[Norman Black]

I don’t see “Slide” in Legacy text. I think you are talking about Protype titler or Titles and Text. Which one? They both have a number of Slide collections. Which one?

I tried a couple. Slide and Slide Right. No green lines. Vegas 13.

If you are using Titles and Text. Try turning GPU off and see if that helps. In Vegas 12 T&T is GPU accelerated.

[Norman Black]

[Stephen Mann] ” It’s strange that Microsoft would advise removing an update, but they have done this before.”

Since the new update replaces the old, the only reason AFAIK is, what if someone uninstalled the new update. Then the old one is still there and that update has a potential BSOD at boot issue. By manually uninstalling, then a faulty update is not lying in wait if someone manually uninstalls the corrected one.

[Norman Black]

[Graham Bernard] “It would be advantageous if the Workspace could have an option to MODIFY the darkness, and give the User an option”

Adobe did this in Photoshop a version or two ago. They had the lighter color scheme and then defaulted to a darker one, but gave options to choose the previous lighter one and an even darker one. Whatever, it has a few choices. The “classic” and darker ones.

I’ll submit a feature request for something like this. It should be really trivial to implement this. Since Vegas can work with their scheme or the system scheme, they have variability already implemented so a little tweak for additional Vegas schemes should be easy.

[Norman Black]

I looked at the original thread and downloaded the file you uploaded and here is a screen shot of using avidemux to convert the QT MOV file to a generic MP4, which Vegas uses its own internal decoders.

I verified that with the original file Vegas was using Quicktime, and the file output from Avidemux, Vegas used its own internal decoders. In theory you should get a little better performance from the internal decoders.

No transcoding was done. The source media video and audio was simply re-muxed.

[Norman Black]

[Scott Francis] “I use handbrake all the time, but the encoders are more for smaller size than quality.”

I gotta disagree there. x264 is about the best video encoder out there. Quality or size. Whatever you are going for. Audio is more problematic with Handbrake as no PCM output option is available.

Of course one may not want to edit AVC/H.264 video as it can be slower. Encoding to Baseline profile solves that.

[Norman Black]

The only thing I can think of is to turn off the “Use Vegas color scheme” option in preferences and change your Windows theme to get what you want. Of course, this affects all application windows.

[Norman Black]

You might look at Cliptoolz convert. It is a ffmbc frontend utility. There are a number of ffmpeg/ffmbc GUI front ends out there.

It may be more work, to learn the options, but you can use ffmpeg directly. The sky is the limit there. Everything is available to you.

You might be able to use the free GoPro studio to convert to Cineform and edit that. The free GP Studio does not read everything but Cineform is an easy edit.

Are the source files ProRes as stated in your message title? ProRes should edit in Vegas. Most MOV should as well but you need Quicktime installed. If they are ProRes, then you will want to convert to some other type of high quality intermediate.

If not an intermediate format, then an mpeg-2 format like HDCAM MXF, or HDCAM EX, should be an easy edit.

[Norman Black]

Now that I think about it. I would implement this by doing…

When multiple keyframes are selected then draw a transparent window with hatch lines over the mask graphics display area. This makes it clear that those controls are no longer valid. If the user was clicking away and did not realized they multi selected, at least there is something very visual that something is different. They can RTFM to figure what the hatch means.

Then in the text panel the usual can be done. Conflicting values can be blank/empty entry fields and users can enter values that apply to the multi-selection. The user can RTFM to learn that they use the text entry panel in multiple selection mode.

The current UI is actually bad, IMO, in that when you have multiple selection, it provides no indication changing a value will not affect all selected keyframes. It is also not perfectly obvious which keyframe in the multi-select will change. Only with trial and error does one learn what is what.

[Norman Black]

I know what you are asking for and which specifics. I am just point out that UI design is looked at in an orthogonal manner. Just saying I only want to change certain ones does not cut it. If this were implemented then how you you indicate to the user which things are allowed to be changed and which not.

Your screen show shows text entry fields. I already stipulated in a previous post that there are mechanisms that can work for these types of UI items. How are graphic indications shown?
Consider these screen shots.
mask1.jpg
mask2.jpg

Two mask keyframes, both different. If your app allows you to change parameters of multiple keyframes then how do you display the differing mask values in graphical form. Which are mask, positive/negative, feather type, feather amount slider. Not an easy answer and it should be obvious to the user what is going on and what is allowed or not. Notice that the text fields panel does not need to be displayed. I personally normally leave it off for more screen real estate. One cannot ignore that fact that the text info panel may not be available.

I agree that a multiple select and letting us change a text entry field is about the simplest way to seamlessly integrate into the existing user interface design a way to change some parameters. One can always add a new dialog to let one do such changes.

This change is a special mode, but at design discussions, consistent orthogonality is a common theme. Special modes are not orthogonal and one then has to deal with different application behavior in a mask multiple select in the text and graphics views when something is changed in text or graphics.

But that is me and I do not have to deal with the average Joe user out there.

Remember my comment about the FX bypass button. That is a sticky button. It sticks across projects and across invocations of Vegas. People click that and then forget they clicked it, or expect it to not be sticky, and end up in the forums, or contacting support, asking why are my FX no longer working. Ctrl-Z don’t help in all UI cases.

[Doug Jackson] “Sorry, but I don’t get how adding this feature is somehow an additional support burden. If your logic was applied, I doubt there would ever be many new features rolled out because, well, they would be too difficult to support. “

Well if you take my statement to a reductio ad absurdum argument, I guess to can conclude that. Or turn my statement to 11, to analogize Spinal Tap.

I clearly said “some hammers”, and yes EVERY feature added to programs has costs. Sometimes you anticipate additional support events, which are a cost of sorts. You always weigh cost benefit, make your best educated guess, and you may or may not go forward. It is a business trying to max profit after all.

You have to consider who you are selling to.

Look at Vegas 13. They added the new toolbar with the edit tool modes. The functions of this Vegas could already do with keyboard modifiers and/or shortcuts. So why add a new feature that does not add new functionality. Maybe because the existing functions not obvious but the new tool modes are.

All developers know users for the most part do not read help files, and the Vegas help index is pretty good, and they certainly do not read manuals. RTFM as we like to say…in private of course. 😉

[Norman Black]

[Doug Jackson] “You display to the user nothing, blank out the field, just like when in an application where you select 3 lines of text with various font sizes. The font size goes blank.”

That works for UI fields with text entry. In this context what about the buttons for positive/negative mask. The buttons for the type of feather and the feather amount slider. Not to mention the mask itself. What if they differ between keyframes. What state should they be displayed in when multiple keyframes are selected.

I suppose one can hide disable those items in that state, but then come the inevitable support question about why has “…” stopped displaying. How many time has I read in forums the last year and a half about people saying FX not longer work and they has the FX bypass button clicked.

There are some hammers you do not want to hand to users to beat you with.