John Rofrano
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Amanda Duffield] “I realise Vegas is not purpose built for captioning and wonder whether to continue trying to workaround it, whether to purchase caption assistant, or whether I am on the wrong track altogether and should be looking at different, purpose built, software. I use PC and laptop, no Mac.”
I tend to agree that you’re using the wrong tool. Vegas Pro doesn’t create open captions. Caption Assistant is for creating closed captions with Vegas Pro so it won’t help.
Your best bet is to look for dedicated captioning software like Telestream CaptionMaker. Your only challenge is that most of those tools are designed for the Mac (but there are some for Windows like Telestream) and cost $1,000 +.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Anna Tam] “do you mean exporting the 60i footage from the tape into 30P via a 30P FCPX timeline, and then bringing it back to a 60P timeline where both the tape footage and the 60FPS animation footage could co-exist?”
You can but don’t. Darren was giving you other options thinking that you wanted 30p but now that we know you want to deliver 60p, all you need to do is check the Deinerlace option under settings for your clip and the clip will be converted to 60p. There is nothing more to do. This is one area where FCP X is a lot easier to use than other NLE’s. Click Deinterlace, Done!
Once again… If you are planning to deliver 60p you DO NOT want to render the clip as 30p and bring it back in. That defeats the whole purpose of converting 60i to 60p.
[Anna Tam] “Also, if you don’t mind me asking, do you think all of this in vein because primarily this video is going to live on YouTube and YouTube doesn’t recognize 60P?”
I’m not sure why you think this. YouTube has supported 60p since 2014.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Normally I would suggest to remove the offending MP4 files and see if that fixes the problem but you’ve already done that and it didn’t work.
Your project may have gotten corrupt somehow. It’s always good to save long projects at several stages so that you can go back and at least recover some of your work.
Make sure that you have the latest version of Vegas Pro 11. (personally I never used Vegas Pro 11 because it was too buggy. I went from 10 right to 12 for my production work).
You can try starting a new project in one instance of Vegas Pro and then open the bad project in another instance and try and select all, copy and paste into the new project before the old one crashes.
Alternately, download the trial of Vegas Pro 13.0 and see if it can open the project without crashing. (did I mention Vegas Pro 11 was buggy?)
Good Luck,
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Peter Silie] “But then I had the idea of zooming in. So I put the entire project into an additional group”
Not sure about your bug but why don’t you use the 3D Camera to zoom in? Zooming on an entire project is really a camera move, not a scaling operation.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Ron Whitaker] “Now, John, is there someplace on the MAGIX website we can go to give our input on what we’d like to see in the upcoming release?”
Not that I know of. A new feature thread was started on the internal Sony forums. Gary Rebholz has posted on Sony’s Vegas Pro forum and Eric Deetman has posted here (Greetings, From the Vegas Team) on the COW. Those are the people you want to reach.
[Ron Whitaker] “Or, do YOU have their ear? If so, can we forward things on to you to pass along to the developers at MAGIX?”
Please don’t forward request to me. I don’t want to be in the middle (nor should I be).
YOU have the ear of the Product Owner, Gary Rebholz, right here on the COW. Start a thread with your requests and I’m sure Gary and Eric will be reading it and possibly commenting on it.
This is NOT Sony Creative Software! They were unfortunately muzzled by corporate lawyers from Sony Japan.
This is MAGIX!!! They are here on YOUR forum and you can talk to THEM directly. It’s a WHOLE NEW WORLD!!! 😀
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Nigel O'Neill] “As a semi-pro editor, feature-wise I would like to know if Magix and the creator of many Vaast products, John Rofrano, will continue to support the plugin’s, particularly the Ultimate S Pro tool set which I swear by for multicam editing.”
