[Rob Franks]

Well I wouldn’t exactly say a “brief” look at the trial. They give you 30 days and I made heavy use of each of those days

My honest (and personal) opinion of SoundBooth is that is a pretty cheap and limited program and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As to why they came up with this program in the first place, I have no idea. They include it in CS4 as well. It’s about as useless there too 🙂
AA and Soundbooth are not at all the same program…. not even really similar. As said before AA more like the combination Sf and acid (with all the detail and functionality of both included)

I don’t remember saying anything about a common interface. Maybe you miss understood me (or I wasn’t clear enough).

[Rob Franks]

“Sound Forge is a little better integrated than what you describe. It’s certainly not as hard as using a third party product.”

Well I would argue this. I’ve found that AA integrates with Vegas just about as well as SF does…. or acid for that matter

I’m not sure if you’ve had the opportunity to work with Adobe CS4, but this is the kind of integration that I would like to see happen with Sony products. In my mind it also just doesn’t make sense to offer SF and Acid as two separate programs. With AA in multi track mode (like being in acid) all you have to do is double click the audio track you wish to edit and bang… you’re in edit mode (like being in SF) With AA running at roughly the same price as SF (maybe just a bit higher) and having the functionality of BOTH SF and acid combined, the choice is really sort of a no brainer.

[Rob Franks]

“Dynamic ram preview” does not have any effect on preview in the way that you’re thinking. Dynamic ram is a certain amount of ram that is set aside and reserved for use in Dynamic playback. If there is a complicated part of the time line that will not playback at full frame rate, then you highlight that part of the time line and then hit SHIFT B. This will load that part of the time line into your reserved ram (dynamic ram) and the successive playback will then take place from ram instead of directly from the time line. You are assured full frame rate play back with this method regardless of how complicated your time line is.

[Rob Franks]

First let me say that vegas is an extremely good audio editor as far as nle’s go. Maybe even a little too good since it kind of steps on the toes of both soundforge and acid.

I once downloded the trial of both SF and Acid and played with them a bit and what I discovered (to my disappointment) was that the three programs do not integrate with each other in the way that (just for example) Adobe CS4 programs do. I can quickly and easily feed raw files and data from one CS4 program to another which is what makes CS4 so very attractive. If Sony products took this approach then I might just be a SF, acid owner right now, but they didn’t.

What I found instead was that SF, Vegas, and Acid have enough that is common (in a rather redundant, repetitive sort of way) so that the only real attraction would be (or would have been) to integrate them to the extent that the CS4 products are. With that feature not there, I really saw no reason for me to go the SF/Acid route.

I instead opted for Adobe Audition which is more like a combination of SF and Acid with several different modes of operation Edit mode… multi track record mode….etc.

With the combination of Vegas and AA, I find there is enough of a difference between the two programs (with much less overlap and redundancy) to make worth owning the pair together. Not withstanding, AA is cheaper than the combination of SF/Acid and can probably do more.

This is all just one man’s opinion though and should only be considered as just that.

[Rob Franks]

Yes… or at least I do tend to see a difference… in quality as well as render time.

This quality slider question has come up quite a few times in the past and everything about it is as clear as mud. The one thing that is clear is that more calculations are made during a render while in the “best” position, and in certain scenes there does tend to be a positive difference when compared.

i myself no longer experiment with it however… I just default all of my templates at “best” and leave it at that.

[Rob Franks]

You can fade each item on the screen out by right clicking on it, and going to “crop and adjust”. You will see an “ALPHA” adjustment there. Key that so that it drops down to 0 alpha. Note that you will have to “crop and adjust” each item in the menu, including your menu back ground. If for example you have a button with a frame, there will be three alpha fades that you will need to do… one for the frame, one for the mask, and one for the button media. Then of course you will have to do an alpha fade for the menu back ground.

The only thing that you can’t fade is the highlight mask…. or at least I’ve never been able to figure out how. What I’ve done as a work around though is played with the highlight color so that it blends in a bit better during the menu fade.

[Rob Franks]

TSmuxer
It will allow you to split by size or by time and your output will remain as M2TS. It will also do a host of other things. Anybody that works with avchd can’t afford to be with out TSmuxer!!
There are two TSmuxer version out there. One is a command line type and the other is the GUI type. Make sure you get the GUI type (it’s easier)
Free download.
Google for it

[Rob Franks]

Use the REGIONS marker… each region you set up gives a ‘start’ marker and an ‘end’. Set these up where you want the text to be. (The text obviously goes between each set of markers) On a separate track use your text generator to create the text.

Then go to your scripts and Vegas has supplied a script called “Export regions as subtitles”. This will export a .SUB file that you will import to DVDa.

The file generated is actually in a text format that can be edited in Microsoft Word or notepad. The format of the file is:

0001 [marker start time] [marker finish time] [text]
0002 [marker start time] [marker finish time] [text]
0003 [marker start time] [marker finish time] [text]
0004 …….

The marker start/finish times are hours, minutes, seconds (00:00:00)

What I usually do is simply set up the region markers in their proper time slots and include NO text. Then export the regions this way. This gives me all the proper timing markers. I then change the SUB extension to .TXT and open it in Microsoft Word where I will add the text (I find it much faster this way). Save as a TXT file then change the extension back to .SUB

[Rob Franks]

You don’t mention too much about your computer specs which is quite important with Vegas since it is pretty much all cpu and memory driven.

A fast machine for example will preview avchd (in Vegas) at full frame rate running vista 64. A slower machine running xp(32 bit) will be hopeless with avchd.

I’m running vista 64, 8 gig ram, with a Q6600 quad core and I can preview AVCHD from the SR11 at full frame rate without issue (that is of course until I hit a transition). Granted the HF11 runs at a higher bit rate but the point is that the only REAL assist when dealing with avchd is horsepower… the more the better.

[Rob Franks]

That’s too bad.

Sony should really consider better integration with all of these programs. Something more along the lines of Adobe’s creative suites. I enjoy Sony products and it seems to me that people go for CS4 not necessarily because they like the programs, but for the hardcore integration they’ve got going on.

Thanks for the answer anyway.