[Matt Crowley]

You can also do a simple zoom/spin with pan/crop, although you are limited in how far you can zoom in/out.

In the pan/crop window, create a keyframe in the event where you want the spin/zoom to start, then create another keyframe toward the end (where you want the slip to finish). Then move the mouse just off the corner of the frame until it changes to the rotate cursor. Then drag in circles to rotate the frame several turns (however much you need). Then adjust the size to set the final zoom level.

Set the first keyframe to “Slow” interpolation (right-click on the keyframe diamond) to make the spin/zoom gradually speed up. Try “Fast” interpolation for the opposite.

[Matt Crowley]

Switching to GPU accelerated video editing means a major rewrite of lots of things… As Dave points out, just the decoding of AVC, MPEG etc video files to raw frame data is a large part of the editing CPU workload. There are some GPU accelerated decoders, but they tend to output directly to the video card frame buffer as part of a media player. Until we get generic CODECs that use the GPU, there’s probably not a lot Sony/Vegas can do, except write their own proprietary CODECs at some expense. They’ve got the AVC encoder, but that’s about it.

Then you have to port the effects library to the GPU – things like Gaussian blur take a fair bit of CPU power, but the GPU is designed to plough through them. Even simple crossfades and colour correction are a breeze for the GPU and free up the CPU for sequencing all these tasks and shuffling the data around.

I don’t know if GPUs are so good at ENcoding video – that’s a lot more involved than decoding because there are many decisions to take and various methods to encode the various bits of a frame. GPUs are better at large amounts of simple processing than convoluted tasks.

[Matt Crowley]

These are interlace lines, and might be caused by the media player not correctly handling your video. However, you might have accidentally used the wrongs settings and made a video that contains the interlace artifacts.

Try playing the DVD in a normal hardware DVD player and TV. If you still see these lines then you need to re-render your video with the correct settings.

You should be rendering from your 1440×1080 HDV project directly to the DVD format using the DVD Architect Video Stream preset under the Mainconcept MPEG2 render format in Vegas. Don’t do an intermediate 1280×720 render because that just takes extra time and the quality suffers.

[Matt Crowley]

As Daniel says, it’s easiest to somply overlap events on the same track to create crossfades.

For simple crossfades between events on different tracks, you don’t even need envelopes.

Just add a fade out or in on the events that you want to fade between. Hover your mouse over the top corner of an event (audio or video) and you’ll see the cursor change to a little quarter circle, indicating fade. Drag the top corner left or right to set the fade length.

All you need for video crossfades is a fade on the upper track so that the lower track starts to show though. For audio crossfades, you need to create matching fades on both events.

[Matt Crowley]

If you don’t mind doing it on a an event-by-event basis, you can right-click on each event’s effects button and click “delete all”. It’s a lot faster than opening the effects window and removing each effect.

[Matt Crowley]

Well, I just re-read the first post and I see you were using the “Make Movie” feature. If you choose the “Burn it to DVD…” option, this takes care of the rendering in Vegas, and it will get you to a step that has a “Send to DVD Architect” button.

At that point, it has created a pair of files somewhere (the default seems to be in your Application Data folder, but you can choose a folder for Vegas to render the video and audio files to.

These 2 files are what you need in DVD Architect to create a video DVD. If you click the “Send to DVD Architect” button on the Make Movie wizard, the files are automatically inserted into a new DVD project and you can burn straight away or modify the DVD project.

[Matt Crowley]

You need to “author” a video DVD using your rendered MPEG2 video and AC3 audio files. If you just burn the file(s) directly to a DVD, you’ll only get a data DVD that happens to contain some video files, and that won’t play in a DVD player.

Assuming you have DVD Architect (usually part of the Vegas suite install), then render Mainconcept MPEG2 format video in Vegas using the appropriate DVD Architect template, then render the audio separately using the Dolby AC3 format and give the files the same name (apart from extension).

Then drop those into DVD Architect and burn the DVD from there. If you browse the DVD, you should see a VIDEO_TS folder containing several files like VTS_01_1.VOB.

[Matt Crowley]

To get the picture aspect correct, just open pan/crop, then right-click on the image in pan/crop and select “Match Output Aspect”.

Depending on your project settings, you may get a small amount of letterboxing when you render to a format that’s different to your project settings. There’s an option in Project Properties called “Adjust source media to better match project or render settings” that lets Vegas tweak the cropping slightly for some media, but I don’t think it affects still images.

[Matt Crowley]

I use MediaInfo, mainly because it gives me the info I need with minimal fuss. It does have shell integration in explorer – right-click and you’ll see MediInfo on the context menu. I can’t remember if this is enabled by default, but it can easily be enabled in MediaInfo’s preferences.

[Matt Crowley]

Get into the habit of saving incrementally named versions of your project, such as project01, project02…

The project files are tiny compared to any media files so you can afford to have lots of copies – just make sure you name them sensibly and you’ll have to opportunity to “roll back” to any stage of your project editing, and there’s less chance you’ll lose many hours work because 1 file has been lost/corrupted.