[Dustin Moore]

I have not found a way to fix this problem. It has
been there ever since the ability to display
multi-view and the program output at the same time.

I reported it to Sony but I couldn’t get past the bottom
level of tech support. The tech support person wasn’t
very familiar with video editing and just barely understood
the problem. It took more than a month to exchange five
emails and in the end it was just a waste of everyone’s
time.

So figure out a workflow that doesn’t require seeing
the multicam and the program out at the same time.

[Dustin Moore]

If you are rendering to an codec that uses interframe
compression it is quite common that the video editing
program feeds a complete GOP to the codec and then the
codec has figure out how to distribute all of the bits
among the frames in the GOP to maximize picture quality
while maintaining the bitrate.

This is totally normal. If you want it to run faster lower
the quality settings or use a more optimized codec like
x264.

[Dustin Moore]

I strongly concurr with John. The Pioneer BDR-206 on
Taiyo Yuden G02 8x media is a very clean burn (low
PI/PO error rates). It should be virtually impossible to
get a burn related DVD compatibility problem with this
pair. An 8x burn with the sped change is about as clean
as the 6x constant velocity burn.

You can still have bad media though but that isn’t the
burner’s fault.

[Dustin Moore]

Fine point for people studying this workflow:
I don’t see an obvious reason to denoise in the beginning. If you
have any rounding errors (say 8bit math) in steps 2 through
6 they are just going to compound. Vegas is kinda cranky in
32 bit mode.

If you do the noise reduction around step 6.5 you can smooth
out some of the rounding error and get less banding in the
final image. Also, to the extent that step 7 adds noise, it
is silly to remove noise and then add fake noise back in.

In the process of removing noise you will probably remove
a bit of signal. If you can leave some of the noise in
because you want more grain in the end, you will probably come
out ahead because you get a tiny bit more signal.

Also, if you are publishing to the web, the H264 acts like
a serious denoising filter anyway so you might want to
leave some noise to avoid plastic looking video.

[Dustin Moore]

First start out with a color correction filter and stretch
out the luminance levels. Some combination of Gain and Offset
ought to make the picture brighter.

Then apply the unsharp mask with the light preset and see what
you have. If it is really noisy you might want to get a copy of
Neatvideo. It can do denoising and sharpening in wavelet space.
It is quite good IF you spend one or two hours turning
down the strength of the spatial part of the filter and
tweaking up the temporal part of the denoiser.

If you can’t do what you want with a color correction and Neatvideo,
you need a true expert in the field and it is probable that they
might not be able to do any better.

Up-rezzing SD imagery to HD using sophisticated algorithms works only
tolerably well with clean, well-exposed SD imagery. This probably
isn’t what you have here.

[Dustin Moore]

Tell us what video enhancing means to you. What does your
footage look like now and what do you want it to look like?

[Dustin Moore]

In Vegas all projects are understood to have studio RGB video
levels but beyond that there is no way to attach color space
metadata to a file unless the codec (see the mpeg-2 codec)
allows it to be set at output time.

If you are outputting to Blueray or TV, you should acquire a
monitoring setup (intensity pro + NTSC reference monitor) and
color correct to that. By default then your working color space
will be whatever the monitor+output card is obeying.

If you are color correcting for web, get familiar with how
your compression for web pipeline (YouTube, private hosting, etc.)
will mangle the luminance in your data. You should monitor
on an sRGB monitor and then apply a filter that will undo
whatever crazy stuff the pipeline will do and be happy with
the result.

[Dustin Moore]

Al, do you use nested veg files or other .veg files inside
of your projects?

[Dustin Moore]

output_luminance = (255 * Gain * (input_luminance/255) ^ ( 1 / Gamma ) ) + Offset

The input luminance is rescaled to run from 0 to 1 then taken to the
power of the inverse of the Gamma. This gets scaled linearly by
the gain then multiplied by 255 to go from [0,1] to [0,255].
An offset is then added.

If this is too mathy, drop a greyscale ramp test function on the
timeline and apply the color corrector filter to it. Watch the
waveform monitor and mess around with the controls.

[Dustin Moore]

Remember that you can use .veg files as events in other
.veg files. You can take a complicated camera track and
stick it in its own .veg file. You can then drop the .veg
file on a track in your main project and combine it into
a multicam track with your other camera angles.

Note that if you plan on upgrading the Vegas 11, using
.veg files inside of other .veg files is slightly
broken with that version. Works great on Vegas 8 to
10 though.