[John Rofrano]

I’ve seen all sorts of problems with Vegas when it needs to call out to Quicktime or other Adobe product to handle one of their file types. I would swap the PSD file for a PNG file and see if it fixes the problem.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

ANSWERS:

1. Get Vegas Pro 8.1 and it will use all 8Gig of memory. (of course you will also need Vista 64) Also check that your processors are not overheating. It seems odd that small renders work but the full render doesn’t. You are either running out of memory or overheating.

2. Vegas can’t work with M2V files as you’ve seen. If the MainConcept codec is not showing up perhaps you need to re-install because it definitely ships with 8.0 and anything 7 can do 8 can do too.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Hey John, I get the sense that you’re in the middle of a project and don’t have time to learn something new. Been there, done that… but you might actually spend more time adjusting the old Text Generator and getting frustrated than the few minutes it would take you to learn the Pro Type Titler. It is dead easy to use if all you want to do is type some text and place it accurately.

You might want to take a few minutes to watch Douglas Spotted Eagle’s short introduction: Titling Teaser in Sony Vegas Pro 8 on YouTube. You literally just type the text and position it and you’re done (except that it stays where you put it) 😉

Take care,

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Sound Forge 9.0 can work with multi-channel files so it might do the job. Download the trial and see.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

If you are using Vegas Pro 8, use the ProType Titler instead of Generated Media Text. If you don’t have Vegas Pro 8, this is a good reason to upgrade.

If you must use Generated Media Text, stay away from the Free Form option. For example, if you lock the text to Upper Left and set the text as left justified, the text will not move when you hit enter and add a line. The problem is, once you manually move it, it goes into Free Form and if you add more text it moves vertically. The ProType Titler doesn’t have this problem.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

You should render your project from Vegas Pro 8 as MainConcept MPEG-2 using the DVD Architect NTSC/PAL DVD video stream template (whichever is appropriate for your location NTSC or PAL). Then create a separate AC3 Stereo audio file of the same name. This should give you outstanding quality on DVD and DVD Architect will not recompress the file.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Vegas doesn’t work well with editing mp4’s. It’s not really an editing format, it’s a delivery format. Use a tool like Super (c) to transcode it to a different format like DV AVI that Vegas can edit.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

> I captured 45 minutes of a tape at low res.

Just curious but how did you capture at low res? What was the format and what was the original hi res format?

> I want to recapture at high resolution. I could recapture the 45 minutes, and then select Replace to replace the low res capture with the high res capture, but I want to recapture only these 13 events totaling 2 minutes

Vegas recapture doesn’t work that way. It only recaptures the original footage and it recaptures all of the footage. So it doesn’t acre that you trimmed a 1 hour clip down to 5 minutes, it will recapture the whole clip.

The only way to capture less was to originally use batch capture and log your in and out points and then Vegas would just recapture those parts of the tape. It would still ignore and trimmed events.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

> I’ve already asked, but how did you know it has RAID 0? The only thing I can find about it is that it has RAID technology. And are you sure its the best because you said that a 1TB harddrive is not as good as 2 500 GB ones.

I cheated of course. 😉 I went to the Sony Style site and looked up the VGC-RT150Y and it said:

Hard Drive
* Capacity : 1TB (500GBx2)
* Interface : Serial ATA
* Speed : 7200rpm
* Technology : RAID 0 Technology

So it’s definitely RAID 0 and it’s definitely 2x500GB to give you 1TB. It’s perfect. That is one killer system. You’re gonna love it!

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

> I actually fell in love with Producing because I fell in love with this television show called One Tree Hill and I drove to where its filmed and got the opportunity to extra on set. And I spent more time watching the men behind the scenes, than the actors.

lol, then you got “the bug”! When I was in college I majored in computer science but I had some open electives and so I took a course in TV production and that was all it took for me. I instantly fell in love with “behind the scenes” too. Of course back then, desktop video editing didn’t exist but as soon as NLE software hit the shelves I bought it and the rest, as they say, is history. 😉 You keep at it.

