Vegas Movie Studio Platinum questions

[MikeFromMesa]

I was recently looking at new Sony Computers and saw the Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0 installed on one of them. It looked like a decent package and since I did not have software to make video slide shows from both stills and videos from our digital cameras I thought I would download the trial (which is 11.0) and see how it works. On my system it looks very nice, but I cannot seem to get it to do simple things.

I own a Canon 7D and my wife owns a Sony Cybershot T-990. While Vegas loads both jpgs and .MOV files produced by my Canon and the jpgs from my wife's T-990, it will not load the .mp4 video files created by my wife's camera. This seems odd to me since the camera is a Sony and the software is Sony, so I assume I am doing something wrong. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

While I can make videos from the stills from both cameras and the video from my camera and have figured out how to add a menu, I cannot find a way to edit the menu or create bullets on the menu to link to specific groups of photos. And the help file does not seem to be of much actual help. Normally for a vacation I group photos from both of our cameras by day and I would want to create a menu button so jump to each day in the video, but cannot find a way to do this.

Can anyone help me? Thank you in advance.

[Z Cheema]

My version of MS 11 takes mp4 from my jvc OK

Little bit confused in your last paragraph are we talking about DVD or Movie Studio?

[MikeFromMesa]

I apologize if I was not clear.

When we go on vacation I backup all of the photo/video files (from our digital cameras) at the end of each day so, when we get home, I have all of the photos and videos from our trip organized by day. We do not have a camcorder, so everything is from our digital cameras. As it turns out both cameras take really nice videos, but the videos from my wife's Sony Cybershot T-990 are particularly nice.

My Canon makes videos in .MOV format and my wife's T-990 makes them in .mp4 format. When I tried to load the .mp4 files into Vegas Movie Studio Platinum (not Pro) it gave me an undefined error, but I find it hard to believe that Sony would be marketing software that did not accept the movie files from one of their own digital cameras, so I assume something is wrong somewhere. Perhaps a setting someplace, or perhaps the videos need to be loaded directly from the camera. Or some other issue.

Since I have the photos and videos arranged by day I wanted to create buttons on the main menu that would point to the photos and videos for each day so when we played the slide-show we could pick what day we wanted to watch without having to go through all of the preceding day's photos. Sort of like creating chapters with a link to each.

I hope this explains what was not clear. If not, please let me know and I will try again.

[Z Cheema]

There are so many formats and variants it is hard to keep up, but Sony Pro 10 takes practically any format. Have a look at the software that came with the camera an intsall that may convert or install a codec for it to work.

Your still not clear about the last paragraph is it DVD Architect or the edit program your talking about? as only menus are available in DVD and not MS10/11

"Since I have the photos and videos arranged by day I wanted to create buttons on the main menu that would point to the photos"

look at my site it has some tutorial on there that may be of help

[MikeFromMesa]

I could find a way in Movie Studio to create a title, but no way to create sub-menus, so I imported the project into DVD Architect and tried to do it there. I was able to create sub-menus in DVD Architect, but could find no way to link those sub-menus to specific slides. I assume there is a way since it seems to be a complete product, but I could not find anything to do that.

I will take a look at your web site. Perhaps there is something there, but am surprised that I cannot import the .mp4 files from the digital camera. This has been a fairly common problem for me. I have tried many different video slide-show products and some will import the .mp4 files but not the .mov files, others are exactly the opposite, but I end up only being able to import one type of file. The only product has seems to allow me to import both is Cyblerlink's PowerDVD, but I do not care for the interface and was hoping that Vegas would work.

In general my main problem with Vegas is that everything seems counter-intuitive, at least to me. I was wondering if there was something that would lead me step-by-step through the actions needed to create a simple DVD slide show including some way to link buttons (or sub-menus) to specific slides. Perhaps that is on your web page???


Thanks for the response.

[Z Cheema]

Movie Studio is JUST a video editor it will edit add music and other fancy bits it does not do menus as that is for the DVD Authoring program only

You do not link menus to an Image but to a video clip or slideshow, DVD-A has a slide show maker (basic) but you can add your images there and a menu should be on the screen, you can create additional menus to go to other pages to access more menus.

try dropping the mp4 files on to the main page on DVD-A if it works it will create a menu for you, you can change and add test as you wish (press F2 to change any text).

