[Rick Mac]

Dave,

Sorry, I keyed in on the blurry part of your question and overlooked the jumpy part.

Could be many things. Could be a program running in the background such as antivirus scanner, adware scanner, that is system resourcesand interupting things.
Could even be a virus causing trouble.
There are ways to tweek XP for video editing.

I would first try shutting down virus scanners and a lot of software that the computer maker might have installed for you.
You can create a custom profile for your computer just for editing that will allow it to run lean and mean.

Here is a link to a very Tutorial fortweeking XP for Video Editing.

https://www.videoguys.com/WinXP.html

This is starting point. No magic bullet. But I would bet your problem is a lot of stuff running in the background.

Perhaps others have some ideas.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

[MagicMountainMan] “How are the audio effects from New Blue? Are they any good? Or would I be better off just getting Sound Forge?”

Well, NewBlue Effects are just that, effect processors, such as eq’s, compressors, etc. They work within the Vegas interface. They are quite useful. Soundforge is a full blown audio editing program. It has some functions and features that you do not get within Vegas. My favorite trick with Soundforge is to highlight a section of audio within the Vegas timelime that I want to process, send it over to Soundforge and process it, then save it, and when I go back to Vegas the changes are already applied to the event.

Vegas will allow you to export a event (clip) out to your just about any audio editor for tweeking, not just Soundforge.

NewBlue has a lot of templates for it’s processing effects to get you going fast at sweetening your audio.

The NewBlue Video effects are pretty cool to.

Perhaps if you told me what you want to do with either NewBlue or Soundforge I could give you better recommendation.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

Dave,

Did setting your preview settings to full instead of auto give you a sharper preview?

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

Here is the link to the Free XVID Codec:
https://www.xvid.org/Downloads.15.0.html

Here is the link to a free format converter:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/Any_Video_Converter__d5692.html

NewBlue FX are pretty cool. I use them a lot.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8 does support MPEG-4
import and export.

Not sure if it will work but you might try downloading a
free MPEG-4 Codec such as Xvid and see if Vegas Studio 6 will then let you render using the Xvid codec.

You might also look into a free format converter program that could transcode your edited video from avi to mpeg-4.

If it were me, I would just go ahead and purchase Studio 8.
But if money is tight you could try the free route.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

Dave,

Do you have your preview window quality settings set to Preview Full?
If it is set to Preview Auto your preview will look a bit
soft. I often switch preview quality settings. If I want a fast framerate preview I will set my settings to a lower quality. If I’m working on graphics I’ll go with Best Full while working on them.

It’s an easy thing to overlook after an upgrade.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

[Ralph Hajik] “When you and Ed get a chance, maybe we’ll all get together for a friendly game of golf.”

That would be great.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome.
It has been fun getting to know many of you.
We have one of the best groups on the Cow.

Regards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

Vegas is primarly designed to capture from your computers firewire port. I’m suprised that you are able to capture anything at all in Vegas with it.

Your choices for capture with Vegas are:
1)Firewire – directly to and from your camera.
2)Analog to Firewire Converter such as the Canopus ADVC110.
3)Decklink Card.

Now, what you may be able to do is capture with your cards capture application and Vegas may be able to work with at that point. The other hurder here is if Vegs can render out to the codec that your card supports for playout.

File sizes are quite small in Vegas when capturing
either DV-Firewire or HDV-firewire.

If you really want to edit in Vegas I would suggest that you do your captures via firewire.

Rgeards, Rick.

[Rick Mac]

You can speed up your clip in two ways. First you can add a velocity envelope to the track.

Second you can go to the end of your clip and hold down the CTRL key and resize the event. As you make the event smaller, it will go faster.

For Velocity envelopes, select clip, then (shortcut key V) adds the envelope line to the track, raise the line to the top for maximum speed.

You can use both methods together for faster speedups.
I beleive both methods used together will give you 12X speed.

If that’s still not fast enough, render the clip to a new track and do these steps again.

As for the best render settings, I’ll leave that to my fellow Cow Brotheren who are HDV Saavy.

Regards, Rick.