Vegas...?

M

Mino

Northern Dreamer
This is the fourth year running I have produced a 21 clip video DVD. The three years prior to this I have used Adobe premiere 6.5 and Ulead DVD workshop to produce the DVD with exceptional results. This year I chose the sony team and am now regretting that decision big time. Vegas is the culpret for me. Audio levels in Vegas are not representative of what you hear during the edit I lose about 30 - 50 percent of level in the render. Vegas will consistantly not render audio tracks, for some reason it will ignore them but include them on the second render. Premiere renders faithful colors every time where Vegas can't deal with the color RED without major manipulation of color saturation on all affected clips. Vegas doesn't preview to an external NTSC monitor/ TV without passing through a camera or other fire wire device. Vegas will not open twice in a row without one having to go into task manager and disable wowexec.exe. It's too late to start this project in premiere at this stage, But I will never again stray from a competant well rounded pro product like premiere for any reason.
 
Hmm, I am sorry you are having those problem Mino. Hope you work through it.

(To others) For what it is worth, Vegas has always rendered faithfully for me, audio and video, and I have always been able to open multiple instances of Vegas without messing with task manager...
 
I agree. I have never encountered any of those problems before . . . especially the multiple instances of Vegas being launched. That's one of its major advantages, actually.

EXCEPT that the volume level of the rendered audio, if rendered to AC-3, is commonly seen as a bug or an error, but it isn't. It's intentional, because of the dynamic range of DVD audio. Vegas will allow AC-3 files to be rendered at the same volume as what you hear in the project, or you can render as PCM.

Play a CD in your DVD player, and then play a DVD. You'll notice that the volume level on every DVD is set much lower than the volume level on every CD. Vegas renders AC-3 files, at default, at the same volume level as commercial DVDs. It's a standard. If you've never rendered AC-3 before (as you probably haven't in Premiere 6.5 or Ulead), this might come as a surprise.

I will say, that because Vegas does approach things very differently than other NLEs do, it's pretty easy to set something, unknowingly, which affects your render in unintended ways -- a slider slightly off 100%, or a track disabled, or something like that -- if you're unfamiliar with the program.
 
It could be some wierd stuff with my box I suppose especially the wowexec.exe thing but I'm really gaurded about what I run on that box and no other software has issues. I have decided to abandon Vegas and restart the whole project in premiere which was not an easy decision for me because it means a ton of extra work in a very short time frame but I really nedd to deliver a professional looking consistant product at the end of the day because I'm not charging "kiddie in the basement" rates on this one and my expectations are probably higher than the clients at this point. Maybe when it's all over, I'll take a look at what issues I may have had, but for now I've just got to get it done right!
 
Sorry to do the Vegas rant thing on you all, I'm sure it works well in most cases but it has failed me miserably in this one. It maybe a short circuit between the keboard and the chair or some other issue I'm not aware of at this moment. I have just been couped up in this studio for a couple of weeks now and a failure of this magnitude knda gets my goat and makes me go Rant, Rant, Rant. I mean no disrespect to those who use Vegas, as I said, It must work well 99% of the time. I just fell into the 1% abyss......Cheers.
 
When going to DVD, the audio is automatically converted to AC3. With the default settings you will get a volume reduction. This is normal.

To override the reduction, create you a new AC3 preset in Vegas with these changes:

Change the dialog normalization to -31

On the PreProcessing tab, change both the Line mode profile and RF mode profile to NONE.
 
But you CAN do a DVD with PCM audio instead of AC-3. You just have to make sure your DVDA project audio is set to PCM.
 
if i remeber correctly Premiere is NOT NTSC 601 spec and Vegas is ...
Premiere 6.5 defaults to using the microsoft codec - Vegas uses it's own DVcodec that is 601 spec.. you can change Vegas to use the microsoft DV codec under preference ...

my win2k and Xp's systems does not have wowexe.exe running ??
i see it is for old 16bit programs to run in 32bit .. perhaps you should do a security scan ( google wowexe.exe) on wowexe.exe ... perhaps V doesn't get along with WOW ?

"WOW Environment Remains in Memory After Quitting 16-Bit Program
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;181333 "
 
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Ive sorted some of the issues out and they seem directly related to this wowexec thing. This file is not a virus, but a legitimate microsoft file that enables older windows 16 bit files to run in a 32 bit world. There are variations that are viruses but they can easily be detected based on their 8.3 structure. So now I am omly having problems with the color RED which is banding really bad vertically. Even if I reduce saturation of the clip, I get banding and jaggies on the reds, any thoughts? I never got to the bottom of the non rendered audio files but the problem has gone away. Probably another wowexec.exe thing. I traced the wow thing back to loading Solier of fortune over X-mas for a network gaming spree. Although I deleted the game, It now activates the wowexe file every time I load Vegas. Vegas will not load while wowexec is loaded, so I have to go into task manager an do an end process on wow. I was not aware of the ac3 audio limits, but this info helped a lot and is a good thing as all the levels on the DVD test burn are very consistant. Thanks for your help guys and I didn't go back to premiere but knuckled down and dealt with Vegas issues and am glad I did:)

If anyone has any info on the red issues I would be grateful.

Oh and one last thig, If I got a video card with hdmi out, could go into the hdmi port on my TV and get vegas to use it as external monitor?
 
Here's a capture of the red banding. Though more pronounced in vga world, it is still part of the ntsc display

band1.jpg
 
The reason the red looks better in Premiere (and others) is the codec/program does we-know-what's-best-for-you processing on it before you even get a chance to edit/cc yourself.

Try adding just a touch (and I mean just a touch...like 0.001 or 2 and work up from there) of horizontal chroma blurring, rather than desaturating it.

Desat may help some, but try the blur first.
 
Desaturating won't actually do anything as the acutal DV codec has already created the banding. THe chroma blur works wonders on DV footage, just be sure you don't rerender to the DV codec after or it will reintroduce the banding.
 
scharky said:
Desaturating won't actually do anything as the acutal DV codec has already created the banding. .
Click to expand...

But it makes it less noticeable, especially if ther's "blooming" going on, too.

Had that problem with some roses I shot a while ago.

Oh. Absolutely no pun intended. :)
 
Thanks to all! Using the microsoft dv codec solved the red banding and reds look sweet again. I'm left now with solving the mystery of why Vegas opens the wowexec file and I'm home free. Thanks for all your help.
 
GenJerDan said:
But it makes it less noticeable, especially if ther's "blooming" going on, too.

Had that problem with some roses I shot a while ago.

Oh. Absolutely no pun intended. :)
Click to expand...

And there was plenty of blooming going on, so I had blooming and banding and a little desaturate smoothed it out a lot, though it did not really deal with the banding per se, it just made it a little less obvious.
 
I had the Wowexec.exe problem a few years ago. You wouldn't happen to have an older scanner that uses TWAIN32 attached to your computer? If you have a 76KB file named TWAIN_32.DLL in your Windows/System32 folder then it is probably the culprit. Rename the TWAIN_32.DLL file to TWAIN_32.OLD and copy the twain_32.dll (46KB) from the C:\WINDOWS directory to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32.

Hope this solves the problem,

-Dan
 
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