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Real-Time Video Rendering - Wow!!


Anderton

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So I just finished editing 75 AES videos (check out the playlist to get an overview), using 64-bit Vegas with a PC Audio Labs 8-core computer, and the renders to WMV happened in - yes - real-time!! Damn!! I remember when rendering a two-minute video took about 20 minutes, so this is a big step up.

 

Anyway, this got me thinking...should we start a forum on "So you want to make your own video..."? Seems video topics are popping up randomly in various forums, so it might be a good idea to consolidate them all in one place.

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Write the book and I'll buy it. I don't have the slightest idea of how to work with video - cameras, files, audio, editing, or creativity. I'd like to see a book on "Making A Coherent Videos for Dummies" (your option as to whether the dummies are the ones making the videos or the ones watching them)

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Wish I could upgrade, that sounds fantastic Craig.

 

I make a bit of side money doing industrial presentation videos in Vegas and it's awful telling my client that they have to wait a full day for rendering as they whine, "..but I can make a Powerpoint in 5 minutes so why does it take all day to render out an hour video????"

 

Then again I'm only using an ancient single-core laptop... ;-)

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After some consideration, I think a Video for Musicians forum is a great idea.

 

 

Tim, I feel your pain, brother. I'm on a 2.8HT P4 and, while it's still got plenty of oomph for most stuff -- and I can make use of track/FX/VST freeze in DAW work -- and Vegas does a really good job of working around slow processors for actual editing and real time preview -- when it comes time to sit down and crunch numbers for video rendering, but there's only so much that can be got out of this 4 year old ~$400ish refurb [added extra RAM and a FW card so I suppose I should say ~$500ish].

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+1, :thu: for a video thread.

 

I also work in Vegas and find it powerful and easy to work with. It can do everything you need for a complete video: fades, dissolves, text overlays, programmable pan & zoom (a.k.a. the "Ken Burns effect"), and rotate. The included plug-ins for both audio (EQ, gate, compressor, time stretch, etc.) and video (brightness/contrast, sharpen, chroma key, color corrector, etc.) are enough to spruce up your media if it's not quite up to snuff. Also, Vegas reads VST plugs, so you can apply, say, Amplitube Jimi Hendrix to a boring narration to spice it up. ;)

 

And rendering is the bane of my existence too.

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+1,
:thu:
for a video thread.


I also work in Vegas and find it powerful and easy to work with. It can do everything you need for a complete video: fades, dissolves, text overlays, programmable pan & zoom (a.k.a. the "Ken Burns effect"), and rotate. The included plug-ins for both audio (EQ, gate, compressor, time stretch, etc.) and video (brightness/contrast, sharpen, chroma key, color corrector, etc.) are enough to spruce up your media if it's not quite up to snuff. Also, Vegas reads VST plugs, so you can apply, say, Amplitube Jimi Hendrix to a boring narration to spice it up.
;)

And rendering is the bane of my existence too.

Yeah, the fact that it can use your VST and DX audio plugins is heavensent. I had to fix up/clean up a bunch of old club performance videos shot by various people on mostly cheap handheld VHS cams from the 80s and early 90s for a client. (And, actually, the video from some of them was better than a couple of "pro" performance videos the band picked up a long the way -- seems like very few "video engineers" of the era could resist the lure of idiotic, cheezeball effects -- and a lot of the gear seemed poorly set up, not white balanced, etc.)

 

But the audio on the handhelds was mostly just awful and I used my favorite EQ and compression plugs to reshape the sound [i know what you're thinking -- most of those hand cams had "AVC" compression -- but a little multi-band compression used with finesse can actually help unscrew up some of those. Well, spread around the damage better, anyhow. :D [i saved a couple of before and afters to show the client in case he wasn't immediately impressed.] EDIT: I forgot to mention another life saver, the extremely easy to automate cropping tool.

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Until about 4-5 years ago much of the art of being an efficient low budget video editor required planning to run your renders during lunch breaks and at night. For many reasons, in general it is still best to make the addition of effects and titles one of the last stages of the edit process.

