[Stewart Bourke]

John,

Slightly OT to this post, but when cleaning up your video do you render out and them drop the rendered video on a new timeline, or do you next the actual clean-up project? If you render, what do you render as (to prevent loss of quality) – the same as you ingested from the camera?

Thanks,

Stewart

[Stewart Bourke]

Jenny,

I am still learning my way around colour correction and grading, so whilst it can be frustrating, once you get to understand what is happening the results can be very rewarding.

I used to play about the contrast and brightness a lot, and to be honest, I know now that this is not the way to go (usually). Stay away from them as much as possible.

The two plugs-ins I would start to learn are the Sony Colour Curves and the Levels ones. Both are native plug-ins so you don’t need to purchase any commercial ones yet.

You can achieve dramatic improvements with the Curves plug-in alone.

Then have a look at the color corrector and secondary color corrector.

I really suggest that you search the COW for colour correction (curves) – some of John Rofrano’s answers and links to tutorials are invaluable for learning.

https://www.glennchan.info/articles/articles.html

These tutorials are a little more technical, but give a real insight into why – I have learnt so much by working through them several times – it is worth it.

There are plenty of commercial plug-ins which you may want to consider in the future, but if you can get your head around how the native ones work, then it becomes much easier to figure out what it is best to purchase in the future (or not purchase, if you have what you need in the native ones)

Also, for me certainly, you never stop learning about this stuff. (in fact it eats up your time, but that’s why we do this – isn’t it??)

STBO

[Stewart Bourke]

John,

You have undocked your ‘project media’ window in Vegas. This undocking feature is a really useful function in Vegas – you can grab just about any section of Vegas and undock it and place it anywhere on the screen. This is especially useful if you have multiple screens and want to keep specific windows available.

It is easy to ‘redock’ the window.

Place the mouse cursor over the undocked window’s title bar – the bar that says ‘Project Media’.

With the cursor over the title bar, click and hold down the left mouse button. Your project media window should move as you move the mouse. You can now move the window around the screen. To put it back where it was originally, drag the window over toward the top-left-hand side of the main Vegas windows.

As you get near the top LHS you should see the window you are dragging ‘snap’ back into place – over the current tabs – let go the mouse button and it should stay in place.

You can use the mechanism to totally rearrange your layout if required.

Hope this helps.

STBO

[Stewart Bourke]

FOlks,

I just tried to download video4YouTube from https://vegasaur.com/download.

Chrome tells me is is malicious – has anybody else had this issue?

Thanks,

STBO

[Stewart Bourke]

Alan,

Thanks for the prompt response. I will give your suggestions a go.

You are correct, the screengrab is the position graph.

Stewart

[Stewart Bourke]

Alan,

that did the trick – thanks.

BTW – I had tried the other icicle ones – but this one give me the nearest to an ice-building growing.

In fact, the search facility is superb – it is a very fast way of trying to find emitters.

STBO

[Stewart Bourke]

Tiffany,

Being a laptop it is extremely unlikely that you can upgrade it and you certainly will not be able to add a second CPU in. You would certainly not be able to mix an Intel and an AMD.

I am afraid you are stuck with it – unless you can trade it in against a more powerful one.

[Stewart Bourke]

Tiffany,

Change as little as possible.

Your project properties should be set to be the same as the content you are trying to import. When you import your first media file into the project you should be asked if you want to set the properties to match those of the media you are trying to import. Say ‘Yes’ to this. This is really important. You want Vegas to be working natively using the same settings as the source media. if you don’t it has to do various conversation on-the-fly while previewing and you will most likely get stuttery/poor preview.

Then go into the project properties and in the deinterlace method choose ‘blend’.

When you go to render, choose the render template that you want and try to avoid change any of the values you mentioned except maybe the bitrate. Start with the default value and see how it looks. You may need to increase the bit rate depending on the final quality required, and also at what rate it was captured in the camera.

Follow John’s advice – and also search the forum here – there are many similar questions to this one. I have only recently moved over to HD/AVCHD from SD/DV/Tape-based – there is a lot to learn…

Hope this helps.

[Stewart Bourke]

+1 from me too.

If Dave wrote books I would buy them. I look forward to his posts – extremely informative and clear.

STBO

[Stewart Bourke]

I am sure Graham will work his magic – as you will see from my previous post.

In the meantime could I suggest the ‘Sony Curves’ filter. It can raise the brightness but you can also compensate for the contract. it is one of the most useful of FX for helping with this.

The other thing to try is to duplicate the track, and on the upper track, change the blend mode to ‘Screen’. In Vegas,this is available in the ‘Composting mode’ control – the small green icon just to the right of the ‘Levels’ slider on the video track. Click this, and from the drop-down list of mode choose ‘Screen’. You can then adjust the amount of blending with the slider.

It helps a lot when trying to brighten up tracks whilst keeping a lot of the detail.

Hope this helps.

STBO