[John Rofrano]

[Rich Kutnick] “…seeing that I already purchased Production Assistant 2 from VASST “

Hi Rich,

Sony Vegas Pro Production Assistant 2 was a Sony product. You did not buy it from VASST because VASST never sold it! We created the product for Sony but it was exclusively a Sony branded and sold product powered by VASST Software technology. It would be impossible for VASST to offer upgrades since we don’t have access to the Sony sales records to validate who purchased it.

VEGAS Production Assistant Pro should be a MAGIX product. They should have the Sony sales data to validate previous customers because they maintain your license keys in their database. I’m not sure that they understand this.

Let me look into this and I’ll get back to you because that email statement is very confusing.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Rich Kutnick] “2) Will VASST Event Tools work in Vegas 16? If so, how do I set it up to show in Vegas 16?”

Yes, just download the latest installer from the Download page of the vasstsoftware.com web site for the latest versions.

[Rich Kutnick] “3) I saw a thread elsewhere where John Rofrano noted that VASST Production Assistant 2 (by VASST) will NOT work in Magix Vegas editions, BUT that Magix was selling a new, compatible version. Unfortunately, I could not find this program on the Magix web site. HELP!!”

This is the product page you are looking for: MAGIX Production Assistant Pro

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I’ve never had any problems like this with my Apple TV. I would recommend that you check the Apple TV for software updates and make sure that you are running at the latest levels of tvOS.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I have the boot drive on my 2015 MacBook Pro encrypted with File Vault and I see no degradation in video editing performance whatsoever. I do not encrypt my external drives. I see no need to.

Here is my Disk Speed Test results from my encrypted boot drive:

That is plenty of bandwidth for me.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I don’t have an answer but I can explain what’s probably going on. The captions are not part of the video, they are added by the playback device as a text overlay. As such, VLC is probably capturing the video frame buffer which does not have the captions.

You would need a program that is external to the player that is actually capturing the screen of your Mac so that the caption overlay shows up. I’m not aware of any program that will do that, especially in sync with a video playing.

Maybe you can use the Mac Automator to create a workflow that can simulate taking screen captures while advancing the video at regular intervals?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Amy Wilson] “I would just like to know if there’s some road block I’m not aware of that is going to make it not worth doing. “

That depends on what version of Mac operating system you want to use. The last version that supported the 2009 Mac Pro is OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The next two versions: macOS 10.12 Sierra and macOS 10.13 High Sierra, require the 2010 Mac Pro as minimum and the “soon to be released” macOS 10.14 Mojave lists the 2013 Mac Pro or 2010 Mac Pro with Metal capable graphics card as the minimum requirement. It is anyone’s guess if you can hack it to install on a 2009 Mac Pro. Out of the box, El Capitan is the last version of OS X that installs by default.

[Amy Wilson] “Or is this possibly something that could be a great computer for a few years more?”

Without knowing what editing software you use it’s hard to say if upgrading a 2009 Mac Pro will last “years” running on El Capitan. As long as you don’t mind being a few years behind on OS updates. My 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core is stuck on El Capitan. I can’t upgrade it past that. My son uses it for photo editing but not video anymore because it can’t run the latest Final Cut Pro X. My 2010 Mac Pro is stuck on Sierra because High Sierra broke support for DVD Studio Pro which I need to make DVD’s. Backward compatibility doesn’t seem to be a word in Apple’s dictionary. ☹

Here are the upgrades I made to my 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core w/24GB memory:

Added a PCIe USB3 card with 3 ports
Added a PCIe SSD OWC Accelsior E2
Added an ATI Radeon HD7950 Apple Edition

The PCIe SSD card is the single best upgrade for increased speed. It gave me 6GB transfer rate instead of the 3GB I would have if I placed it in an existing drive bay. It also gave me an external eSATA port for my external RAID array. The next big speed update was the USB 3.0 ports. They are 10x faster than USB 2.0 and I can actually edit HD video in FCP X directly off of external USB 3 drives.

This is the problem with these old machines… they use older PCIe technology so it doesn’t matter what new parts you buy, they are limited by the old buss that they plug into. My ATI Radeon HD7950 supports PCI Express 3.0 but the 2010 Mac Pro motherboard only supports PCI Express 2.0 so the card cannot run as fast as it was designed.

You will be limited by the OS that you can use and whether your software supports that OS or whether (like me) so stick with an older macOS version. SSD’s are cheap. I would start by adding once and seeing what you think. It gives an amazing boost in performance. I have not tried the USB-C PCIe cards so I can’t say how well they work (if at all). I’m guessing that they are only USB protocol. If you want Thunderbolt you might need to specifically buy a PCIe Thunderbolt card. I don’t have any Thunderbolt devices but I have tons of USB 3 and eSATA devices so that’s why I added those cards. Having an SSD and USB3 really breathed new life into my 2010 Mac Pro. There is probably plenty of life left in your 2009 depending on what software you plan to use.

Hope that helps,

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Boris FX has the Particle Array 3D particle emitter as part of Continuum that is outstanding for this.

Here is a tutorial I made for Boris FX:
https://borisfx.com/videos/particle-array-3d-title-wipe/

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Martin Seemungal] “If I do run into lagging and editing in 30p helps then would I be able to switch back to 60i before I render? any issues with that?”

No issues but also no need to do that. Just render to 60i from your 30p project and check for any problems in the render to be sure. It should be fine.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Martin Seemungal] “I have dropped it into the 60i timeline with no issues (other than the usual lagging problem) but my camera material has always been 60i. So this is good to know since I am switching to 30P.”

If you are having lag issues then I might suggest changing your project to 30p. There is always a trade-off but it’s hard to edit with laggy footage so you might try it the other way around. As I said, 30p and 60i are the same frame rate so there shouldn’t be any surprises when rendered. The only issue I’ve seen is adding images with thin lines that look perfectly fine at 30p but flicker at 60i. You wouldn’t catch this problem until you render to 60i if your timeline was 30p but… I hate laggy editing so I would switch to the a 30p timeline.

[Martin Seemungal] “My ‘full resolution render quality’ is set to: ‘good’ should I change that?”

No, Good is usually fine if you are not resizing (e.g., 1920×1080 project -> 1920×1080 render). The only time you would change it is if you are rendering to a different resolution, then Good probably won’t be good enough and you’d want to use Best so that it uses a better (but slower) algorithm for resizing. (I believe Good uses bilinear and Best uses bicubic if I remember correctly)

[Martin Seemungal] “Motion blur is set to : Gaussian
Deinterlace is set to: blend fields.
Any issues with those settings?”

No, those are fine.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I would work in a 60i project this way there are no surprises when you render because you will be rendering to the same format that you are editing in. It shouldn’t make a different because both formats are 29.976 fps so the timing will be the same either way, but I like to edit in my delivery format if at all possible just to be safe.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com