[John Rofrano]

No. If you need this, just capture your PC screen while using WMP with a screen recorder program.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

Markers are unique to each video format. I don’t believe MP4 supports markers. WMV supports Command markers from Vegas but not regular markers. There is no one way that supports them all.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

It could be several things. Is the FRAPS footage compressed or uncompressed? If it’s uncompressed, you might want to compress it with a codec like Huffyuv or Lagarith to make handling it a bit easier. Are you editing this footage on your C: drive? If so, you may be experiencing disk thrashing because Windows is trying to free up memory by writing it to the swap file while Vegas is trying to read the video from the same hard drive. Having a separate hard drive for your video will help. Finally, as hard drives fill up performance starts to suffer. Freeing up hard disk space and defragging your hard drive may improve performance. You also didn’t say how much memory you have or how powerful your CPU is. I assume the FRAPS video is some huge frame size and depending on your project properties, Vegas will need to resize it on the fly which may take a lot of memory and processing power.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

> 1. Am I correct in assuming that this is the truest to true, lossless, definitive, final and absolute HDV file that I can possibly expect to get from this,… the above method, ?

Yes. Your camera shoots HDV and the file it produces is as good as it gets.

> 2. Would there be any way possible that my partner’s Mac could actually have better results (deeper colors, sharper images, etc.) by capturing to the elusive “Final Cut Pro”. (I know it captures a to .mov/.mkv, etc.)

No. There is no “capture” like in the analog days. It is really a file copy and the copy is digital so it doesn’t matter what system copies the file from the tape… the contents of the file will be the same.

> 3. We have 40 hours of a HD concert festival footage that we will be splitting editing between us both, on both a MAC and on a PC. The footage will eventually have to end up on the same machine, any tips for minimum loss (if not lossless) cross-os compression possibilities? (H264/ DIVX/ XVID)?

I have no experience working with both PC’s and Mac’s other than reading that Mac’s are extremely limited in what they can ingest (i.e., they only seem to like their own proprietary formats). I will leave it to others to comment on what format may be compatible between both (if any).

> any tips, that is, other than “get a mac”would be eternally appreciated.

Yea, have your partner to get a PC so he can work with more video formats. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

> I can use this for the basis of other changes to rotation and position, rather than having to do things manually.

Yes, the other positional attributes are:

keyframe.PositionX
keyframe.PositionY
keyframe.PositionZ
keyframe.RotationX
keyframe.RotationY
keyframe.RotationZ
keyframe.OrientationX
keyframe.OrientationY
keyframe.OrientationZ
keyframe.RotationOffsetX
keyframe.RotationOffsetY
keyframe.RotationOffsetZ

Glad I could help.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

Hi Valerie,

This script will set all of your track motion keyframes so that the Y value is zero. Just cut and paste into a file named ResetTrackMotionY.cs and place it in your Vegas script menu folder.

/**
 *       Script: ResetTrackMotionY.cs
 *  Description: This script will reset all of the TrackMotion keyframes Y values to zero
 *       Author: John Rofrano
 * Last Updated: June 14, 2009
 **/

using System;
using Sony.Vegas;

class EntryPoint
{
   public void FromVegas(Vegas vegas)
   {
      foreach (Track track in vegas.Project.Tracks)
      {
         if (track.IsVideo())
         {
            VideoTrack videoTrack = track as VideoTrack;
            if (videoTrack.TrackMotion.HasMotionData)
            {
               foreach (TrackMotionKeyframe keyframe in videoTrack.TrackMotion.MotionKeyframes)
               {
                  keyframe.PositionY = 0.0;
               }
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

This script only works in Vegas Pro 8.0 or 9.0.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

There will be some quality loss when re-rendering MPEG2 files but it shouldn’t be that noticeable with just one generation, especially if you liked the output direct to DVD.

Did you select the correct project properties in Vegas Movie Studio? I see that you are in a PAL country but Vegas Movie Studio defaults to NTSC unless you change it. If you are editing PAL video on an NTSC timeline and then render back out to PAL this could be why there is so much loss. Make sure your footage, project, and render properties all match to get the best quality.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

If you are looking for tutorials on After Effects, press the Tutorial button at the top of this page here at the Creative Cow and prepare to be amazed.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

You only get 4 tracks with Cinescore. It is not a music composition program, it’s just for generating “pre-canned” music. If you need more tracks, you should probably bring your composition into Vegas or ACID and continue there.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

> …there’s no way to “capture” using Vegas, as far as I can see.

Have you tried all of the File | Import options? Perhaps one of those options will recognize your camera when it’s plugged into your computer’s USB port? DVD Camcorder Disc might actually work depending on how the HDD on the camera is organized.

> …then if you want to edit and render the clips for making a DVD, you have to compress them again as MPEG-2, resulting in further compression and quality loss. How are people dealing with this?

Well… people who want to edit their videos and are concerned with quality should not buy MPEG2 cameras. These cameras are for people who just want to shoot and watch or burn directly to DVD. My Sony HDR-CX12 shoots MPEG2 in addition to AVCHD but it has a setting for MPEG2 at 9Mbps which is a pretty good bitrate and you really don’t loose that much quality when re-rendering. I would always shoot with the highest bitrate your camcorder allows.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com