Rob Mack
Forum Replies Created
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Shouldn’t be a problem but look for a PhenomII. performance-wise these should be competitive with Intel’s Core2 line.
Rob Mack
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Well, it probably means that stills aren’t the issue 🙂
Could be your chosen media type or possibly the RAM preview setting. 2GB ought to be pretty serviceable. Vegas is saying “I can’t play that” until you restart the program which usually means memory usage is an issue.
Changing the preview settings for the preview window often has the same effect if it forces Vegas to discard all its cached information
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Well, uncompressed SD usually requires more throughput than a single hard drive can provide. Are you playing off a 10k disk or a RAID array? How are you determining that the audio is out of sync?
Rob Mack
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I think your first mistake was to try to shoehorn ideas from users of other NLEs into Vegas. It’s natural to try to force a new NLE to work like one you’ve got more experience with but I think in the end this just causes trouble. I don’t know if you personally have experience with other systems or if you were just reading tips from others but the result was the same.
Vegas gives you only one timeline per project. Most other systems give you more timelines and the project file manages them all. It seems like that’s what you were trying to simulate by nesting veg files into a master project. Don’t bother with this, as you’ve seen that nested Vegs don’t help much in managing a big project. Most people get by in Vegas by just managing things at the Windows Explorer level, organizing things into folders.
Bins are useful for organizing clips and they’re easily copied from one project to another.
Subclips have the problem you’ve discovered, that they won’t retain a user assigned name when you copy them to a new project file. They also have hard fixed heads and tails, which may or may not bother you.
Trimmer regions can be a very useful substitute for subclips. You mark a region in the trimmer and then you can view those regions in the Vegas Explorer as child objects of the file they come from. If you’ve captured fairly big clips (like the whole tape or a whole interview) then regions displayed this way are very easy to use. You can drag them to the timeline or back into the trimmer. Unfortunately, you can’t organize them in bins, probably because they existed in Vegas before bins did and the bins, subclips, and nested veg features were just added as lipservice to people in forums.
Vegas works very well with DV AVI files (and has done so for years) so there’s no good reason to work with smaller proxies.
Vegas has limits. You can find you’ve got too many objects in the file, too many events on tracks, too many tracks…and you generally only find this out once the project is so big that you can’t easily pull it apart. It’s prudent to break a project into smaller phases if you can, just to keep the project spritely and responsive. For instance, you could do 15 minute segments, or you could do the entire project as basic cuts, render the vision to a new track and get rid of the old media, then move on to do the color and then do the audio.
The main thing is just to try not to choose such complex and convoluted workflows. Vegas does well with “simple”. Don’t over-think your process.
There are a few good script tools out there that can help you out. I’d go look for Veggie Toolkit because I think it may have useful features for your situation.
Rob Mack
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Yes, red frames happen when an image/clip is too large (in pixel dimensions), or when it has some other problem being decoded. Your image’s pixel dimensions don’t seem so large, though. Perhaps they’re tiffs or some format variant that gives Vegas a fit.
The fact that the images come back after a restart suggests that memory was made available for a bit. That could be a problem with the media you’re using or maybe indicates a problem with your RAM Preview setting. If your system has 2GB installed i might set the Ram Preview anywhere between 16 MB and 512 MB, the general idea being that too much or too little will give you trouble.
As far as an image file being nMB, that’s not too meaningful. If I take a huge image and compress the heck out of it then it’ll still take a tremendous amount of RAM when it’s decompressed. Similarly, it’s not meaningful to say an image is 1200DPI unless you know the supposed physical dimensions. If it’s 1/2″ across then it’s 600PX wide, if it’s a foot across then it’s 14400PX wide. These pixel dimensions are more important to know than file size or DPI.
Rob Mack
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My employer was a long time user of Media100, had a short tryst with their 844X system, and moved to PPro with AXIO cards. We’re now using an FCP system for a long form doc.
All except the FCP system could be considered hardware based. The FCP system just uses a Kona card for I/O. Vegas ought to be in the same boat there but you should REALLY get a cast iron guarantee that such a card would work before making any plans around it.
