[John Rofrano]

[Jeff David] “I see now that the USB3.0 is inferior to the extensive set-up you have but for us mere mortals and paupers – it is better than ethernet so I will have to use it for now.”

Let’s get the facts straight. USB 3.0 is NOT inferior to the eSATA setup that Graham has. I have an external RAID 5 enclosure which supports both USB 3.0 and eSATA and I’ve done the measurements with Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test and the throughput of both USB 3.0 and eSATA is about the same! (in fact, USB 3.0 is slightly faster) This is why I recommended USB 3.0 to you. I do all of my editing on a MacBook Pro with external WD Passport 1TB USB 3.0 drives and I have no problems with my HD projects.

Here are the results of my disk speed tests:

CineRaid5 + eSATA:

CineRaid5 + USB 3.0:

As you can see they are very close in throughput so there is no advantage to using eSATA over USB 3.0. Having said that, I am doing these tests on a Mac but the results on Windows should be very similar.

Maybe the answer lies on what type of files you have in your project. What type of media are we talking about?

What file format (AVI, MP4, WMV)?

What codec (DV, HDV, AVC/H.264)?

What resolution (SD, HD, 2K, 4K)?

How many tracks of video at once?

Your drives need to be able to stream all of the video needed at the same time. One or two tracks of HD should not impact USB 3.0 at all. 4 tracks of 4K will probably cause lag. What are you using?

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Wolfgang Blackburn] “to save yourself a little time, you dont have to reply with paragraphs of fixes, just little tips would be nice only becuase i either tried it or if i dont know then you can give me an explanation, so maybe “Have you tried doing……….” thanks”

Have you tried running a check disk on your hard drive? You may have corruption on your drive which will never go away until you run ‘CHKDSK /F C:’ to fix them. Here is an article from Microsoft about it:

Run Check Disk from a Command Line to Check for and fix Disk Errors

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I agree with Aaron. The problem is that Vegas Pro not expecting an AVC codec in an AVI container. This is what DivX and XviD did and it never played well with Vegas Pro. I would convert the files using ffmpeg as Aaron suggests to place them in a proper MPEG4 container. This is probably the best solution.

One other thing you might try is to look at the FOURCC (4 character code) which tells applications what codec was used to encode the file. You will need a FOURCC tool to do this. Then see if these is a Video for Windows (VFW) codec that you can install to handle these files. They are probably just H264. You can learn more about it here: What is FOURCC?

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[James Smith] “Currently any motion tracking i do affects everything on the video track and in order to have the number of individual motion tracked texts i want i would have to make hundreds of video tracks. “

Welcome to the world of motion graphics. ???? Usually you would do this in programs like Apple Motion or After Effects and if you’ve ever seen any of those projects, yes there are hundreds of tracks! That’s what motion graphics is all about.

You might be able to use ProType Titler as Marco suggests but if you need to keep things in time with the timeline, ProType Titler is horrible at that. It’s timeline is not synchronized with the Vegas Pro timeline so it’s only useful for simple motions.

Don’t forget that Vegas Pro supports Nested Projects. You can make a project with lots of tracks to do your motion tracking and then drop that project file into your main project timeline as a single event. This will keep your main project free of all of those tracks.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Vendasi] “The end result (AVI) was fine contrast/color wise, but I noticed it was a a bit ‘ragged’. This was hard to notice but it was definitely there. So now I’m trying another render with ‘Deinterlace’ turned off in case that’s the culprit.”

If by ‘ragged’ you mean the combing affect of the interlaced video you DO NOT want to get rid of this. It will look bad on your computer monitor because computers are not interlaced but it will look fine on a TV via DVD because TVs are interlaced and expect SD footage to be interlaced. Besides, you don’t get rid of it by turning off the Deinterlace mode… that just makes it worse!

[Bill Vendasi] “Re: MPEG2 vs. DV AVI, are you saying I can render to MPEG2 and then author a DVD with that file instead of AVI? And I won’t lose any quality?”

