[John Ranta]

Actually, you can do it, but it’s intermittent. By which I mean that some students are able to select a bunch of stills on the timeline of their project, then change the duration in the properties window for that batch of selected stills and see it immediately change the length of all those stills. But this does not always work, and we can’t figure out what to do when it won’t. We’ve looked at the Preferences settings and these do not seem to make a difference. Which makes me wonder if there is some setting in RT or other odd place that somehow effects the duration settings on stills. Any ideas?

[John Ranta]

We are having a similar problem. My students are working on Stop Motion projects. They have imported hundreds of still images to the timeline. They set the still image duration in Preferences to 00:00:00:05. Now they’ve decided that they want to shorten the duration of some sections of their film. They have selected 50 (or so) still images on the timeline, and right-clicked to change the duration of these to 00:00:00:03. When they click “okay”, FCP “bonks” (makes a weird error weird sound) and the duration for all these still frames reverts back to 00:05. If they make the change one still frame at a time, it works. Why can’t they change the duration for multiple frames? Do we have something set wrong? Thanks, John Ranta

[John Ranta]

It looks like I asked one of those “Russian Doll” questions. It might help for you to know how my students typically handle a project.

High schools are different than production environments. For my kids to make a 5 minute movie might take a calendar time of two to three weeks (storyboard to DVD) because they can work on it one 50 minute class period (and maybe some time after school) per day. It usually takes them a week or more to write their story board and film their scenes. They usually end up with a half hour or so of raw footage which they import into editing, along with music, jpegs, sound effects, etc. For my Advanced kids, who might be making 15-20 minute videos, the total calendar time might be 3-6 weeks, and they might end up with a couple of hours of raw footage and associated files.

We work almost entirely with DV tape – for a number of reasons. Most of our cameras are standard def $400 Canon consumer DV cameras (high school budgets). We have a couple of GL2s which can record in high def. I like students to record everything to DV tape (that way kids have their own backup if a drive crashes and we don’t have to worry about codecs when capturing raw avi, etc).

But to my naive brain it makes no sense that AVCHD would be any more processor intensive when editing than avi or mpg or any other format. I understand this might not be true when rendering, but during editing? Why?

I’m surprised by what I’m hearing about USB. I capture raw clips (avi) from DV tape to USB drives all the time with our Dells and Vegas. We edit those in Vegas with instantaneous response time, no slow downs. I even have kids on group projects editing clips over 100mbit ethernet (shared network server). There are no problems or delays during the editing process. Vegas’s architecture must be different than FCP or FCE.

We had Adobe Premier in here 4-5 years ago, and had a number of problems with it (constant crashes, incompatibility with firewire cards, clumsy user interface, etc). It might be much better now, but we’ve invested a lot in Vegas, and it’s been working just fine. We’ve got 60 licenses installed in 3 computer labs. Thanks for the tip but I’d rather not open up a review of Vegas versus Premier at this point. I want to focus on getting FCP in here, in one lab 🙂 .

Thanks for all the replies, it’s been quite helpful. JR

[John Ranta]

Walter, I hear you. I like the external drive idea as well. I use Western Digital external firewire drives in my Dell video lab. They’re supported on Apple or Windows – will these be okay? 500gbyte drives run around $100, and I can fit those into the budget I think. JR

[John Ranta]

Walter, thanks for the response. I will be looking at Final Cut Express for 2/3s of the systems, but I want to get 1/3 of the systems with Final Cut Studio for my Advanced Production students.

Tax dollars are tight. Is it worth it to upgrade to 4 gbytes of RAM? Thanks again – jr

[John Ranta]

I think I discovered what I was doing wrong. When rendering in Vegas I used the Default template, not the NTSC template. This apparently is not acceptable to DVDA. I re-rendered my video using the NTSC template, and DVDA skipped the rendering process (except for the audio, but I’ll work on that). Yay!

Thanks to all who replied, this is a very helpful forum. I only wish I had spelled “Architect” properly in my header.

[John Ranta]

There must be something more that I am missing. I re-rendered the original football video in Vegas Pro, but I rendered only the 1st half of the game. The resulting rendered mpg file is only 650 mbytes, which should easily fit on a DVD (the original file of the entire game was 2.4 gbytes, which I would have thought would still fit on a DVD). When I go to burn this 1st half movie as a Single Movie in DVDA, it still renders it. What else am I missing?

I’ve been using Vegas for many years, but I am new to DVDA. Is there a guide somewhere on how to avoid this rendering process in DVDA? What would be even more valuable to me, since both of these products are Sony products, would be a way to render & burn the DVD out of Vegas, as a single process.

Thanks in advance!!! JR

[John Ranta]

Ahhh, I missed your point the first time. Thanks for explaining, I get it. JR

[John Ranta]

I was unclear in my question. The process that I am using today is:
1. Import and edit in Vegas.
2. Render out of Vegas as mpeg2.
3. Create a New Movie DVD in DVD Architect.
4. DVD Architect renders all over again.

The rendering process in Vegas in step 2 takes 2 hours. The rendering process in DVd Architect in step 4 takes 2 hours. What I’m hoping is that there’s a way to render out of Vegas just once so that DVD Arhcitect will just burn the rendered files, and not have to render again and waste 2 more hours.

Thanks, JR

[John Ranta]

Terry, thanks for the reply. I think you are right, the GL-2 outputs DV-AVI. The problem seems to be what the Firestore hard drive is doing. It can be configured to save video files in about 10 different formats. I’ll experiment with those to see which work with Vegas. JR