[Matt Crowley]

It looks like you’ll still be fine with AutoPlay on a CD. It sounds like MS were mainly worried about auto-running malware on USB thumb drives. If it is disabled by the update, you should still get a dialog asking what to do (open explorer, play video etc.)

As a fall-back, you can add a note on the CD label/insert telling users how to play the video file manually if it doesn’t autorun.

[Matt Crowley]

The OPEN command is designed to run an application on the disc, but it will also trigger the playback of a video how you’ve used it.

The SHELLEXECUTE command is probably better/safer. It will basically have the same effect as double-clicking the video file in Explorer – i.e. the default/associated player on the user’s system will open and play the video normally. This will normally be whatever version of Windows Media Player they have installed.

So you’d have something like:
[autorun]
SHELLEXECUTE=VIDEO.WMV
ICON=LOGO_SMALL.ICO
LABEL=MyCompany Product Demo

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorun.inf and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144200%28VS.85%29.aspx for the details of all Autorun features.

As for the video… WMV is pretty safe for Windows systems. Keep the frame size relatively small so that it’ll play fine at full size on smaller laptops and older PCs. Try it at 640×480 (or 640×360 for widescreen) and see if it’s clear enough. If not, you’ll have to re-frame (pan/crop) the screen captures or go larger (720p?), but be aware that the video may play back smaller than full size on small screens, making fine detail harder to see. This is mainly an issue on netbooks, but since they mostly don’t have optical drives it’s not a big concern. What size/format are the screen capture clips?

[Matt Crowley]

AIFF is basically WAV for Macs – uncompressed PCM with same/similar format support. They should both be fine in Vegas but you may as well stick with WAV if you’re mainly using PCs because it’s probably more widely supported.

[Matt Crowley]

Don’t worry about the preferences thing I mentioned – it turns out that it is enabled by default.

I’m not sure why the thumbnails don’t show in the trimmer window… clicking the button I mentioned should switch between showing video thumbnails with audio waveform, or audio only. If Vegas can handle the video at all (and it sounds like it can) then you should get thumbnails…

Do you see thumbnails in video events on the main timeline?

Note that the trimmer only shows 1 video clip at a time, not a sequence of clips like some other editors do. This makes it a bit laborious to rapidly preview and select clips from a load of video, which is probably why folks like Steve just trim clips directly on the timeline.

[Matt Crowley]

Do you mean that you do NOT see a video thumbnail strip below the trimmer video preview? If you want to see the video thumbnails, just click the right-most button on the trimmer window (the icon is two video frames) to get the thumbnails back.

You can also “animate” the frames in the thumbnail strip so that they “play” the video as you scrub/select along the trimmer clip. I can’t remember if this is enabled by default, but you can turn it on (at the expense of some editing speed) in the hidden preferences. Shift-Click Preferences on the Options menu, go to the Internal tab, type “animate” in the search box at the bottom, and change the “Animate video frames in trimmer” item to “TRUE”. Be careful fiddling with these hidden preferences – mostly they are hidden for a reason!

[Matt Crowley]

It’s an unfortunate fact of HD video editing that decoding HD video (especially AVCHD/H264) is VERY processor intensive. This is the main cause of slow previews in Vegas and other editors, and no amount of system tweaking will give much improvement. You need a modern quad-core to get reasonable previews in projects with anything more than a single track of AVCHD video. I have a similar Dell laptop to yours (with T9500@2GHz) and it’s only good enough for standard-def editing (but I also have a desktop PC).

Your proxy trick should have worked OK, but you need to choose a video format (codec) that is suited to editing – not WMV, AVC MP4 and the like. Remember that AVI is simply a container format which can internally use a variety of codecs like MPEG4, MPEG2, MJPEG, Cineform and more. The trick is to use a video format (codec) that is much less processor-intensive to decode. You can try AVI DV (the standard SD format), maybe MPEG2 in standard def. Cineform is not used as a proxy, it’s an alternative codec to transcode your HD video into to make it easier to edit directly.

[Matt Crowley]

Not sure about this plugin’s implementation (I have Movie Studio so can’t try it) but the original Yadif (which I use in Media Player Classic) can deinterlace 60i to 60p for example (instead of the standard 60i to 30p), and uses some clever edge/motion detection to actually produce a full-resolution frame from each field, or properly blend together the two fields of a frame even if there is motion that would normally result in combing/ghosting.

I’m not sure (and the help doesn’t really explain), but I guess Vegas’s “blend” mode simply slots two fields together into an output frame (potential for combing where there’s motion), and the “interpolate” mode simply discards one field, and fills in the gaps in the remaining field by copying the lines (with loss of vertical resolution). There could well be more to it though, and I hope there is.

[Matt Crowley]

Don’t worry about space at the beginning of the timeline. You can avoid rendering this as part of your video by setting the loop region.

Double-click on the empty space on the timeline to set the time selection to cover everything, then drag the left edge of the selection to the start of your first event so that the selected time span covers the part you want to render (typically from the start of the earliest event until the end of the last), then click “Render As…” (File menu) and make sure the “Render loop region only” option at the bottom of the dialog is checked. That will give you a video that only includes the timespan you selected.

The alternative is to use the power of ripple editing (as per Mike’s post above) to move everything on your timeline back so that the first event starts at 00:00:00. Just drag the first event back to the start.

If you want to have a second of two of black at the start of your video, leave a blank gap before the first event (or make your loop region start ahead of the first event). You can extend the loop region beyond the last event to make a black “tail” at the end of your video.

[Matt Crowley]

Vegas Movie Studio 9 can still be found for relatively cheap. With that spec of PC, standard definition editing (DVD quality) should be OK but HD video editing will be really slow – HDV might be OK for simple projects but not AVCHD, which requires a pretty beefy PC to work smoothly on any software.

If you don’t need HD editing, the basic Movie Studio (9 or 10) will do fine and is cheap. If you need HD capability, then you need either Platinum edition. Version 10 has some improvements in HD performance and a couple of extra features, but for getting started and simple projects, Movie Studio 9 (or platinum if you need HD) should suffice.

According to Sony’s website, Movie Studio 9 and 10 will run under Win7 but earlier versions aren’t supported.

[Matt Crowley]

I believe DVD only supports interlaced video for MPEG2, so the standard DVD formats are 720×480 60i (strictly 29.97 fps) or 720×576 50i. Any progressive footage must be encoded into these using pulldown.

Can you actually shoot SD 30p on that camera? It looks like it can do HDV at 60i/30p/24p or SD at 60i only.

You may as well shoot in 60i, edit with project setting set to match the source, and encode using the appropriate Mainconcept MPEG2 DVD-Architect NTSC preset. If your footage genuinely looks better at 30p, then try 30p for shooting/editing but encode to the same preset as above. You can also try editing/encoding as 60i.

Also try the DVD on different players/TVs to see if the stuttering is still noticeable.