Vegas Studio 10 for Premiere Elements Users

[Chris B]

Chris, did you see my earlier post about there being Credit Rolls in Media Generators?

Sorry - I meant "crawl" (left to right) - I've got the rolls - but there are "timed events" rather than crawls.

Can you give an example of what you mean by "The effects whilst of good quality - and sometimes more configurable - don't seem as easily combined as they are in PE."

It's because some of the items are are not part of the effects as such and in different locations. For example the position is track based, the masks are part of the tracks in - so it's all or nothing and then you add the effects. Makes it harder to mix and match. However the posts above have shown some of the "workrounds" provided by other effects. Like I said - I'm still learning.

[Ken Jarstad]

I talked to a nice woman at SCS today, spent an extra 10 bucks and downloaded the 'suite' version of 10. For a silly few dollars more I found out I get quite a bit more. Still livin' - still learnin'

[Chris B]

Update - To perform a cross-fade on audio only trim the clips a bit then click the "ignore event grouping" icon (which looks like a padlock). This in effect ungroups audio and video for the whole project. You can then drag the ends of the audio into each other and obtain a cross-fade.

Edit:

I've since been told that if you put the cursot between to events and select one of the Audio tracks then pressing '/' on the numeric keypad (not the main keyboard) will convert a cut to a transition. Great tip - but even armed with this information I can't find it in the help file...

[peggig]

PRE 8 is driving me crazy, because it's soooooooo s---l---o---w when editing HDV, so I decided to download a trial version of Vegas 10 Platinum. The one thing I can't figure out (so far) in Vegas is how to unlink an audio track from the video track, once the clip is already in the timeline. I know you can choose to import only the audio track or only the video track when you import the media, but I often need to unlink them when editing.

For example, I may want to speed up a very slow pan, but I don't want to speed up the audio track along with it. So what I do in PRE is I split the clip before and after the pan, then unlink the audio from the video in just that subclip, speed up the video track, and crop the audio track to fit it. This leaves the rest of the audio and video in sync, but lets me adjust it just where I need to.

Can anybody tell me if there's a way to do that in Vegas? I scoured the Help files, but couldn't figure out any way to unlink audio from video once the clip is already in the timeline.

Thanks!

[Paul LS]

In the post above yours Chris explains how to ungroup the video and audio on the timeline using "ignore event grouping". Or is this not what you want?

[peggig]

Thanks, Paul. I was hoping there was a way to do it for just an individual clip. I really don't want to unsync the audio and video for the whole project, because then I'd have to manually go through and regroup them for every clip to make sure they stay in sync when I move clips around (which I do a lot).

Is there really no way to unlink them for a single clip?

[RJ Johnston]

You can right-click on the clip on the timeline and then select Group>Remove From. Or just select the clip and then press U.

[peggig]

Thank you, RJ! That should make my life a whole lot easier.

[peggig]

Am I missing something? Nobody else has mentioned this, but the quality of HDV video in Sony Vegas is extremely grainy. In PRE, you can click Render Timeline to make it render. It's slow, but at least you can see your footage clearly. I couldn't find anything like this in Vegas. The video quality in the editor is so bad that I can't see the image well enough to do any color correction or sharpening, or even see transitions between clips.

It's much faster than PRE, and has some nice features, but unless I can see what the video actually looks like, it seems pretty useless for my purposes. What am I missing?

[RJ Johnston]

Sony Vegas has several quality level settings for previewing: Draft, Preview, Good, Best. And within each of those there are Auto, Full, Half, Quarter. You should see that option above the preview monitor. The lower quality settings allow for more frames per second at the expense of quality. For color correction try Best-Full.

[Paul LS]

You can also pre-render regions of your timeline in Sony Vegas.

[RJ Johnston]

Rendering or pre-rendering can also be draft, preview, good, or best -- depending on the project properties under the file menu.

If you define a loop region, you can press Shift-B and store the corresponding pre-rendered video in RAM. Then when you preview the loop region, it will play back as fast as it can on your computer.

[Paul LS]

Well you can either pre-render or do a dynamic RAM render. Robert is refering to the dynamic RAM render, with the dynamic RAM render you can use shift-b to do a temporary render in RAM, you can set the amount of RAM to dedicate for dynamic RAM rendering under preferences. The more RAM dedicated to dynamic RAM render the longer the section of video you will be able to temporarily RAM render. With pre-render you render the track and create a file stored on your hard drive.

[peggig]

Thanks, Paul and RJ!

How do you pre-render it? I was trying to figure out a way to do that, but couln't find it.

I did find the Auto, Full, Half,and Quarter, but I didn't find the Draft, Preview, Good, and Best settings. It was originally set to Auto, and I changed it to Full, but it still looked terrible. Maybe setting it to Best will work.

I went back to using PRE 8, but it's really driving me crazy because it's so slow. It thrashes the hard disk just to paint the timeline! (I keep telling it that isn't necessary, but it doesn't listen to me.) It's really painful to use, even with the process priority set to High. And it leaks memory like a sieve. I have to shut it down periodically, when it gets so slow I start cursing...

Maybe I'll try Vegas again, with pre-rendering and setting the quality to Best in addition to Full. If that works, I'll be very happy. But I've already got a good chunk of the project done in PRE, so I guess I'll just do individual segments in Vegas, export them to MPEG, and import them into my master project in PRE. I assume that should work OK. (Is that a valid assumption?)

[Paul LS]

You prerender by using the Shift+M keys. You can select to prerender the entire timeline or a section of the timeline by using the loop region (yellow work bar above timeline). When you hit Shift+M a window will open with a number of options. You need to select the prerender format, DV-AVI is good. This prerender file will replace the clips on the timeline. The prerender file is made up of many smaller files so that if you do further editing, when you prerender again it does not have to prerender the entire clip. You can also select to delete the prerender files at anytime to clean up and save space on your hard drive.


Above the preview monitor there is a drop down where you can select Draft, Preview, Good, Best. Within each of these you can select Auto, Full, Half,and Quarter.