Rob Strobbe
Forum Replies Created
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Another way: Move around the timeline until you find the frame you want to use for a thumbnail. Then, in the Project Overview, right-click the button you want to change and choose Set Thumbnail from View.
Rob
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You’ve already found the right answer: Vegas Movie Studio doesn’t make use of TV tuner cards. It captures from OHCI-compliant / firewire devices.
Use the software that came with your tuner card to record / capture video and then bring those files into Vegas Movie Studio.
Rob
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Is there anything important outside the safe area? Anything that you feel your audience needs to be able to see?
If not, don’t worry about it. I guarantee you that 99.9% (that’s a rough estimate, by the way) of DVD menus have some “hidden content” that is outside the safe area. This is simply something that DVD producers (and video producers in general) have accepted — not all of the recorded content is going to be seen on most televisions. They simply do their best to make sure that the important content is.
In short, don’t fix it if it ain’t broken.
Rob
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Make a time selection in Vegas Movie Studio before you launch the Cinescore Studio plug-in. Cinescore Studio will base the length of the music piece on the length you selected.
Keep in mind that it adheres to a few “rules” of music regarding beats, measures, etc, so the resulting length may not be exactly what you chose, but will be close. If the resulting audio is not exactly the length you need, you can adjust its playback rate on the VMS timeline (Ctrl+click an edge of the event and drag it longer or shorter). In most cases, the difference in length is going to so small that you’re not going to notice any distortion.
Rob
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What happens if you play the DVD in your computer?
Only thing I can think of that would cause something like that is maybe if you’re playing a PAL DVD on an NTSC system or vice versa.
Rob
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If there is a Vegas Pro 9 out this year, it will probably be released in about a month during NAB. Traditionally, Sony has been offering the upgrade for about $150 for the first 30 days. That’s slightly less than you would pay to upgrade from Vegas 7 to Vegas Pro 8 with their current 35% off sale.
Rob
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Any chance you hit Ctrl+Shift+E? This toggles the display of envelopes.
Go to View > Show Envelopes and make sure that’s checked. While you’re there, go to View > Video Envelopes > Velocity Envelope and make sure that’s checked, too.
Rob
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Put all your text on one track. Use three events.
First event: Only the first word.
Second Event: First and second word.
Third Event: All three words.Put a fade on the first one. Then overlap the second with the first and the third with the second. Each word will fade in. (In the second and third events, there’s really more than one word fading in, but the “extra” words are simply fading into themselves.)
Tricky thing might be getting the positions to match since the placement option for the text tool is kind of klutzy. Easiest solution would be for all three events to have all three words and use Pan / Crop for each one to show only the words you want for that event. Be sure to set both “Maintain Aspect Ratio” and “Stretch to fill frame” to NO.
If you want to save yourself another track, take that graphic into a graphics application and add the white background there.
Rob
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“BTW, I can get the Movie Studio software for around $70 instead of the $250+ to upgrade my Vegas 4.0”
Though it’s not definite, there’s a good chance that Vegas Pro 9 will be released around the third week have April. It’s “about that time” for a new version to come out, and that’s when the NAB conference is.
Sony usually offers a $150 upgrade for the first 30 days. That would bring the difference to $80, which I’d say is pretty darn good.
“Can I uses the Creative Cow forums for Movie Studio questions?”
Happens all the time, and I’ve never seen any objections. Just be sure to mention that that’s what you’re using so people can keep their answers relevant to you.
“ased on reading a couple of reviews for Movie Studio it looks like a sub set of the real Vegas.”
Guess that depends on what you mean but “subset.” It’s a stripped down version with a bit more “hand holding” than Vegas Pro, if that helps answer your question. The interface is pretty much the same.
For a bit more info, see this list of 10 differences between Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio I wrote a couple weeks ago — or Sony’s own Vegas Family Comparison.
Rob
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“I’m not quite sure I fully understand this velocity thing though.”
No worries. It behaves kind of funky, and the behavior you’re having trouble will surprise even someone who’s been using Vegas for months or even years. When you’re ready to confront it again, start a new thread with “velocity envelope” in the title, and I or someone else will be along to see if they can make it clearer.
“for instance, i tried right clicking on the clip > properties > playback rate”
This does exactly what you think it does. Higher playback rate runs it faster, lower playback rate runs it slower. In fact, one way to get really fast or really slow playback is to use both the playback rate and a velocity envelope together. (Velocity envelope has a max of 3x, playback rate has a max of 4x. So using them together speeds something up 12x.)
You can achieve the same effect by holding the Ctrl key and clicking and dragging the edge of an event — longer event runs slower, shorter event runs faster.
As for Vegas lagging, that can depend on a lot of things. First and foremost is, yes, whether or not your computer sucks. 😉 What kind of processor and how much memory does it have? Honestly, it doesn’t really take a lot to run Vegas (I have a desktop and a laptop, and my desktop machine is olllllllllld, but I get along okay). But faster and bigger is always better.
Other things that will affect how well Vegas runs are:
1. The number of programs running in the background. Even if you don’t have any windows open, there are likely several programs running that you don’t see — maybe anti-virus software, device helpers waiting to see if you need help with a device, IM apps waiting to see if you want to IM. Most of these will have icons on the lower right of the taskbar. Right-click any of them, figure out what it is, and decide if you need it running while you’re using Vegas. If not, most have a Quit or Exit option. You can also hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Windows’ Task Manager, but it’s less obvious what each item there is.
2. The kind of compression being used by the videos on your timeline. Some are more compressed than others, and Vegas has to uncompress those frames to memory before it can display them. That’s actually a fair amount of work. Things slow down especially at a transition because Vegas is not only decompressing and displaying the video, but it’s creating “new” video (the combination of your two events) on the fly. When you use video that’s not so highly compressed, Vegas can concentrate on what it was made for — creating those new frames. Do you know what type of compression (or “codec”) being used by the files on your timeline?
3. Similar to above, if your videos use a different framesize (also known as resolution) than what your project properties are set it, Vegas has to resize everything as well. For best results, be sure that these are the same. For example, if the videos on your timeline are 800×600 (not likely, but just go with it), and your project is 720×480, changing the latter to the former will help speed things along.
4. Regarding memory, one possibility is that Vegas is reserving too much for something called dynamic RAM preview. Basically, this is a way of getting Vegas to render a segment of your project directly to memory so you can see it play in realtime (or close to it). It’s especially good for previewing parts that require a lot of number crunching from Vegas — for example, transitions. 😉 The catch is that there is a setting in the preferences dialog for how much memory Vegas should use for dynamic RAM previews. What doesn’t occur to a lot of people, though, is that Vegas is actually reserving that amount, which means it will ignore that much memory for all other purposes. Not there, doesn’t exist, not use for things like regular previewing.
Item #4 may be moot, though, since the default setting for dynamic RAM preview is actually rather small, so unless you’ve changed it that’s probably not it. If you want to check, go to Options > Preferences > Video. If you don’t plan on using RAM preview, setting this value to 64 will get you release the most amount of memory to standard operations. (Don’t set it for less than 64.)
Now that I’ve said that, though, you may want to actually put dynamic RAM preview to use. You can make a selection of your transition (either by clicking and dragging on the timeline from one side of the transition to the other or by double-clicking within the transition) and then force a RAM preview by hitting Shift+B. Vegas will slowly move through the selection to build a RAM preview. When it stops, you can hit the Play button to see the transition as it was rendered.
If Vegas stops doing the initial render to memory and changes the size of your selection, that means that the dynamic RAM preview setting is not large enough to do the whole selection. Try increasing the number in preferences.
Isn’t this fun?
Rob