The advantage of Vegas or most software based systems lies in their flexibility. You can work with many sorts of media in the same timeline. Hardware based systems tend to have very strict limits on what you can do with them. That’s the tradeoff for the system’s render speed.
Many people think that Vegas is very fast to work with but your editors may be disturbed by the apparent lack of control. Vegas is pretty freewheeling. Vegas can do a lot of multitrack comp work and it can also do a lot of audio work. Generally, Vegas is fast to edit with but then you had to render in the end.
Vegas also usually plays nicely with other NLEs, so you could have it installed on an edit system along with something else.
We had to install an FCP system for the doc we’re working on because the PPro/Axio systems had huge memory problems and just couldn’t handle large projects (more than 10 minutes)
I’d say that if you have a very well defined workflow using just one type of media then a hardware based system would be faster. If you’re in the market, I’ve heard nice things about Edius…
Rob Mack
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No glitch. It’s been a long standing feature request to have a Source monitor. The trimmer now does that. The glitch is that the stock Vegas layout doesn’t show the trimmer, otherwise everything is by design.
Rob Mack
(near Mills College, Rick) -
If you can install XP64 or Vista 64 on a Mac and you can run that Mac up to 8GB you might still see a bit better performance out of 8.c just because most or all of the memory it uses could actually really be RAM rather than a mix of RAM and page file. And you’d be in a good position to also run 8.1 if you wanted to.
In fact, maybe installing 8.1 first would get all the other needed components like dot net and the MS sql server installed right. Then, hopefully, installing 8c would be a breeze.
8.1 shouldn’t install on 32-bit windows. If it installs by some accident I doubt it’d run.
I read recently that MS would like to migrate everyone to a 64-bit windows within 2 more version upgrades. So figure it’s 4 versions away :-). Given that, you could probably expect 64-bit Vegas to get some real flesh on its bones by version 10.1, and version 9.1 ought to be pretty usable. This is total conjecture, though.
At the moment, I’m guessing we’ll see one or two more bug fixes of Vegas 8 and then a Vegas 9 ought to appear at NAB. Again, total conjecture.
Rob Mack
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John’s generally right here that SD doesn’t look all that great uprezzed, but if you’re careful you can get a pretty good product.
Case in point. My employers finished a doc a few years ago called Ballets Russes. I think you can rent it or even stream it from Netflix.
The project was shot in DV using a DSR500 (a pretty old camera suitable for industrials, but much better than any prosumer DV cameras). They edited in Media100 as an SD project and did a lot of compositing of archival stills and film in Media100’s 844x system. In the end they output the finished project to a Snell & Wilcox box wich uprezzed the video and output that to HDCam. They then sent it off to Sundance and later did theatrical runs.
Even though it was uprezzed DV, it looked very good! Some of this was the care put into the editing process, some of it was the quality of the stills (a bit of sharpness there gives a little relief from the SD video), some of it was the effort put into the audio (they paid a lot for licensing and they also paid a composer and musicians for original work), and most of it was just simply an engaging story. If people are engaged in the story they stop paying attention to a crunchy picture. They’re less likely to ignore lousy audio.
They also had years of experience and a good amount of time and money to put into this. It’s probably their 5th long form doc. It sounds like you’re at the beginning of that learning curve so you can’t put the resources into your project that they did.
I’d highly recommend that you read the DV Rebel’s guide. It addresses your situation very well. It’s not the final word but there’s a lot of good information in there.
Rob Mack
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I’d probably go straight to the horse’s mouth and ask the Raylight folks if it works with your particular footage. Otherwise, I think you can download Raylight as a demo, no?
Many, many folks use the Panasonic DVCPro-HD cameras. The latest and greatest HDX900 has evidently been flying off the shelves as people try to make sure they get the last of the tape-based units. Or so I hear.
Raylight solves some issues for Vegas but capturing from the tape based cameras is still an issue. Some people go to the AJA or BMD cards to make this work over SDI. Ideally, it’d be good to see Panasonic provide a standalone capture tool to get media off of decks over 1394.
Rob Mack