

Ooohh, I’m kind of a keyboard nerd. The logitech one Mr. Rob recommends is also a membrane ‘board as is your laptop one, so you don’t really want a scissors/spring/cherryswitch board, because it has a long throw, but they do have decisive clickity-clicks and I love them! You might also love the little Apple wireless jobby. I worked on one all day earlier in the week and liked it alot, for what it was: very laptoppy in feel.

Now if anyone knows of a split-key spring keyboard that is reasonably priced, let me know! I know of a few straight ones (Das Keyboard and clones), but I need a split key and write a few thousand words a day, so it’s important. Also, I’d prefer not to have a number pad (I’d really like it detached and off to the side more). A Lexmark M15 from 1994 with a USB connection would be ideal. I know, too much to ask.

[D. Eric franks]

Two ways to do the simple trailer effect, but without the psychedelic color part. You could duplicate a bunch of tracks, offset them by a frame and play with the Composite Levels, but that’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth and probably won’t work in the end anyhow.

Instead, use Vegas’ Motion Blur property. I’m not a big fan of Vegas’ implementation of Motion Blur (esp. as compared with AE’s) because it is not smooth enough and… looks more like trailers! So this is probably perfect for you and will actually produce more “realistic” LSD trailers than the effect example you posted (not that I’d know anything about that):

(1) Show the Video Bus Track at the bottom of the timeline: View > Video Bus Track (Ctrl+Shift+B).
(2) Right-click the Video Bus Track and select Insert/Remove Envelope > Motion Blur Amount.
(3) Drag the entire envelope up to set the Motion Blur Length. I’m thinking a half second is about right (12-15 frames, depending on your project).

You can also animate it on and off with keyframe nodes. Note that the method used here is set with the Project Properties – Motion blur type item.

[D. Eric franks]

I see. Sounds like a good, standard workflow, with the big hack being the painful copy-n-paste part of the operation. The last series I worked on that had this sort of workflow we rendered out the audio tracks all to separate files for the mixing/mastering guy. Definitely chews up some disk space and required the editor to be neat with his track exports (and you get some oddball tracks that are 99% silent with just a few sfx), but it was very workable and the results were great. Granted, we were editing in FCP, but the best tool for the final mix in our workflow was Vegas. Mixing and mastering is an unappreciated art, to be sure, the Rodney Dangerfield of video post, with the coloristas getting all the glory these days!

[D. Eric franks]

I’ll add:

(1) Many of the “Sony Vegas” issues are really “Apple QuickTime” issues, re: no H.264, no DVCPro50, no ProRes codecs in PC version.

(2) Unfortunately, Mr. Rose is right about some Apple folks. They won’t necessarily intentionally try to trip you up, but I have definitely experienced a refusal to make any accommodations for the PC, re: HDD format, installing necessary codecs, using other intermediaries, attempting any troubleshooting at all. Which leads to…

(3) What is your deliverable? If you are being contracted to take raw footage from the camera and deliver a finished program, you should be able to use Pinnacle Studio for all anyone cares. If you need to collaborate, however, I’d go FCS, due to all of the hassles listed above.

It’s also hard to give specific advice because I’m unsure what you mean by “have access” to a free 8-core Mac vs. building a new, expensive Vegas system: I’d take the free Mac any day! If that means going to someone else’s location to edit in FCS and that makes everyone happy, then you might as well do that. I did that Tuesday afternoon for 5 hours. You won’t have much trouble with the learning curve and I think you’ll be surprised both with how great FCS is AND how imperfect it is (yea, it’s got a whole suite of quirks and hangs and crashes that Macficionados would never admit in public). And while it’ll take some time to get up to speed, if you do need to collaborate back and forth between Vegas+FCS, you will spend a ton of time doing some really unpleasant transfers anyhow.

[D. Eric franks]

Let’s start with the codec: What encoding are you using within the AVI file format wrapper? Second, if you toggle the Preview Window to “Best (FULL)” and look at the video at actual project size (so you can see the actual pixels Vegas will be encoding when you hit render), do you also see the ghosting?

