John Rofrano
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Steve, I agree that terminology is confusing because it’s use inconsistently. An alpha channel only affects the media that you create it in. The alpha becomes transparent and the non-alpha shows the media. A black and white mask has the ability to show one track for the white and another for the black. I think this is what you want (but maybe I still don’t understand).
What you would do is add a Mask Generator to the track with the mask. Set that track’s composite mode to Mask and the track below will show through everything that is white. Finally, make the track below the mask track a Compositing Child and the track which is two tracks below will show through the black areas. You will be left with Track 1 as the mask, Track 2 shows through white, Track 3 shows through black.
I don’t know any way of achieving this with an alpha channel.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
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You could use 3D Track Motion to make it turn any way you want. Don’t forget using Transitions to have it enter and exit the screen in an interesting way.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> they both did a widescreen .MOD to .MPEG2 (.MOD: Video: around 9Mbps. Audio: AC3 (dolby digital) to MPEG2: Video: default export quality. Audio: MPEG 224kbps)
Unless you created a custom render template in Vegas to the exact specs of the MOD file, this would explain why Vegas had to take longer to process each and every frame to a different spec. You are rendering to two different specifications (JVC 9Mbps MPEG2 vs Vegas 6Mbps MPEG2) and cannot compare the times.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> Hmph. When I open the nested project in the trimmer, and add markers and regions, they appear on the timeline but they cannot be saved to the media file. (“Either media file is read-only [or] markers are not supported…”)
Sorry that my post wasn’t clearer. My suggestion was to not use the trimmer and just use a nested project. You open the nested project in another instance of Vegas (right-click open project) and all of your markers, regions, etc. will be available to you. This may not be helpful to your workflow but it’s the only way I could think of to use timeline artifacts like markers with an event. I realize now that you want to somehow see the timeline markers from your project in the event trimmer which is impossible since timeline markers are only valid in the context of a timeline and not an event.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
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> The issue with the method you’ve suggested is that it’s relying on the the video layer with the mask to also have the video that’s being overlayed.
Not at all. What I said was to place the mask track above the video track that you want to mask and use the mask compositing mode. The video below the mask track should show through the mask.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> In all cases, the computer do not crash. If the problem is due to CPU overheating, should not the computer also crash?
No. Computers protect themselves from overheating by throttling down the CPU speed which may cause an abort in a process. You need to make sure it’s not overheating by checking the inside for dust, using a CPU temperature reporting program and/or rendering with the case open just to see if you get further or to completion.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> Question…do you think my processor is enough? It’s a Duo Core and they say it’s rated at 1.83 GHz, but I understood that to just be one of the processors speed (so combining them should be much more than that)
The Sony web site states the requirement as:
# 800 MHz processor (2.8 GHz recommended for HDV and AVCHD)
If you are using HDV or AVCHD then your processor is inadequate. You can’t add the two cores up; it doesn’t work that way. If you are just using SD files then you have more than enough processing power. You said in a previous post that you “think” your files are MPEG2. You need to “know”. MPEG2 can be HD or SD.
> …the guy I bought it from said that it should be able to handle software (all other things being equal) that requires 2.8 GHz to run it.
The guy was wrong. When software specs quote a required processor speed it is quoted for a single processor. You cannot add the core speeds together because not all software tasks are multi-threaded and can take advantage of the extra cores. While a dual-core can do more work than a single core, it does not do it faster. It still does it at 1.83 GHz per CPU. It may finish faster because it can parallelize the tasks but if any one task requires 2.8Ghz, a 1.83 GHz CPU cannot provide that.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> I’m using my Vaio AW190 to stream the file from my server which is on my home network. I just purchased the Vaio about 4-5 weeks ago and had it fairly beefed up.
This may be your problem. PC’s don’t know anything about interlacing. They are progressive devices. If you burned the file to Blu-ray or even DVD you would not have this problem because DVD players understand interlacing and will compensate for it. It would be the responsibility of the software that you are using to send the video to your projector to compensate for the interlacing. If it is not capable of this, then you should render your videos as progressive or use software that will deinterlace.
It is important to render in the same format as your target device. If your target is progressive such as a PC or the Web, then you should render progressive. If your target is an interlaced device such as a TV then you should render interlaced.
I assume that both the projector and PC are progressive mode devices which is why they are showing you the interlacing artifacts. You may be able to correct this by playing the file back with software that will deinterlace. Most DVD playback software these days will also play back files and have an option to deinterlace.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> I did a render test with a 19sec video and here are my results:
You can’t do a render test to different formats and compare the results. That’s not a fair test. Rendering to MPEG-2 and WMV are very different things.
> now can somebody explain how a free software from my camera can render the video much faster than a very expensive video editing software?
Sure. Perhaps the free software wasn’t rendering at all. If nothing was done to the video it as probably smart enough to know this and simply copy the input file to an output file. So what you tested was how fast your hard drive can copy a file.
> nothing was done to the video just a plain mpeg2 video from my camera that was used for the test
What camera? What MPEG-2 format? Did you render to the same exact format in Vegas? As I said, if you asked Vegas to convert from one MPEG2 format to another it has to analyze each and every frame and make the conversion. If you asked your camera software to render to the same format, it will just copy the frames with no conversion.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> I know there could be a lot of things causing this, but really I don’t know where to start.
I would start by calling Sony Tech support. Only they can read the crash dumps that Vegas produces. I can see that you got an access violation while reading memory which could be a bad memory chip or even a bug in the program. Sony support can trace the dump and figure out a lot more than we can. Good luck.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com