I can answer that. 😉
VASST Software will continue to support Vegas Pro and Movie Studio under MAGIX ownership. I’ve already started these discussions with Gary Rebholz. We’ll announce more as we know more but our intent is to continue support for our products.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Thanks for the kind words Rob. It’s nice to be appreciated. That’s what makes is a great community. People do really care. 🙂
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
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[Tim Wilson] “FWIW, our friend John Rofrano had posted this in the COW’s Vegas forum last night. He was one of the true giants in those circles, but transitioned his own work onto FCPX a while back. Hopefully he’ll weigh in with some insights that will outweigh mine. :-)”
I’m not sure that I am worthy of that introduction but I humbly accept the invitation to comment. 😉
For those of you who don’t know me, I am a long time Vegas Pro user from back when it was Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 3 on up to Sony Vegas Pro 13. I am also the developer who, along with Douglas Spotted Eagle, has created all of the plug-ins that VASST makes for Vegas Pro (e.g., Ultimate S Pro, Caption Assistant, ScatterShot 3D, GearShift, Fasst Apps. etc.). With VASST I also created DVD training for Vegas Pro and DVD Architect and ACID Pro. I create training for Boris FX’s Boris TV Continuum Complete for Vegas Pro episodes. I also developed Vegas Pro Production Assistant which carries a Sony logo so, as you might imagine, VASST and Sony have a close partnership going back to the Sonic Foundry days so I’m more than a user, I am a Sony partner. (in the interest of full disclosure)
Sonic Foundry Vegas Video (as it was known before Sony acquired it) was the best “multi-media” editor bar none. I carefully used the term “multi-media” because calling it an NLE would be selling it short. Vegas Pro started out as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) called Vegas Audio and for a while Vegas Audio and Vegas Video were two separate products until they were later joined. What that means is that to this day, Vegas Pro has audio capabilities equivalent to ProTools and some people still use it for live and studio multi-track recording. It has Audio Buses and Audio FX Sends and Automation with Touch, Latch, Write capabilities. Needless to say no other NLE can come close to this, so Vegas Pro editors do all of their audio work right in Vegas. I can route my tracks to buses for dialog, music, and sfx, and have complete control over the levels of each.
As an NLE it has a wide range of options for adding FX. You can add FX to the underlying media of a clip which affects all clips that use that media (great for initial color correcting/balancing). You can add FX to the clip itself. You can add FX to the track which affects all clips on the track, and you can add FX to the Master Video Bus which affects the whole project. So ensuring that a project is broadcast safe or adding timecode to a project to send to a customer to review is a simple matter of dropping an FX on the Master Video Bus and the entire project is instantly affected. Other NLE’s don’t even have this bus concept but because Vegas Pro was an audio editor at it’s core, and summing buses are at the core of all DAWs, it has these capabilities. This flexibility is what attracted me to Vegas Pro.
I called it a “multi-media” video editor also because I remember back in 2005 watching Douglas Spotted Eagle demo Vegas to a group here in NYC that included several Final Cut Pro editors. He had a timeline loop playing and he was throwing media of all different codecs, frame rates, and sizes at it and it just kept playing without missing beat. They were amazed that #1 it was playing native formats, and #2 they were different resolutions and Vegas simply resized them to fit the project, and #3 they were different frame rates and Vegas compensated on-the-fly and then… Then he placed an animated GIF on the timeline above a video track. An animated GIF! and it animated on the timeline with transparency!!! I think it was a flying bat or bird or something and when the bird was flapping it’s wings with the video playing behind it I think the FCP editors almost fainted. They were awe struck. They couldn’t approach anything like that in FCP which required them to conform and transform everything before they dare place anything on the timeline. Sorry but us Vegas Pro editors would chuckle when we saw other NLE’s announce new features like “plays native media”, or “now supports mixed frame rates” when Vegas Pro had been doing this since day 1.
What makes Vegas Pro so special, is that Sonic Foundry dared to “Think Different” from the beginning. Other NLE’s tried to make editing with a computer familiar so they implemented artifacts that resembled “real” editing artifacts from the days of celluloid, video tape, cutting blocks, razors, and film bins. By doing so, they severely limited the software’s capability to working within that mindset. If the first word processors were implemented the same way, our computer would ring a bell when we hit 80 characters on a line and we would have to press RETURN to go to the next line and reach for the white-out icon and rub it over the screen to fix our mistakes. Ridiculous as that might sound… That’s EXACTLY what every NLE manufacturer did!!! And we were all happy to see our familiar razors and bins and we were all doomed to never transcend the physical world into a world of what video editing *could* be on a computer.
