Stewart Bourke
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Interesting – I am a registered owner of VMS, but have not received such emails – maybe it only relates to pro users… pity, I’ll drop a note to Sony to see…
thanks for letting me know
Stewart Bourke
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Would anybody know if there are likely to be any VMS to pro upgrade ‘specials’ around this release? I am thinking about upgrading from VMS to pro, and if historically, upgrades like this prompted specials, I light hold off for a while to see if anything was coming down the tracks…
Thanks
Stewart Bourke
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Mike,
As usual, many thanks. In all my messing about I obviously missed this simple step – worked perfectly…
Thanks
Stewart
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Steve,
It was a fun project – I spent too many hours on it frankly – but mine is a hobby… It was my first big show since I moved from Pinnacle, and so it was a great learning exercise. I reckon I spent approx 2 hours of prep for each minute of show-time (for the images) – so 120 hours (hmmm, now I know where the weekends went…). This included learning about the matrox, figuring out the three-projector setup etc and especially Vegas – which is such an amazing application…
As I keep saying, I doubt it would have worked as well as it did without the folks on this forum.
Stewart Bourke
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This is going to be a length post – but if you don’t mind a bit of experimenting…
I have just been through a very long exercise to achieve exactly this, and taking a lot of advice from this (and the live events) forum – I came up with something that worked really, really well. It was all new to me – there was a huge amount of experimenting. I will say that there is very good professional equipment out there which will do this really well but I was on a budget (a very tight one) – and I was really pleased with the outcome.
I used a matrox triple-head, VMS, and movie-player home cinema and it all worked out fine.
Doing a school show, I wanted three screens – one on either side of the stage, and one above it. Each screen had to have a different image appear on it, in time to the music, so at any one time there were three different images on the screens – one image per screen if you follow…
To do this I set the projectors to be each 640 x 480, and then in Vegas I set my project properties to be 1920 x 480 – which gives a widescreen in effect of 3 x (640 x 480).
In VMS, I made sure that each of the images was restricted to its own region (LHS, CENTER or RHS). This is very easy to do with the pan/cropping facilities. It did take a little bit of practice, but in the end it worked out fine.
When rendering, I rendered to 1920 x 480 wmv.
Playing the image for the show was a little trickier, as I wanted to be able to cue up the video and then when ready, have the images displayed on the projector.
I used a PC with a graphics card with two separate outputs. You need to make sure that whatever card you use, that you can set the resolutions of the two outputs independently, and that at least one output can go up to 1920 in resolution.
Connect your PC monitor to the first output of the graphics card – this will be for cueing up and preparing for playback.
Connect the matrix triplehead to the second output. Set the resolution of the graphics card output to 1920 * 480, and set the matrox for 3 x (640 * 480).
The projectors were at the far end of the hall, so we used three VGA to CAT5 baluns from Mcmelectronics – really neat little devices which allow you send VGA over cat 5. These devices had no problem with the 1920 resolution. The projectors were between 50 and 80 feet from the desk, and had no issues.
For actual playback I used the free (and superb) media player classic – home cinema version. I tried a number of different players (including VLC) but for me, I really only got what I needed from MPC.. I am sure VLC would work, but I had only so much time to try and learn all this!!
In MPC you will need to go into Opions, Playback, Output and set video settings, and choose Direct X as your output device, and select Display 2 from the drop down in ‘Full Screen Output’. This means that any file payed back in ‘full screen mode’ will be sent to output 2 which is the matrox – and so you will see the output on the projectors connected to the matrox, but still have you main screen for cueing etc.
Also in (Options, Player) – set ‘Launch files in fullscreen’ and also set ‘exit fullscreen when finished playback’. This means that when you start playing a video it will send output to the matrox and then when finished, automatically return focus to your main window. You may need to experiment a bit here.. In MPC you can play about with settings to remove screen borders, toolbars etc in full-screen mode so all you should see is your video – no controls, menu bars, borders etc.
Sorry about the long post, but there are a few steps involved – but it does work, appears to be reliable, and until I splash out on some of the dedicated software designed specially for this task this will do fine…
Stewart Bourke
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Rob,
Apologies for the delay in reverting – have been away from the site for a few days..
If anything, things got worse as I moved from 11 to 12. the problems were simply not deterministic – and therefor I had to move.
I am an amateur – not a professional user – I use Vegas Movie Studio at present, and for me, it works very well. As my knowledge progresses I will probably upgrade to Vegas pro at some stage, but for now, VMS allows me do what I want.
my main difference with your situation is that I have not yet moved to HI-Def, so cannot comment on how it will work for you in this case – all I can say is that there appear to be a lot of people out there using it in the way you want to…
Good luck with your project…
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Rob,
I was a pinnacle user since v8, and got to V12 and gave up, despite years of trying to cope with its stability problems, constant corruption of transitions etc.
I moved to vegas movie studio a year ago and have not looked back. For me, there is no comparison in terms of stability and ease of use. Apart from that, the whole support and third-party-add-ons for vegas are way ahead of pinnacle. (This forum alone is a reason to move – vegas is a professional tool – and the knowledge base and generosity of time given by people in this forum take huge amounts of pain out of the learning curve).
I tried several large projects with pinnacle – and every time hit problems that could just not be solved. One of the biggest (and the reason I moved) was constant corruption of transitions – even on short clips – and nothing could be done about it no matter who tried – including Pinnacle themselves.
Pinnacle was not all bad – and I would probably be still using it if the transition thing could have been solved – but now having found vegas there is no way on earth I would ever go back…
One day i look forward to upgrading to pro – but for the moment – VMS is a great start..
Just my two-cents worth…
Stewart Bourke
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Just in case anybody else is having issues with markers, the solution I found was to create the project in DVDA as a ‘single movie’ project.
The markers appear perfectly in the timberline for any media added. All you have to do is add the header menu manually, and then you can work away as normal.
Since I started using DVDA, the markers have *never* appeared when I created a menu-based project, but appear *every* time I create a single movie project.
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It gets even more weird…
In DVDA (4.5), when I have the rendered video in the timeline, pressing ‘M’ to add a marker does nothing – I cannot add markers onto the timeline..
I have check every preference setting I can find, and googled everywhere, but can find nothing….
Is there a setting somewhere which prevents markers from being set within DVDA 4.5?
Many thanks,
Stewart Bourke
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Rob – thank you very much. I had not used this before, and it never occurred to me – I was focusing on the panning….