Rob Mack
Forum Replies Created
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I’d probably say that it uses them when it can rather than when it needs to.
Rob Mack
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Nope, nothing fishy. 32-bit windows allows a program to use 2GB, made up of actual RAM and virtual memory. Bumping your system up to 3GB made it possible for Vegas to use more RAM for it’s allowed memory space, and less virtual memory.
The preferences dialog limits how much RAM you can allocate for preview but I *think” that if you set this manually in the hidden prefs then you can set a higher limit. Just don’t fuss with it in the normal prefs because the dialog window seems to calculate what the limit is.
Other things you can do are to hunt down a utility that can reset a flag in the Vegas executable to make it Large Address Aware. Essentially, if you work it right you can get Vegas to use a little more memory, and the Preview RAM can also be set a little higher. One possible problem with this, and with setting your RAM preview high in general, is that you can use so much memory that you force windows to try to swap all sorts of other processes. You’ll end up with slower performance in Vegas because the OS is too busy managing the page file.
Setting the flag to make Vegas Large Address Aware is much more useful if you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows that supports more RAM. But it’s also totally unsupported so you can’t go crying to anyone if Vegas crashes.
Rob Mack
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You say that you want to add titles after they deliver edited video to you.
I wouldn’t just run with my recommendations, just take them as a jumping off point. I’m not going to recommend that they deliver video to you in one format or another, except to say that you should specify what they deliver.
But let’s take some points here. It sounds like you want them to shoot standard def video and edit it before delivering to you. The sources are worldwide and will be PAL or NTSC. You haven’t said how you want them to get the video to you but your choices are for them to ship a tape, ship a data or mpeg2 DVD, or deliver electronically.
Shipping adds time to the process. Shipping tape means you need a deck and also time to ingest the media. Data DVDs or Video DVDs are cheap to ship but their capacity is limited. Electronic delivery ties up a couple of computers to upload and download a file. Files could be a few GB and if many people are providing files you might be better off with shipping than trying to download a handful of files at once.
We actually do this where I work for a client’s quarterly meeting in either San Jose, Texas, or Germany. We’re in San Francisco. Generally, we have a very strict deadline to meet so what we do is edit the project, add titles based on the client’s artwork, deliver lower resolution WMV files for review, and then deliver a high resolution WMV over the web while also shipping a tape or disc. We deliver both ways simply as a backup and shipping is timed to meet the deadline. If something goes wrong with shipping then the client still has the online version available.
I don’t know if I’d want to add titles and rerender an mp4 file. No experience there. Maybe it works out fine.
Maybe there’s a way for you to create XML title files that exist separately from the video. The potential advantage might be that you can create localized versions in sever languages.
Rob
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If your sources are all acquiring their own footage from camera and then editing it before giving it to you then I’d think you could specify the format they deliver to you, within reason.
As far as I know, SECAM is pretty much the same as PAL, so if you’re asking for standard definition video you’ll essentially be dealing with PAL or NTSC video. If they are doing the acquisition and editing then analog is probably out of the picture – they should deliver digital video.
The simplest thing for these sources to do would be to send you DV tapes. Then the main issue is PAL or NTSC, both of which are easily handled by Vegas. Asking for DV on tape standardizes everything and pretty much eliminates any problems of unreadable files from FCP systems.
There are down sides to this, of course. While DV on tape has a certain easy consistency, DV is not a very good format for final renders because it doesn’t retain a lot of color data. Text and graphics will suffer. Also, You have to get tapes shipped from all over the world, which might not be what you want. Finally, you’d have to have a camera or deck to play the tapes so you could recapture them into your local computers.
You might be thinking that since the video providers are all over the world that it’d be easier/more timely for them to send/make available the edited files to you over electronically. You could certainly do that but master files could be prohibitively huge. If that is the case then why not ask them to make the mp4 files for you — they have to render them to something small enough to efficiently move around the internet so why not just have them do the renders you need?
Rob Mack
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Steve,
VP8 hasn’t been very stable for many of the HDV and avchd users. Nothing but doom and gloom over on the SCS Vegas forum.
Rob Mack
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Vegas is pretty lenient and you can install it on several computers. You just aren’t supposed to use the software on more than one computer at a time.
Rob Mack
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32-bit Vegas runs on 64-bit XP or Vista but it’s not built for it and SCS won’t answer support questions.
As far as any claims of speed with a 64-bit version of Vegas, just wait and see. Maybe yes, maybe no, but don’t make money decisions on it until you can actually try it.
Yes, it will be able to use more memory, and that should help a lot of people.
Rob Mack
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The DebugMode frameserver plugin can export tiff sequences directly, or it can serve frames to Quicktime Pro or VirtualDub, both of which should also be able to make tiff sequences.
Vegas can’t do it on it’s own, and I wouldn’t use scripts for what you want, but the frame server is free.
Rob Mack
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By convention, an analog TV would always show you a 4:3 section of the picture. It would also mask the left and right edges of the picture which would vary in raggedness depending on how good all the tubes were in your TV. And they were never all that good.
Remember, this standard developed before there was such a thing as solid state electronics. TV’s had to be warmed up for a minute or two before the picture was stable, and then pictures would vary grossly from one TV to another. So there was a lot of room for slop built into the way TVs would display the picture.
Now, as to why WMP would display your 720×480 image as 640×480 while Vegas might display it as 655×480…most programs tend to try to display SD video in a 4:3 ratio because that’s what the designers think they’re supposed to do and it’s what the customer expects. Vegas, on the other hand, just sticks to the math and interprets sample rates the way they are supposed to be interpreted. Vegas has it’s roots in audio, after all, and DV is just a digital sampling of an analog standard.
In the end, the digital SD image for DV and for SD DVDs is still 720×480, no matter how the player interprets it.
Rob Mack
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I’m pretty sure it doesn’t but I’m not sure if that’s something Quicktime is supposed to provide or if Sony is supposed to implement it.
You’re the second person I’ve seen ask for it in the last 6 months. You might want to go to the SCS site and file a feature request.
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/support/productsuggestion.asp
Rob Mack