> I found this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001G0MP5Q computer and it says that it has a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 (2.66GHz), 4MB L2 cache, is that not a quad core because it says “2 Quad”? Or if it was, would it say “Intel Core 4 Quad Q9400”?

That is one of the most confusing things that Intel has ever done. Core 2 has nothing to do with how many cores. 🙁 It is there second generation Core technology (the first generation was a disaster and were slower that single cores, so they came up with the name Core 2 for their 2nd generation chips). That means “Core 2 Duo” is a 2nd gen dual-core and “Core 2 Quad” is a 2nd gen quad-core. So what you were looking at was indeed a quad-core.

BTW, that is a monster of a machine but it’s almost $4000!!! That’s a long way for the $2000 PC you were looking at. When someone points to a link, I usually take that to mean that this is also their price range which is why I tried to stay around $2000 in my recommendations. If you can afford that machine go for it!

> Now, is the 1TB the same as 2 500GB Harddrives? If so, why is the 2 500GB better?

Working with video, especially HD video, requires a lot of disk space and throughput. It also requires that the disk is fast enough to read the video data in real-time (where here in the US, real-time means approximately 30 frames per second).

The way a hard drive works is there is a read/write head that moves along the length of the disc and reads or writes data. The operative word in that last sentence is “OR”. It can read, or it can write, but it can’t do both at the same time. If you have 2 drives, one can be reading while the other is writing. One of the major tasks in video editing is rendering where you read from one file, modify the frame, and write to another file. Having two physical hard drives, (either separate or in a RAID 0) gives you better throughput because you can now read and write simultaneously (not to mention that the head can stay over the same position it’s work on and not have to move back and forth between the read position and write position which takes time). That may have been more computer theory than you need but hopefully it makes sense to you.

Bottom line: For video editing, 2 500GB hard drives (which equal 1TB in capacity) are better than one big 1TB hard drive.

> From the specs for the Harddrive of this computer^ it looks, to me, like…

500GB RAID 1 (2 x 500GB SATA HDDs)

1TB RAID 0 (2 x 500GB SATA HDDs)

are the same. They are both 2 500 GB drives put together… Except, whatever a RAID is, the 500GB one has 1… lol. What does that mean?

RAID technology comes in a few formats. RAID 0 takes two discs and makes them behave as one disc, only faster! (because there are two heads remember? and everyone knows… “two heads are better than one” lol) So two 500GB discs look like a 1TB disc to your PC. RAID 1 mirrors two discs. So everything you write on the first disc, gets copied to the second for safe keeping. Because the second disk is a copy, 2 500GB discs in a RAID 1 equal only 500GB. You would use RAID 1 for an application that could not tolerate a hard drive failure like Banking where loosing customer’s data is a bad thing. It is really not needed for most video editing and RAID 0 is preferred for its increase in speed. I have my video discs configured in a RAID 0.

> I finally found a Sony Vaio with a Quad Core: Sony VAIO VGC-RT100Y Does that sound good?

That Sony VAIO VGC-RT100Y looks great. If you can afford it, go for it. The Sony VAIO VGC-RT150Y at Amazon is even better (with a 2.66GHz Quad-Core and 8GB memory for only $500 more). The Sony VAIO VGC-RT150Y is not going to run out of steam any time soon. My PC is a 2.66GHz Quad-Core with 8GB of memory so you would have what I have only yours would take up less space (I’m really starting to like those All-In-Ones) 😉

After seeing the RT series, I would buy one of the Sony VAIO’s myself. The thing about a tower is that it is expandable but the VAIO already has everything you could possibly want. It’s got a fast quad-core, it’s got plenty of memory, it’s got 1TB or hard drive in a RAID 0, it’s got Blu-ray… let’s face it… it’s got it all. Like I said, it has everything my PC has and I’m editing HD so it should serve you well for years to come and it’s a perfect size for a dorm room. 😉

~jr

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