You need to think about what each program does and then make your work flow from there

[MikeFromMesa]

> Movie Studio is JUST a video editor it will edit add music and other fancy bits it does not do menus

OK. That would explain why I could not add menus, although it does allow someone to add a title.

> as that is for the DVD Authoring program only

I have, in fact, tried this. When I completed the slide show in Vegas MS I selected "Make A Movie" and "Burn To A DVD" and "DVD With Menus" and then, finally, "Send To DVD Architect Studio". When DVD Arch Studio started I created sub-menus, but could not figure out how to add links to the sub-menus to allow selection of some other starting point than the first. I also tried to create a DVD in DVD-A, but all I got was the menu. No photos on the disk.

> try dropping the mp4 files on to the main page on DVD-A if it works it will create a menu for you, you can change and add test as you wish (press F2 to change any text)

I tried this in DVD-A, but without any luck. But at this point I had pretty much given up on the whole idea of importing the Sony digital camera videos into the Sony software, so I probably did not play with it enough. I will try again.

> You do not link menus to an Image but to a video clip or slideshow

So this was a basic misunderstanding on my part. Presumably I need to create separate play-lists (or something like them) for each day of photos and videos and then add them to the sub-menus. Sounds like a plan.

And, since I am doing all of this on a brand new machine perhaps it is worth re-installing the Sony software for the camera just in case there is a missing codex for the Sony videos. I have already done that for the Canon, but not the Sony.

Again, thank you for your help.

[MikeFromMesa]

A further update.

Surprisingly DVD-A will accept the video files from my wife's camera while Movie Studio will not. I do not understand this, but when I added the .mp4 file in DVD-A the software accepted it. When I previewed it, the video played properly. One problem addressed. And, since the laptop I am working on is a Sony it already had the Sony camera related software installed and would not let me re-install the software that came with the camera.

However it appears that DVD-A will not create an AVCHD disk from photos and videos. For a regular DVD I was given only low res choices (720 x 480 and less). I can pick Blu-Ray, but since I do not have a Blu-Ray burner on my laptop I could not burn it as a Blu-Ray. Some of the choices under Blu-Ray are for AVC and I don't know if that will produce an AVCHD disk. I guess I will find out.

And thank you for your help with this. It was only after reading your responses that I changed the way I was thinking about creating the disks.

[Z Cheema]

Not used your cut down version's of DVD-A so cannot help to much.

From what I remember you can just make (prepare) the files first and then make the DVD latter
You can burn Blue ray files on to a DVD and the Blue ray player may play it

Does MS allow a render to AVCHD,?

This is my worklow

Edit work, press M to place markers in project to use as chapters in DVD
Render to MPEG2 (no audio) bit rate dependent on size and how much to go on the finished DVD, min 4Mbs
then render AC3 audio file.
open DVD-A, drag video file onto menu, rename and pick image or change graphic (if you left click and drop a file this allows you to place a still or moving background) double click file on left and timeline appears at bottom, drag audio over and place underneath video (if video and audio have same name this is then automatically done) check chapters re there.

Make DVD

[MikeFromMesa]

This is my worklow

Edit work, press M to place markers in project to use as chapters in DVD
Render to MPEG2 (no audio) bit rate dependent on size and how much to go on the finished DVD, min 4Mbs
then render AC3 audio file.
open DVD-A, drag video file onto menu, rename and pick image or change graphic (if you left click and drop a file this allows you to place a still or moving background) double click file on left and timeline appears at bottom, drag audio over and place underneath video (if video and audio have same name this is then automatically done) check chapters re there.

Make DVD

This is very helpful. Thank you.

For what it is worth - Since my version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio will not accept the mp4 files generated by my wife's Sony Cyber-shot T900 camera I have filed a bug report with Sony as a Vegas issue. Actually I have filed 2 such bug reports, but I have heard nothing back, not even an acknowledgement, even though these issues were filed a week and more ago. I do not understand why I would not even get an acknowledgement from Sony about the issue.

I seem to have the choice of either buying conversion software to convert the mp4 file to some other format, say avi, and then using it, or not using those files at all.