[Nigel O’neill]

Richard, you won’t happened to have installed a codec pack such as K-lite to your system, would you? Doing so can have a detrimental effect on Vegas. Check your installed programs in control panel. Are you rendering CBR or VBR? Which version of Vegas are you using?

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

[Joe Bee] ” It seems that my camcorder often likes to focus on the background more than the subject directly infront of it”

Yup, Sony cameras tend to do that, especially if there is movement in the background. It does not just affect my PJ760. It does it too on the prosumer cameras I have: FX1 and Z1P.

Manual focussing or touch focussing on the PJ760 is the way to go

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

1) Disable GPU acceleration under video preferences

2) Download and install SVP12. Vegas 13 projects should open in Vegas 12 (it does for me), and then try rendering.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

[John Rofrano] “That’s pretty poor so don’t expect much.”

John, does that mean that using the default DVD template of Vegas and 2 pass encoding is the optimal way to preserve quality when trying to preserve VHS recordings? In my case, I used DV pass through from an old DV camera into firewire to capture. I did notice that there was a softening of the overall image, but put that down to conversion/compression. Are there any tricks of the trade to preserve quality when working with VHS?

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

[Rob Lindsay] “buggy mess on my Vista 64 comp”

Rob, the best thing I did was upgrade to Windows 7. No more blue screens and sluggish performance. Vegas 11 is not the most stable to Vegas versions and is prone to regular crashing, but I have found that if I open a project, close it, then reopen it, it seems to run more stably * go figure *. At one point it used to hang when scrubbing on the timeline with the mouse, and Ctrl-S and auto-save have saved my b*tt on many an occasion. The latest version of Vegas 11 has solved most of these issues.

I am still on Vegas 11 as it works best with my plug-ins.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

[Jim Murphy] ” I was hoping there was a simpler fix”

Jim, after removing Vegas, have you tried creating another user account on your PC and seeing if Vegas installs then under those credentials?

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

[John Rofrano] “BTW, that was my entry into Vegas. I too used Pinnacle Studio 7 and when I couldn’t get a project to render and the Pinnacle support told me I would have to start over, I told them… well if I have to start over… I’m starting over with someone else software “

Wow, me too, John, but I started with Pinnacle 8 and had just finished editing a wedding for a friend. After 50 hours of editing, the project refuse to render. I tried importing it into Avid Liquid 7 with mixed success, but like you, ending up starting over. After another 50 hours of editing, my friends had a freebie DVD and my editing journey began with Vegas.

Robert, I have had success editing with Pinnacle, but I found that it was too flaky and unpredictable. Too many times have projects gone down to the wire. The closest was a 2 hour in-house video for work. We had rendered out the first hour to DVD without problem and was able to start showing it, but when I checked the 2nd hour’s edit, there was missing audio, so we rendered to tape straight back into the camera, and played the 2nd hour off the camera. We were rendering as the first hour was showing. We made it with zero minutes to spare and after some quick cable hook-up magic, connected up the camera to the AV projection equipment. Talk about going down to the wire. I should have learned my lesson, but it took 2 near disasters to get me to switch to Vegas.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

Debbie

Much of the assistance I provide to some Vegas editors in my local area relates to colour grading. Having a high quality professional monitor is essential. Editing using a TV as a monitor or an over head projector is not ideal and will result in discs being returned and poor colour quality overall.

What John did not mention is that even the colour of the light used in your editing room can affect you perception of colour, as your brain will adjust automatically to see the ‘correct’ colour, but our cameras don’t lie (if set up correctly). Setting up your camera during the shoot with a simple manual white and black balance (if your camera has such capability), goes a long way to cutting down work in the edit stage.

Debbie, I do a lot of live video work which I then edit and deliver to the performers later on. In terms of showing the final work, I sell the performers a DVD but I also give the show’s producers an MP4 file created by the free Vegasaur Youtube plugin. They then play that back through a computer connected by HDMI cable to an HDMI projector in a theatre to all the performers. It’s much better than DVD and pretty close to bluray. It might help to ask the festival producers next time if they will accept file delivery.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

Thanks, John and Scott. In short, SSD’s don’t improve render times.

Merry X’mas and thanks for your sage advice over the past 6 years. Without it, I probably would have ended up using Hideous (Edius) or ** shudder ** Adobe Premiere.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

[Scott Francis] “Just added one to my late 2011 MBP”

Scott, have you experimented with rendering on an SSD only setup?

[Scott Francis] “and it is like a new computer.”

My work has just started replacing our PC’s with laptops containing SSD drives. It is an i7, but I have to say the boot time is about the same as on my old PC because of all the corporate cr*p they have put on it, but I shudder to think what the boot time would have been with a standard HDD.