[Jeff Weinberger]

Rob,
I think you bring up good points about what would actually comprise a “properly written script” to accomplish this task.
We do have Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro systems here, and proponents of those systems can just select “render as…” choose a template, and 2 seconds later the correct process has been implemented. I’m trying to be an advocate for Vegas, but I just can’t convince people that some kooky convoluted chain of actions is better than the “render as” button. Final Cut has been gaining a lot of ground lately…

[Jeff Weinberger]

Wouldn’t a genuine “Frame sequence” render option be more convenient than fiddling with the preview window-script thingee?

The Vegas design team did modify the product to include an XDCAM browser and support for the XDCAM file system. Perhaps someone who is using a $50,000 XDCAM camcorder is participating in projects requiring a greater degree of precision than those of a consumer user.

Maybe the Vegas design team is correct in their belief that Vegas users are basically a simple folk who can’t handle genuine frame rendering. Maybe they done taken ‘er as fer as she can git…

[Jeff Weinberger]

I just used the debug frameserver to feed the Vegas time line into Premiere, and that worked quite well. Adobe Premiere has wonderful options for exporting frame sequences, and they have such an elegant design for choosing options. It would be nice if the Vegas design team could incorporate those options into a future build of Vegas. The existing system of grabbing from the Preview window could be left intact. There could be an option in the rendering choices to select a frame sequence. The options dialog box could even default to the basic settings that currently exist, and there could be an “Advanced Settings” box that could be clicked to reveal a settings screen that has the settings that Premiere offers.
My recent projects have involved shooting with a Sony XDCAM system, which is considered a professional format as it currently isn’t available in consumer camcorders. It would be great if Sony would facilitate the editing of XDCAM projects by including more professional features in “Vegas Professional”.

[Jeff Weinberger]

I was able to render frames with TMPEG Enc, but only up to 720 x 480. 95% of my projects are HD. I was able to get debugmode frameserver to work with Combustion 4, and could output Combustions’s RAM render as 1920 x 1080 PAR 1 and 1440 x 1080 PAR 1.333.
It would be much more convenient if Vegas offered an option to render real frames. I can appreciate how the current system could be easy to use for consumers, such as a grandmother who wants to take a snapshot from her camcorder and e-mail a JPG image to members of her sewing circle. Sony has a ‘Movie Studio’ version of Vegas that serves the casual consumer user. But the exact same system is used in the “Professional” version of the product. It means that the Vegas development team thinks that most Vegas users would not be able to comprehend real frame rendering, that users would be overwhelmed by and unable comprehend settings for frame size, pixel aspect ratio, and image formats. Sony deliberately wants to keep the product simplistic, even though it is being marketed as “Professional”.

[Jeff Weinberger]

Rob,
I went to the Sony forum, saw your post there, found links to Debugmode frameserver. Initially I am not able to get an output, but will have to wait until I have some time to figure out how this process works. I didn’t know that rendering could be done through TmpegEnc, I have been compressing from it with rendered Uncompressed AVI files in the vicinity of 100 Gigs each.

[Jeff Weinberger]

I just took a look at the QT video export options from within Vegas, it looks like the video formats are there in the current version, but it appears that the Quicktime Pro plugin does not offer the option to export as a frame sequence. That option is currently there in the QT Pro export options of the QT Player. Frame export used to be a plugin option with older versions of QT. So you could probably obtain it from an older version of QT, though the new version of Vegas states that it requires Quicktime 7.

[Jeff Weinberger]

The Nvidia sites has had postings about recent Nvidia drivers that cause Quicktime Pro to close when the user tries to select custome export options. This is especially bad with 8600 series Nvidia cards.
But QT Pro has an option to “export Movie to Image Sequence”, and then you can choose from these formats:
“BMP, JP2, JPEG, Mac Paint, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, Quick Time Image, SGI, TGA, and TIFF”.

I’ve never tried to access the Vegas timeline using a frame server. Can anyone confirm that Vegas can render real frame sequences through QT Pro using that method?

[Jeff Weinberger]

Quicktime is free as a player, you can pay a small fee and upgrade it to Quicktime Pro. The Pro version functions as a plugin that provides enhanced rendering options for most editing programs, and the player itself can load a media file and export it to the rendering formats that QT supports.
If you have another editing program that supports QT Pro as a plugin, you can render your timeline as Quicktime and all the Pro formats are available. If you are in Vegas and render as Quicktime, not all the rendering formats are there. How is it “Professional” to have rendering formats blocked? How is it “Professional” for Vegas to render a frame sequence as a resized JPEG or PNG with a pixel aspect ratio that is altered from the source footage? How is this better than competing programs which offer the ability to render all the formats included in Quicktime Pro or render as a frame sequence using settings precisely chosen by the user?

[Jeff Weinberger]

Vegas has offered only partial Quicktime Pro rendering, many of the formats are not available. Other editing programs will allow you to render using all of the options that Quicktime Pro includes.
If Quicktime Pro releases an update that contains a new codec, you can render to it from other programs. With Vegas, you have to wait for Sony to release a new version of the whole program and hope that the new codec is available as a render option.
Another great feature of Quicktime Pro is that it gives most programs the option to export frame sequences. You can specify the frame dimensions and pixel aspect ratio and render as frames. Vegas does not offer true frame exporting. It can render frames of various amounts depending on the size of your preview window, and the output of your frame can have a different pixel aspect ratio than that of your source footage. Sometimes I need to export to frames and take them into another application to create an alpha mask and perform some post operations. The finished footage is then rendered as frames and tossed onto the video timeline for inclusion in the final project rendering. There are times when I need the rendered frames to exactly match the source footage dimensions and pixel aspect ratio, and I haven’t been able to get what I need from Vegas.
Is there a trick to access the Vegas timeline and direct it to the Quicktime Pro exporter so that all of the render options are available?

[Jeff Weinberger]

Laszlo,

I renamed the reg key, it got rid of the error screen.

THANKS!!

-Jeff