[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Masking was a good way to go. And using only Brightness and contrast with a mask on top kept the green away in the 32 bit render.

How do you feather the Mask Generator mask?

Too bad I can’t see the results before hand in my preview device. Tried switching between computer rbg and studio rbg but it didn’t seem to help.

By the way, is there a way to eliminate audio in the XAVC render?

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Thanks again. Aaron.

I loaded your VEG and verified that you could recreate the washed out effect with out using the Video Event FX Brightness & Contrast and render it faithfully with SonyAVC, XAVC, or QT.

But then I also noticed that I could do the bleaching with the Brightness & Contrast filter and get it to render just as faithfully in all three as well.

Since I couldn’t do that in my VEG I realized there must be something different with our project settings. There was: You were using the 8 bit pixel format and I had been using the 32-bit floating point (video levels)

When I switched to 8 bit the render came out bleached and identical to the filtered original without any of the green background breaking through.

When I switched back to 32-bit floating point (video levels) and the washed out effect looked the way I wanted it to in my preview, the SonyAVC and XAVC renders caused the green background to breakthrough while the QT render kept it suppressed i.e. the QT results were faithful to my preview screen.

Using your method for washing out the image and rendering with 32-bit floating point (video levels) the green also breaks through (where your mask doesn’t cover it) with SonyAVC and XAVC — but the QT render with Sorenson Video 3 suppresses it.

Since I am quite a ways into my project using 32-bit floating point (video levels) I don’t see switching to the 8 bit pixel format for the entire production, but I do realize that I will need to do 8 bit pre-renders on all my ‘bleached’ clips that have greenscreen backgrounds. A little extra work, but a lot simpler than chromakeying and masking a moving target against an uneven greenscreen.

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Thanks for responding, Aaron.

My background is intentionally a green screen. When I decided to do the bleaching and saw that the results looked good in my preview window I didn’t bother to key out the green.

As I understand it Sony XAVC is recommended for prerendering and I find it odd that it can’t handle the filter settings Brightness 0,260 contrast 0,279, contrast center 0,500. A render of the unfiltered clip looks fine.

I also tried rendering with Sony AVC and MainConcept AVC and both resulted in similar results as XAVC. Can you tell me how you were able to recreate/render the washed out filtered image with Sony AVC?

Can you take my green-screened image and filter it with the settings I list above and then get a render that matches the preview with XAVC? I can’t do this.

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Yes, thanks again. But I suppose we are talking past each other.

“A macro is a scripted button that you can assign multiple keystrokes to a single keypress.”

Yes I know, but I was trying to confine the wording of my question to terms used by Vegas.

“… then hit Ctrl+Tab to switch focus from the event pan/crop editor to the timeline.”

But you see, if one switches focus from the pan/crop editor to the timeline there is (AFAIK) no way to manipulate the mask without switching focus back again.

By using an external midi controller I am able to retain focus in the pan/crop editor and at the same time advance frames. It is not necessary to switch focus between windows. It would be nice to know if that could be done without an external controller.

Incidentally, it is possible, using cntr+play to set the transport in movement without losing focus in the pan/crop editor, but that doesn’t provide me frame-by-frame precision.

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Thanks David

When you say ‘macro’ do you mean a script?

In any case I find that when using only my computer keyboard and when focused on the mask, CursorTo.RightByFrame will move the mask position not the timeline cursor.

Even with the script/macro you suggest I beleive I would have to adjust the mask position, click a hotkey, move somewhere on the timeline and then click on the mask again to bring back focus to it.

I pulled out an old Korg nanoKontrol midi interface and programmed in CursorTo.RightByFrame and now I am able to advance the cursor in the timeline without losing focus on the mask and consequently I am able to adjust the mask position with one hand (mouse or arrow keys) and move the cursor with the other with no necessary key presses in between.

It appears that there is a difference in the way Vegas handles commands depending upon whether they are called up from the computer keyboard or an external midi device.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Resolved.

Thanks to the helpers on this forum I found the solution for my ultrawide render of 3640×1280 in a post by John in this thread.

There was a remaining question as to streaming bit rates, but at the venue they could see no difference in quality between anything over a vbr of 15m in the samples I sent them.

My 6 min film ended up being less then 600meg and I was able to upload the same version used at the venue to youtube:

https://youtu.be/4E_tQgHwFnU

Since I had organized a troupe of dancers and artists to perform in front of the screen, matching the content of the film, I am pretty sure where most eyes were focused and can laugh at myself for all the detail work I put into the film.

The complete program with performers is here – unfortunately it is from a live 3 camera feed where the producer hadn’t talked to me first and had no idea of what was going to happen next on the stage:

https://www.siwi.org/news/watch-live-opening-plenary-from-the-week/

Thanks again John and Steve

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Ivan, you removed your post. Is there any reason not to try your AME Video Tab
Format: H.264
Level: 5.1 advice?

Greg

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

My gosh. what da ya know it worked!

I only tried a little demo so it will be exciting to see what happens when I render my big project tonight.

I can only hope I have been as helpful to others in my skill’s domain as you have been to me in yours:-)

Greg

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Once again thanks for replying.

Do you have any idea why I get the error messages when trying Steve’s suggestion to use AVC?

I just did a render of 4.30 minutes and it is 51 gig!!!

glad you told me not to bother sending it to the venue people.

Would you suggest an encoder? I downloaded Adobe Media Encoder – is that a good choice?

[Greg Fitzpatrick]

Thanks again, Steve

I think I did as you suggested.

in the Sony AVC/MVC template I chose plain AVC as the video format
Audio: 128 Kbps; 48 000 Hz; 32 Bit; Stereo; AAC
Video: 25 fps; 3640×1080 Progressive; YUV; 16 Mbps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1,000

I tried this with both the “allow source to adjust frame size” selected and deselected but I got the error in both cases. “an invalid argument was specified”

I tried the render in 1920×1080 and there was no error – except of course 1920×1080 is not what I want:-)

What could I be doing wrong?