[Naiche Lujan]

I’ve never experienced that. Are you sure that the DVD has good audio?
There is no method I know of to auto-sync the audio/video. Hopefully it’s a one time deal and you can just manually fix this one.

[Naiche Lujan]

Thanks Jon, I agree about the number pad.
So I suppose if I got a 17″ notebook that would ease those problems.
Usually those come with a number pad and the screen is pretty reasonable, plus with a secondary monitor…

[Naiche Lujan]

Forgot to mention that my projects are all SD at the moment. So, I’m not planning on doing HD just yet. Who knows what the future holds, but I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it…

[Naiche Lujan]

I still use Vegas 7, so I don’t know if it’s changed in 8, but i can rip a DVD straight into the timeline:
File–>Import–>DVD Camcorder Disc…
The default location for the video file(s) will be in “My Documents”. The resulting file will be in mpeg-2 format.(From what I understand, VOB files are mpeg-2 files that have a special wrapper to play in DVD players. So Vegas just “unwraps” the files, which means this should theoretically be the least lossy method, i think.)
You can then work with it or convert to whatever file format you like.
Hope that helps some.

[Naiche Lujan]

You remember back in the old days when watching takes from a production set, you always saw that guy come out in front of the camera with the that thing that snaps? Action!

The whole point of doing that was to give the editor a cue to later synchronize the audio. While things have advanced pretty well in the digital world, I’m not aware of any automagic way of syncing the audio through the program.

Ideally, all three cameras had the same time set on their internal clocks, then you potentially do some quick math get in the ballpark of a sync point. Then it’s just a matter of zooming in on the audio track timeline and visually(looking at the waveforms) aligning the tracks, which sometimes does not end up “perfect” for me but it’s close enough for government work as they say.

On a side note, you may just want to approach the edit differently. You may just want to use the audio from the best mic, or switch back forth between audio track at your cut points. Also, if you lay some music underneath, that may help smooth it out some things as well.

Good luck and congratulations!

[Naiche Lujan]

It’s funny you mention that, because that’s what I ended up doing. I used “CamStudio” a freeware version.

However, I am now running into another problem. I import the .avi file and it seems to work fine in the preview, although there is a quirk: the color is a little wacky. I don’t know how to describe it so i’ve attached a snapshot. it seems to go off-color with some of the movement.

I think there is an incompatibility with the video codec or recording settings because not only am i getting an off-color thing, when i go to render, I get a black screen, mostly. The first few frames showed fine and then it went to black, but the other active latyers displayed properly.

I attaching another screenshot of some of the video options i have with this program.

Unfortunately, now i’m on deadline and i need to solve this very soon.

[Naiche Lujan]

Thank you, that did the trick!

[Naiche Lujan]

Yes Terry is right, create the graphic(s) outside of Vegas, maybe with Illustrator. Make sure to export the graphic with a transparent background as with png’s or gif’s.

Once imported, bring it onto a new layer and you will have to play a lot with the Track Motion(3D) and a Velocity Envelope to get the motion of it striking down.

If you plan on having a static page and moving arm strikes, you will have to also pan with keyframes so your arm image moves across the page. Alternatively you could create different layers each with the arm in a different position.

If you page is moving, then of course you will have to pan the page layer.

Hope this helps and I hope the sentence is short!

Best of luck

[Naiche Lujan]

Thank you guys.
Great newsletters, i’ll have to spend some afternoons perusing some more.
Track Motion was the missing link. I was trying to shrink the subclip so I could run the entire shrunken frame over another clip. I’m sure there’s a name for that, but you know what I mean. I already understood the Pan/Zoom/Keyframe concepts, so that just completed the picture (pun intended).
Thanks

[Naiche Lujan]

OK, will try that. Thanks for the tip.