Vegas Pro was the FCP X of it’s day. It did not follow the 3-Point Editing convention of other NLE’s (and this is one of the reasons why traditional editors snubbed their noses at it). You dropped stuff into the timeline and if you moved the end of one clip over the other it magically made a crossfade transition. You didn’t have to look for a menu item to get things done, you manipulated the media directly. It was organic. Like working with clay. This is why I loved it. (This is why I love FCP X!) Vegas Pro had a Media Manager that cataloged all of your media, added meta-tags, and made it queriable much like FCP X does today. Vegas Pro’s Media Manager even had a query that answered the question, “What other projects have I used this media with?” It was a true external database and could show you all the ways that you used that media (great for stock libraries). But very few editors took advantage of it. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the power of metadata. It was later demoted to an optional component that you didn’t even need to install.
To me FCP X is what Vegas Pro could have been had Sony not bought Sonic Foundry and focused them more on supporting Sony hardware than adding editing features that their customers wanted.
Which brings me to the insights on the MAGIX acquisition that Tim was hoping for…
Sonic Foundry was very customer driven. They listened to the community and they built an NLE for everyone else that didn’t want the razor blades and bins paradigm. They were very responsive. Then Sony purchased them and the small Sonic Foundry team was suddenly part of a major corporation and someone else was pulling the strings. It seems to me that Sony Japan had their own agenda for the Sonic Foundry team and wanted their camera equipment and formats supported (which is understandable). So a lot of work went into that. Vegas Pro got support for XDCAM and other Sony formats. I was the first NLE to be 64-bit and to support HD and 4K which was a good thing. Unfortunately, I was also the first NLE to support 3D. Nobody asked for it. Nobody wanted it. There were plenty of bugs to be fixed in the core code and new features to be added but that’s not what we got. We got 3D. This was clearly not a customer driven decision. Sony was making 3D cameras and they needed a 3D editor. The community was upset.
So… The sale to MAGIX is HUGE! MAGIX is a small company like Sonic Foundry was. Those Sonic Foundry employees that survived Sony and moved to MAGIX are going to get their spark back and I have confidence they are going to do wonderful things. MAGIX seems to be very customer focused. The Vegas Pro community (who is about the most loyal community that I have ever had the pleasure to be part of) is optimistic that MAGIX is going to continue to develop and support the most productive NLE that they have ever used with Gary Rebholz (from Sonic Foundry days) at the helm. This is a very positive development.
Vegas Pro was never meant to be used by Hollywood. (btw, it has been used on several indie films) It is designed for the lone-wolf editor. It is purposefully built to do-it-all. Need to mix 24 track audio… Vegas Pro can do that. Need to cut a 30 minute episode with 32 tracks of video, Vegas Pro can do that… need to add 3D compositing… Vegas Pro can do that too. There is pretty much no reason to leave Vegas Pro to use other tools which is why lone editors love it. An all-in-one tool for the all-in-one editor.
I edit with FCP X now not because anything is wrong with Vegas Pro. I edit with FCP X because several years ago I converted to Mac for other reasons (I develop technology for cloud computing and Windows is a horrible platform for open source developers) and I got tired of requiring a Windows VM to run Vegas Pro so I looked for a Mac native solution and tried FCP X and instantly fell in love with it because it is NOT like Premiere, Avid, or FCP 7. It is a LOT like Vegas Pro. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Tim Wilson] “…so please let us know if you see anything amiss.”
The links across the top of the main forum use to point to the Vegas Basics forum, Vegas tutorials, and other related forums, etc. They no longer do that. When I enter a post it still does but it also says Sony Vegas so the navigation is now inconsistent.. This is what I mean:
It use to look like this (and still does if you click on a post):
Now it looks like this from the main forum view (they use to be the same):
Why is this important? I only bookmark the Vegas Pro forum and I get to the Vegas Basics forum through the header link that’s no longer there.
Not sure why the forum name changed before we know the name of the new product (unless you have personal knowledge that it will be called MAGIX Vegas) because it will only need to change again when we do know the official name. Also why rename the basics forum to Sony (MAGIX) Vegas basics while this one is just MAGIX Vegas? It causes the forum to be listed in a complete different place in the main COW forum list which is alphabetic. This will make it hard for people to find both forums
Maybe the name of this forum should be Sony (MAGIX) Vegas Pro until we know the new names of everything?
…now if I can only get you to change the Apple FCPX Techniques forum to Apple Final Cut Pro X and the Apple Final Cut Pro to Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy so people over there know where to post, that would be excellent! 😀 (I’ve always felt it strange to put the word “Techniques” after a forum name. It makes it sound like a place to post proven techniques and not to ask questions.)
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com
