[Rohdew]

[Steven J Casey] “I’ve never worked with a .mov file from an editing standpoint. I know it will work but can anyone tell me if there’s going to be much difference in how it looks once it’s on DVD, compared to starting out with an .avi file? Just curious because someone is overnighting me something to work on tomorrow but they only have the .mov version.

thx
sjc”

Hi sjc.

The quicktime format is just a wrapper like an .avi is. The internal encoding could be anything from uncompressed to DV encoded to totally trashed by overcompressing. My guess would be you’re OK since most people are bringing in their source from a miniDV device, thus it is just the original DV stream (no different than what you would get from importing into an AVI file).

Ultimately, you’ll just have to wait and see, though.

-Rohde

[Rohdew]

[Terje A. Bergesen] “Good question, I really don’t know. Most video editing requires a decent amount of RAM, but typically not enough to tax the adressing capacity of a 32 bit CPU. There is a possibility that this may change with HD video editing, it depends. With a 32 bit architecture you can directly address about 4G of RAM, currently probably two to four times what most people have. A 64 bit architecture allows direct access to far more RAM, but how effective is RAM in your video editing/rendering process? Assume you are currently using Vegas with 1G of memory, if you could chose, what would you do, double the speed of your CPU or double the amount of memory you have?”

Actually, they will see some speed improvement, but not from the memory side of a 64-bit architecture. The AMD64 instruction set adds many more registers (and they’re 64-bit wide vs. 32-bit wide) as well as instructions to do work in 64-bits. Some types of video encoding / decoding are very dependant on 64-bit math, and it provides the ability to optimize other algorithms as well as they can work with data in larger chunks.

All that to say – speed increases are not limited to memory usage, but also to other features that come along with the new 64-bit x86 machines.

-Rohde

[Rohdew]

[ArcEnSon] “Yes my question was for applying in/out effects
on a video track over time.
Thanks Gary”

Gary,

Many effects you can keyframe to bring them in and out. Whether you’re doing track effect or event effect, the keyframes show up as diamonds at the bottom of the settings screen. There is a time ruler right over them.

So, for example, using the Sepia plugin, you can over time change from full sepia effect to no effect by putting a keyframe at the beginning with the values set as you want, and then at the point you want it to be completely out, put another keyframe with the “Blending Strength” set to 0. This will give you a nice gradual change from Sepia tone to no effect. To change the settings on a keyframe, just click its diamond to select it and start making changes.

You can also clip the event into pieces and apply the effect to just the event you want. Right click the event and select “Video Event FX”. This is probably more common for spot changes like color correction of mixed footage. And, you still have keyframes here to make changes over time.

Does that help?

-Rohde

[Rohdew]

[mbuck22] “It’s not transparent…I need it to be transparent. (I’m still at Vegas 4 but it wouldn’t let me bring a gif in)

What I have is an image with the person swoosh logo which runs along the top and down the side. I want that to be on top of all the video footage throughout. I also want to put some animation to the swoosh. I can figure out how to do one or the other but not both.

Is that more clear? Sorry, it’s kind of hard to describe.”

It sounds like you need to split your “person swoosh logo” into separate graphics which you can then put on their own track and animate separately.

Alternatively, you could duplicate the graphic on a separate track (above the unchanging image) and use the cookie cutter plugin to isolate the section you want to change (I think this is what Edward’s article discusses if I remember correctly).

BTW, .Gif or .Png graphics files will allow you to save transparency.

[Rohdew]

[EOR] “Yes… I tried AVI after making mpeg2…. not really an improvement ..
I believe is the render settings that we can’t modify (as in Vegas…)”

I struggled with the quality back in DVDA1 days until I started created the menu movies as progressive (30p) instead of interlaced. I was having severe issues of blockiness and this resolved it, especially in the fine lines of logos.

May not be the same issue you’re having, but probably worth checking.

-Rohde

[Rohdew]

[gingles] “On the other hand, from what I gather, it’s the DVD A2 (or A3) where the real improvements have been made. So perhaps the buy is worth it for that?

Erik.”

Hi Erik.

I just finished editing my first project on Vegas 6. To be honest, the only three bugs / annoyances I encountered were:

1) Secondary monitor as preview is funky if you don’t dedicate the screen to it – its tough to get it “turned off” by the toolbar window

2) Some issues with Excalibur 4 not putting the tally in the right spot (this is probably just something funky in my project anyway).

3) Importing media bogged down my editing machine (AthlonXP 3000+) a bit. It was not uncommon to wait 20 seconds for it to finish its logging. A dual proc might help this.

Beyond that, it hasn’t crashed after about 12 hours of use.

One other note – the multi-proc rendering is very sweet. I tested the Vegas 6 trial on my work machine using the old rendertest and it finished at “best” quality in 46 seconds. Before, Vegas 5 did it in about 1:40 (if my memory serves me correctly). This is a dual Opteron 246 system (2 CPU, 2GHz, 2GB RAM box).

I would say upgrade now – you’ll find many useful features. And, if you hit issues you can go back to your 4.0 install.

-Rohde

[Rohdew]

It sounds like you’re trying to do layer masks.

There may be a more efficient way, but here’s how I would do it:

0) Load all three images into separate layers
1) Set the active layer to be your masking layer. Select all (Ctrl-A) and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C). You can turn off this layer now.
2) Set the top layer as active.
3) Then switch to Quick Mask mode (Q).
4) Paste in the mask from the clipboard (Ctrl-V)
5) Switch back out of quick mask mode (Q).
6) On the Layer menu up top, select Layer –> Add Layer Mask –> Reveal Selection (or Hide Selection if you want the inverse)
7) Notice that your top layer now has two images – one is the image, the other is the mask. You can click on the mask (Should see its outline bolded), and modify it in the main window to your hearts content.

I hope that helps.

-Rohde

[Joost] “Let’s say I have two images (textures) that I want to mix. And I want to mix them using a third image (usually a greyscale image). A white pixel means: image A is visible, a black pixel means: image B is visible, a grey pixel mixes images A and B according to it’s darkness. “