[John Rofrano]

Hi Sprague,

Sounds like you’re having a tough time there. Let me try and see if I understand what you’re asking:

> Playback in Vegas Pro8b is jerky, as in still frames. The HV30 playback is configured properly. The I’m sure there’s an internal setting on Vegas I need to address but can’t seem to find any info in the book. As I’m sure this has been covered, can someone please suggest a link which covers this issue?

Playback is jerky because your PC can’t keep up with the High Definition footage which has 5 times the resolution of DV and is more highly compressed than DV so that your CPU has to work harder to decompress it. This is perfectly normal depending on the power of you PC.

How powerful is your CPU?
You’ll need at least a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 or a 2.5GHz Dual Core to get any appreciable frame rates.

What are your preview settings in Vegas?
It should be set to Preview (Auto) but you may have to go as low as Draft (Auto) depending on your computer.

> When I captured the footage Vegas did indeed capture it as stills, “m2t” format. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated and returned 10 fold!

M2T is not “stills”. It is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream. This is the container that is specified for HDV tape. All HDV tape cameras will use this format.

> Well, now when I go to playback clips that are in SD and I’ve had no problem playing back before (current projects) I get this message: “An error occurred while starting playback – An invalid device was specified”

I’m confused at what you’re trying to do here. You’ve switched to SD?

If you have the M2T files captured then you’re all set to edit. Just drop them on the timeline. If your PC is having a hard time playing them back, we (VASST) make a script plug-in to Vegas called GearShift that will convert these files to DV Widescreen to make it easier to edit. GearShift will allow you to substitute the DV for HDV before you render so you can output HDV when needed. It was specifically designed for people who want to edit HDV on less powerful computers.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Are you sure you inserted a Volume envelope and not a Pan envelope or FX Automation envelope? Right-click on an empty part of the Audio track, select Insert/Remove Envelope and make sure that Volume Shift+V is checked. If you bring this line down to the bottom the volume should be off. If not, I can’t imagine what is wrong. I use this all the time to edit multiple audio sources for my videos.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Hi Bruce,

This is rather simple to fix once you know what to look for. What has happened is that a nested project still has the deleted file listed in it’s media pool even though it is not on the timeline. All you have to do is clean the media pools.

What you need to do is determine which nested project has the missing file. If you don’t know just right-click each nested project in turn and select Edit Source Project. Then in that project switch to the Project Media tab and press the Remove All Unused Media From Project button (it’s the lightning bolt icon) and then Save the project (this is very important).

This procedure will clean all of the media pools in the nested projects and stop the error message.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Thanks Kathlyn and Steve but it is I who is honored to be in the company of the other Vegas forum moderators. I’ll do my best to keep up. It’s great to be here in such a friendly community.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

This has nothing to do with it being a trial. Are you just using Celluloid to add Film Looks or are you rendering to 24p too? If you are just adding Film Looks, all it is doing is adding FX to the video track just as if you had dragged and dropped an FX there yourself. I don’t see how adding a video FX could affect the audio in any way.

I would try again with a new project and a different clip. If it happens again, contact VASST via the ultimatesupport email and send us the project file so we can see if we can reproduce it.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Yea glad you got it all working again.

I have Acronis Trueimage running on my PC and every morning when I boot the computer it does a system backup (just system files). Once a month (on the first) it does a full backup and then every day it does an incremental backup. This way I can restore to any day I want for an entire month if needed. You never know when you will need to restore but you can always bet it will be when you’re under a deadline! 😉

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

> John — in terms of “remaining codec files” — do you mean stray files for the Multimedia codec? If that’s the case, do I need to look for them anywhere else but the Morgan file in Program Files? I’ll give that a try, in any case.

That and in the \Windows\System32\ folder. I had a problem uninstalling the Panasonic DV codec where it would deregister itself but not remove the files in the windows system folders and then when windows would reboot, it would see the files and re-register them again. I had to hunt for them and delete them but it sounds like you may have a corrupt file.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Since other applications are affected (not just VMS) I think you are heading in the right direction with re-installing the codec. Do you have a system restore point that you can restore to? Have you tried totally uninstalling the codec, rebooting the computer, deleting any remaining codec files (because they might still be there) and then re-installing fresh?

If all else fails, you could re-render the clips using the Quicktime Animation codec. This is what I use for all of my 3D renders because it supports Alpha Channel for transparent overlays in Vegas and is very efficient for compressing animation.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I’m just guessing here, but I would think that you should be posting on the NVIDIA forums to find out how to set your video card correctly. If the video drivers are set to 16-235 there is nothing that any other software on your PC is going to do to change this. The video driver is the “last filter in the chain”. If it is clipping your luma, you need to change it there. Boosting it anywhere else will still get clipped by the drivers before it hits the display.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Glad to see you’ve got it worked out. Have you tried to serve one of these files to your Xbox yet? I would do that before you convert them all and find out that the XBox doesn’t like the format for some reason. You should be pretty safe with WMV but I would check. I’ve had a terrible time with compatibility on file serving and I’ve given up for the moment. I did not try to serve to an Xbox though.

As far as Vista64 goes, you are correct. If you are using multiple instances of Vegas, Vista64 will give you more memory to open more instances. Also, Sony has announced that they are coming out with a 64-bit version of Vegas and only Vista64 will take advantage of this so we will all need to use Vista64 to take advantage of Vegas 64-bit. It couldn’t hurt to try it now.

~jr

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