[D. Eric franks]

No offense to “YouTube viewers” (OK, just a little), but could you post a link to an uploaded video with the problem? I trust the gang here more and it’ll help with diagnostics.

[D. Eric franks]

I think that’s the entire concept of a nested project: the whole thing is “mixed down” into one video and one audio track, right? So it sounds like you want to do something that nested projects are simply not designed to do.

It is possible to open two copies of Vegas and copy large chunks from one project into another – or copy the whole project and insert it into another one. This can get tricky and might take a couple of attempts to get it right with ripple editing and just generally mass chaos from such a complex insert, but it’ll work (just get ready to CTRL+Z).

[D. Eric franks]

“Trying to [remove traffic noise from an audio track] is like trying to take the eggs back out of a cake once it’s baked.” – John Rofrano

I am so using that quote. Too funny.

There is one other free option to try to fix this, however, but it’s not a fun one: ADR (“additional” dialog replacement). This means you’ll re-record the dialog in a quieter location while watching the playback and try to match it as precisely as possible. This is both (a) not as outrageous as it sounds and (b) way more outrageous than it sounds. What I mean is, (a) Hollywood does this all of the time. It’s been a standard practice since the dawn of movies with sound and isn’t outrageous at all. But (b), it’s also seriously, outrageously tedious and not at all easy to get it right (although matching waveforms in Vegas and a few percent time stretching/squashing here or there helps a lot).

I’ve had to do this on a couple of sentences at a time here or there and it can be done. Of course, you’ll need access to the actors to re-record. And you’ll also need some ambiance to drop in the background or it will immediately sound odd and artificial. But it is free and worth a try, especially if it’s only a few sentences of dialog. There are commercial products you can try as well that can semi-automate the process of matching the ADR to the original track.

__________
“I have never seen a bad television program, because I refuse to.
God gave me a mind, and a wrist that turns things off.”
– Jack Paar
https://videopia.org

[D. Eric franks]

I use external drives as media drives and backup, but generally work off an internal drive on a currently active project, mostly for performance reasons, but, yes, different external drives seem to behave differently: Some seem to stay quite warm while others are good about spinning down and remain cool, even when plugged in for days at a time.

One way to conveniently keep your projects semi-portable is to use the File > Save As – Copy media with project option and save the project to a new folder. I use this to archive every project when I’m done, but it’s also a mindless way to create a mobile version of the project, noting that you’ll get everything in the Project Media bin, but not everything in your work folder in the case where you’ve collected elements you haven’t used yet. (On the other hand, sweeping the Project Media bin clean before archiving also eliminates all the clips you thought you might need at the beginning of the project, but didn’t end up using.)
______
“Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing.
It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.”
– Alfred Hitchcock
https://videopia.org

[D. Eric franks]

Yep, it can be done that way (any method that can isolate a color will work), but I’m afraid I don’t know if your version of Vegas can do it. Here’s your track layout and summary (see the attached image too):

Track 1 – Parent mask based on chromakey reveals…
|- Track 2 – colored bits in compositing child
Track 3 – desaturated background

Here’s the Step-by-Step (matches screen grab):
1. Add clip to Track 1. Chromakey to the color you want to keep. Toggle Show mask only on, which you’ll do while perfecting your mask anyhow. Normally, you’d leave it off when you are done. You want the colored areas to be white, everything else black (and there’s your mask).
2. Click the Track FX button and add a mask generator. Set it to Luminance and toggle Invert on.
3. Change the Compositing mode to Multiply (Mask).
4. Add the clip again to Track 2 and click the Make Compositing Child button.
5. Add the clip again to Track 3 and desaturate it.

Again, this sort of track matte key or travelling matte is a good fundamental technique, but seems complex for Vegas Movie Studio, eats up three tracks and it’d be a lot easier using the Secondary Color Corrector. On the other hand, if you can do it for free, that’s fantastic.