D. Eric franks
Forum Replies Created
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Definitely great to see you back and thanks for the welcome!
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There’s no way to do this without being able to select and isolate a particular color range (makes sense, right?) and I can’t think of any way to do that in Vegas without using the secondary color corrector. There might be other tools online that can do this for free/cheap, but they are all going to work by selecting and isolating a color range. You might search for “pleasanville effect” – that was the nickname for it before Sin City!
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Linda sayeth “I am also wondering, am I just lazy and taking the easy way out? Would a truly creative person just create all their own??”
Why yes, yes you are lazy and taking the easy way out and a truly creative person (with a lot of free time and years of experience) would create everything from scratch. A truly smart and efficient person, however, uses every tool at his disposal and takes shortcuts whenever it makes sense! No shame at all in starting from a template and no reason to reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to, right? Besides, why would anyone ever want to do things the hard way, when the easy way out is, well, easier?!
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I took a shot at Prentice’s question over in the basic forum. Didn’t add much to the discussion that the experts here haven’t covered: high frequency, broadband noise can be attacked with EQ (noting that human speaking voices are in the 80-250Hz range), maybe add a noise gate, optional noise reduction. I did also suggest cheating (as I often do) by dropping a music bed underneath, if it’s appropriate to the style of the piece.
But that got me thinking. What order would you guys go at this? Meaning: Would you EQ first, then NR? Would a soft gate be a part of the solution?
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There aren’t any project or render settings that will make your video look better. There are plenty that can screw it up, so your question is a very good one and getting these things right is important, but none of those settings will make the video look better (or like film).
That’s not to say you can’t improve the look during editing. Basic color correction is a big start (and a lot of work). There aren’t many things that Red Giant’s Magic Bullet suite can do (automatically) that Vegas can’t do (manually), but it does offer a ton of really neat presets and shortcuts to get some very lovely looks very quickly – of course it costs money!
As to 24p, sure, you can try that and you might like it. It’s about the 17th most important characteristic that makes film look like film, however. I produced a little primer on 24p some time ago that might help: The 24p Conspiracy
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The hissing is just the background noise floor. Could actually be caused by many things, including inherent electronic noise (my guess as to what it is). You won’t be able to eliminate it, but you can mitigate it somewhat.
I’d attack it with a simple equalizer first: “hiss” implies it’s high frequency and broad spectrum. Knowing that a the human speaking voice is anywhere from 80-250 Hz, you can use the EQ to lower higher frequencies. Many EQ plug-ins (including Vegas’ Track EQ and others) will have presets, like “Hiss Reduction” or something. Make sure you toggle the filter on and off while working to hear how badly you are affecting the voice as well.
You can also go after a problem like this with a noise gate, which will quiet everything below a certain level. This is much trickier and can be obtrusive, with the noise floor turning on and off as the person speaks. Might be what you need however and can work very well, especially if you throw a music bed underneath.
Which brings me to my final bit of advice: throw a music bed underneath to hide the hiss, if it would be appropriate for your video.
And a final bit of un-advice: there are fancy expensive noise reduction plugins. They can work, but they are definitely not magical (despite the marketing claims) and are most effective when used in combination with EQ and maybe a soft gate anyhow.
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There is a third option too, which is that you can drop I-frames on the last frame of the one clip and the first frame of the next, so you get two I-frames in a row, sandwiching the cut. That clearly bumps the data rate way up momentarily and breaks the cadence, but it shouldn’t cause problems.
I’m afraid the last time I remember doing this was a decade ago, so I don’t even know what tool you’d use today, but advanced compression apps have an automatic “scene detection” algorithm that will sometimes take care of this automatically as well as the ability to drop compression keyframes (that’s what the app I used called them) wherever you want. Sorenson Squeeze might be something to look at? Sorry I don’t have more info other than to get you started looking for an answer, but this is the sort of stuff a professional DVD compressionist in Hollywood would do full time.
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The reduce interlace flicker and de-interlace won’t work, because the interlacing not is coming from the still images, but from the project. So, two questions:
(1) What is your destination? I’m guessing DVD, because you are working with an interlaced project and that is the only format that I can think of where you’d want to use interlacing. If this project is not going to DVD, then change the project settings to Progressive and you are finished.
(2) Where are you seeing these interlacing “errors”? Interlacing that is apparent in a single still frame of video from Vegas’ timeline might not be apparent at all when the video is in full motion playback and might not be a problem at all. Furthermore, interlacing that is apparent on your computer monitor might look exactly right when you burn a DVD and play it back on your TV. So it all comes down to destination again: If you are producing a DVD with interlaced video, then the only place to verify whether you have a real problem or not is on a disc + TV and it doesn’t matter if you get flicker on a computer. And if your destination is computer/internet, then you should be rendering progressive.
Two final comments: You can render progressive to DVD if you want as well – that might do what you want if you need a disc that will play both places. Also, I would not generally pre-resize the images and I’d normally just bring in the source pictures at full-res into Vegas. This’ll give you more options for cropping and resizing too – although I can see an argument for resizing first, since it is then drag-n-drop easy to edit without any futzing about.
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I still see the red thumbnail thing every now and again. Pretty random, however and reloading the project makes it go away. Clips still work though.
As to the more serious problem, I dunno. For trouble shooting, try installing and running the 32-bit version. Since it calls different media I/O and different core Vista libraries, there are definitely situations where the 32-bit version will work when the 64-bit won’t.
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Hehe, ripple editing is really a very core professional function, but get ready with Ctrl+Z because it’s going to do all kinds of nutso things to your entire timeline when you forget it’s toggled on. Definitely a very powerful tool that can create some powerful chaos with just a click! Doh!