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I got the bug. From Pro Tools, etc. to Adobe CS5 and Apple Final Cut Pro suite. After Effects, Motion...

 

It is a grand world.

 

the awesome thing about video for musicians... is how well suited we are to the gig. I work with guys that have video credentials and yet I'll walk up and say, "We should slide that over here and change the dissolve from 1.5 seconds to 3 seconds..."

 

And it comes together. Cut in rhythm, weather literal or implied. It's poetry with a groove. It's comics in the pocket. It's something we all get around here after thinking temporally for so long.

 

I actually dig watching commercials now for the wonderful titling effects and sense of balance.

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Until about 4-5 years ago much of the art of being an efficient low budget video editor required planning to run your renders during lunch breaks and at night. For many reasons, in general it is still best to make the addition of effects and titles one of the last stages of the edit process.

The nice thing about a modern NLVE like Vegas is it uses the same approach to non-destructive editing that modern DAWs do. So you can just sort of mess around trying out effects.

 

Another thing that's nice is that you can us realtime video FX plug ins on a per clip basis.

 

(No per-clip audio plugs, though, at least not in the ~$100 'deluxe' consumer version. You can put realtime audio plugsins a given track -- but not in a given clip. And you can't automate audio FX parameters like you can with video FX. You can only automate volume and pan. You do have up to 10 stereo audio and video tracks, though, so you've got some leeway there. You could use those ten tracks as de facto fx 'snapshots.' Still, the lack of realtime audio automation is a little perplexing, given the relative power of the video automation. Again, maybe the considerably more expensive pro version has more sophisticated audio capabilities -- perhaps Sony figured that most home videographers would be more interested in semi-sophisticated video editing and processing. Dunno. Hasn't been a big deal to me -- but it does seem like something you'd want if you were doing serious work with it.)

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I'd love to see a video forum. And please, an FAQ or Basics sticky. I've been using Sonar for about a decade, and have a pretty fair understanding of audio stuff. But even starting out, when it came time to export a mix, the options were pretty straightforward; wav, mp3, maybe sample rate. Not too difficult to grasp.

 

But rendering video from Vegas, the options are ridiculous. Besides the format (avi, wmv, etc.) there are a ton of other options that I don't understand. So a 'primer' of sorts would be of great value. I don't do enough video editing to get good at it, so anything that would help communicate basics would be very valuable to me.

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One thing is true in this new environment, though: You really do need a kickass (read: $$$$) videocamera if you want to get imagery that looks worth a {censored}. Anything under $1500 is basically a toy of sorts.


VEGAS can't polish turds.

 

Well, I think Vegas can polish turds, but the idea is that you don't want to engage in the act of turd-polishing at all, if you can avoid it. But if given a turd, Vegas can polish it with the best of 'em. :)

 

I'm not sure if I fully agree about the $1500 mark, but I can tell you that anything under $500 indeed sucks, and for one very tangible reason: no external mic or headphone jack. I don't know why this feature has been dropped from the new crop of handhelds for under $500. (When the world was awash with MiniDV cams, these jacks were de rigueur.) It means you have to use the onboard mic, or have your subject speak into a digital recorder and sync the tracks later. (Though this will give you a blend of ambient and closed-miked sound for your effort.) And if you go with the onboard mic (being careful not to breathe or have anyone talk into your ear) and you use the zoom, the camera's giving you a completely different sound than what the visual is showing. And missing headphone jacks? Don't get me started.

 

But I'm thinking that around $800 and above, the quality and pro-level features start to reappear, even if you're not getting a 3-CCD or CMOS image sensor with a great big lens.

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One thing is true in this new environment, though: You really do need a kickass (read: $$$$) videocamera if you want to get imagery that looks worth a {censored}. Anything under $1500 is basically a toy of sorts.


VEGAS can't polish turds.

 

 

It can if you know what you're doing... and I think I did

 

 

[YOUTUBE]f9FFYL8JjVs[/YOUTUBE]

 

...and it was shot with a freakin' point and shoot photo camera in video mode at 640x480 (that part sucks most).

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