Yes, but it depends on the DVD authoring program. If you are using DVD Architect, it will simply burn the MPEG2 video to DVD with no rendering and no loss. Other programs might not be that smart. The video on a DVD MUST be MPEG2 so the AVI file is 100% going to get re-rendered and loose more quality guaranteed.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Trevor Smith] “My main question though is, is it even possible to render without altering the image at least a little bit? Is it possible on any video rendering program?! “

Yes, it is absolutely possible to get the same levels after rendering as before. We do it all the time in broadcast. The other variable in the mix is how you are playing it back. Try different players (e.g., VLC) and browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox) and you’ll get different levels. That’s just the way it is with video. Some players are more accurate than others. Some assume you must be playing Studio RGB material and intentionally darken it to match Computer RGB by mistake.

There is only one way to tell. Drop the rendered footage back onto Vegas Pro timeline. If it looks the same as the original, you have rendered correctly. If you really want to be sure, place the original footage below the rendered footage matching frames and use the compositing mode called Difference and it will only show the difference between the two videos. The screen should be completely black if there are no difference.

If different players make the video too dark, that’s the player messing up your video levels not you.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Manuela Porter] “…and it exports the audio in PCM, not in AES3”

That’s because AES3 uses PCM audio. AES3 is NOT an audio format. It’s a protocol for carrying audio that includes twisted pair wires and XLR connectors, etc. The problem with TV stations is that they don’t know a lot about digital formats and so when requesting submissions, they often talk in terms of the analog equipment that they are use to using (which is why the spec talks about video black and white points in voltages!) For your purpose, PCM = AES3.

[Manuela Porter] “Is there any other way to export I don’t know?”

How about using Apple Compressor 4.3? Look under Settings | CUSTOM | MXF | MXF25 fps and you will find a template called 1080i25 XDCAM HD 422 50 Mbps which should give you what you want. You can adjust the number of audio channels to fit the spec (it defaults to 8 but you can set it to 4 or 2). For $49 (the price of Compressor in the Apple store) you can have this solved.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Vendasi] “Well, it’s not solved, but I just discovered all the old posts on this issue so I know nobody wants to talk about it anymore.”

Hi Bill,

I copied this over from your other post because it’s better to keep all of the conversation threads under the same post so that people who are looking for similar solution in the future can find them. Sometimes people are just busy during the week and don’t see posts until they have free time on the weekends.

I would suggest that you use the Levels plug-in with the Computer RGB to Studio RGB preset. This will lighten your footage on the timeline so that it doesn’t look so dark when you render (assuming somehow VirtualDub captured your footage in Computer RGB by mistake)

I would also suggest that you render to MainConcept MPEG-2 instead of DV AVI out of Vegas Pro. The reason for this is that DV is 4:1:1 color space and MPEG2 is 4:2:0 so when you put them together you get 4:1:0 which is less color information than the 4:2:0 you would have gotten by rendering MPEG2 directly out of Vegas Pro since this is the format DVD needs.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Trevor Smith] “I already tried using FX Vegas Levels and Computer RGB to Studio RGB”

You’re on the right track. Where did you place these? You should be placing these as an Event FX on the event that is the picture. In other words, pictures (images) and in computer RGB. Any image that you drop on the Vegas Pro timeline you should apply the Levels effect with the Computer RGB to Studio RGB preset to make that image conform to Studio RGB like the rest of the video. Everything should look fine after that once rendered.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Andrew Blake] ” You blame it because that is the easiest way to say that you don’t actually know what is wrong?”

I blame it because I have seen it break things in the past. The K-Lite codec pack has had a history of causing problems for Sony Vegas and Movie Studio. It’s not that K-Lite itself is “trying” to break things, it’s that there can only be one “default” codec for a particular video type or 4CC so when K-Lite registers it’s codecs over the ones that Sony installed, Vegas doesn’t always work correctly. Then you uninstall K-Lite, and Vegas starts working again. You can call it coincidence… I call it “cause and effect”. I have seen it too many times and this is exactly what the original poster was describing. Very prevalent in the days of AVI files. I realize that recent versions of Vegas now ship it’s own MPEG4 codecs, so maybe not so much now with MPEG4.

If you are saying that newer versions of K-Lite do not affect Vegas negatively then I’ll take your word for it. I don’t use Vegas or Windows or anymore so I’ll refrain from commenting on the affects of K-Lite but in the past, it would mess Vegas and Movie Studio up. You could argue that it is Vegas’ fault for not working with alternate codecs, but it would definitely mess things up none the less.

~jr

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