[Ryan Mcrobb]

[Anton Louthander] “What I meant with assigning audio samples to the piano keys is that i want to, when im editing a video in Vegas, press the keys for sounds to pop up in the audio tracks while it’s on playback. Is this even possible somehow?”

Nope. Not possible. Sorry. 🙂

I just play the footage on the timeline and hit “M” for marker every time I need a sound effect, then I put them in manually, in exactly the spot they need to be. Using a MIDI keyboard with assigned samples could potentially speed things up a bit, but it wouldn’t be much, as most of your time would be spent getting your sounds in the precise spot, and edited correctly.

I looked into ReWire with Vegas, but it is not supported, unfortunately.

The normal workflow would be to render your video in a low quality(but with the same frame-rate!) and then open it in a Digital Audio Workstation. There you can do midi assigned samples to your hearts desire……….

For you, I would recommend using Sony ACID Pro 7, just because it is incredibly similar to Vegas. The shortcuts and icons are largely the same. The program has a bit of a bad rap from audio nerds(like me!) but I have used it for years to teach kids, and I find it incredibly intuitive and easy, and it does all the important things a DAW needs to do, plus many more.

I have even used ACID Pro as the DAW in a professional studio, which elicited some weird looks from the in-house engineer, but it worked as well as Pro-Tools.

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Yep. That fixed it. How I wish I had known this earlier!

Thankyou so much John, I am most grateful.
Have an awesome day.

[Ryan Mcrobb]

I would like to know the answer to this too.
I actually have a issue with wmv files turning a little orange in the rendering process.

[Ryan Mcrobb]

What do you mean by “assign audio samples to piano keys”?
Using a sampler controlled by a MIDI keyboard, yeah?
Ideally, you could just use one of the many VST Samplers that are available, and use it inside Vegas, but Vegas doesn’t have MIDI tracks so I can’t see how this is possible.

Maybe ReWire works? If ReWire works with Vegas, you use Vegas as a mater program and an audio program could be the slave, and your MIDI keyboard would control the slave program, and the audio would be played/recorded in Vegas, and the MIDI could potentially be recorded in the slave program.

I just had a quick play with controlling Vegas with MIDI, and had no luck at all. I could get Vegas to recieve MIDI messages, could assign MIDI to actions such as Play and Stop, but doing this didn’t seem to have any effect at all.

I hope that was somewhat useful!

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Well that’s easy, cheers Steve. 🙂
I have another project which combines AVCHD clips with the Canon DSLR clips. I always figured because there are different file types I should make them all the same before I edit them?

Or do I need to not bother at all with intermediate codecs?

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Never thought of that one, I will give it a go.
Cheers

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Thanks Paul, New Blue drop shadow is exactly what I am talking about.
I figured it was possible to create a drop shadow video track by duplicating the layer and making it black, transparent and at whatever angle behind the first layer needed to be, but it sounds like too much trouble, and the kids I was working with had enough trouble with keyframing their png’s.

thanks for your help, i just wish i didn’t have to fork out $130 for the plugin set!

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Hi Graham,

At it’s simplest form, I would like to add a drop shadow to a png, of say, a person cut out and hence the area around the person is transparent. I would like to add shadow to the area around the person, so the drop shadow would ignore the alpha contents of the png.

The purpose for the drop shadow is to create depth of field when putting the png cutout of a person(or anything) in front of a background.
I hope that is clearer!
Cheers

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Ok thanks, that is reassuring.
I have only recently starting figuring out trimmer, is there any resources out there that could further enlighten me on the ways this tool is used?
Thanks again

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Hi Stephen,

thanks for your response.

I have found that Vegas won’t open all .AVI files, and the ones found at this site will not open in our version of Vegas(Vegas Pro 10). https://xstockvideo.com/p2/download/0260_carameldrop.mov.htm
If you wouldn’t mind testing this yourself, you could download the larger .AVI file from this site. Only the .MOV files from this site will open in Vegas, at least on our computers.

We will probably have enough disk space to store the larger .MOV files, therefore if they are easier for Vegas to handle I will go through and download those. Our computers have 8Gb of RAM, and as most student projects don’t run for longer than 90 seconds, I doubt that will cause too many hassles. Thanks for the advice!

Also, do you or anyone else out there recommend any other free of paid stock footage sites for students? I would love to obtain footage in which the students could create varying narratives for their films. People footage on green screens, or with alpha channels would be ideal. Any ideas?

Thanks again Steve,

Ryan