10+ reasons to be excited about Vegas Pro 11
by Gary Rebholz
Now that Vegas Pro 11 has been released, you may have heard about some of the new features that make the application even more powerful than it was before. In this article I'll talk about 10 of these new features and hopefully give you a better idea of what the new version of Vegas Pro is all about.
Expanded GPU acceleration
We introduced GPU acceleration with AVC rendering back in Vegas Pro 10, but Vegas Pro 11 takes our utilization of GPU enabled graphics cards to a completely new level. If you've been longing for increased rendering speed and smoother playback of the timeline at higher preview quality settings, you'll love Vegas Pro 11!
We've worked closely with both NVIDIA and AMD to enable Vegas Pro 11 to utilize the GPU power that they make available with many of their graphics cards. But we've gone even further than that. In fact, Vegas Pro 11 takes advantage of the GPU from any graphics card that provides OpenCL-enabled GPU. That includes many lower-priced graphics cards that make it possible to tap into the power of GPU without spending a lot of money. If you've made the investment in a higher end graphics card (both NVIDIA and AMD provide amazing high-end graphics card options), Vegas Pro 11 works great with these.
This enhanced GPU acceleration means that you can now view your project in Best (Full) and see drastically higher frame rates when you play back complex projects, which in previous versions of the software would have brought preview framerate to a grinding halt. Sequences that include many processor-intensive elements like video effects (such as Gaussian Blur, Secondary Color Correction, Len Flare, Stereoscopic 3D Adjust, and many more), transitions (such as the new Star Wipe, Page Peel, Page Roll, and others), Track Motion, Event Pan/Crop, various compositing techniques, Video Preview Split-Screen mode, and many others now play much more smoothly even at the highest Preview settings. This enables you to preview more of your project at high quality and high frame rate as you work your edits.
In addition to adding all of this power on project preview, we've significantly beefed up the usage of GPU acceleration when you render to the AVC format (whether you use the Sony or Main Concept AVC encoding options). You'll see a huge reduction in rendering time when you kick in the GPU acceleration from your qualified graphics card.
Though this extra power and heightened performance gained from GPU acceleration makes Vegas Pro 11 an attractive upgrade all on its own, we naturally didn't stop there. There are several other new features and enhancements that act as icing on the GPU cake.
As part of this expanded GPU usage, we've added some helpful organizational features to the Video FX, Transitions, and Media Generators windows. You can see in Figure 1 that we've added a folder structure to the Video FX window that helps you quickly find the video effect plug-ins you want to use. In addition to a folder that lists all of the plug-ins, you can now view just your OFX plug-ins, plug-ins that utilize 32-bit floating point, your GPU Accelerated plug-ins, as well as all of your Sony and third-party plug-ins. This organization makes it much easier to find the plug-ins you need. You can quickly scan through the GPU Accelerated folder to see all of the plug-ins that we've supercharged with GPU assistance.
The new folder structure in the Video FX (and other) windows make it easier for you to find the plug-in you want to use and quickly identify GPU-accelerated plug-ins.
More robust text and titling options
There's a lot to talk about in the area of text and titling. From usability improvements in the ProType Titler, to the completely new Titles & Text plug-in, to the inclusion of a robust new titler plug-in from New Blue that enables sophisticated 3D text, complete with extrusion and unlimited creative possibilities.
In the ProType Titler, the Collections, Effects, Gradient, and Curves options have been relocated to more logical positions. For instance, to access the collections, click the new Collections button in the bar at the top of the ProType Titler timeline area, shown in Figure 1. Double-click the collection you want from the Collections pop-up list to add the collection to your ProType Titler timeline.
The Collections buttons have been move to more logical locations to make the ProType Titler easier to use.
Curves are now just a right-mouse-click away. Right-click within the lane that holds the automation envelope you want to fine-tune with curve modifications and choose Add Curve from the menu. From the Curves pop-up list, double-click the curve modification you want to apply and then adjust and position the curve modification as normal.
Effects and Gradient Collections buttons now appear in the Effects tab near the Gradient fill option or the effect that you want to add.
In addition to these usability enhancements in the ProType Titler, we've added a completely new titler called the Titles & Text media generator. This tool replaces the old Text media generator. (By the way; the old Text generator is still available and is now called (Legacy) Text.)
To use the new Titles & Text media generator, click the Media Generators tab to bring the window to the front. Click the Expand button for the All folder to see its contents, then click Titles & Text from the list. Point to the various thumbnails and you'll notice that you have many animated options. If you want text animation, choose a thumbnail and drag it to your timeline. If you want static text, drag the Default preset to the timeline.
Figure 3 shows the Video Media Generators window with the controls for the new Titles & Text generator visible. Notice that the new plug-in utilizes the OFX architecture that we've switched to for Vegas Pro plug-ins. (We'll talk more about OFX a bit later.) This new Titles & Text media generator gives you a more robust option for those times when you want to create basic text quickly. And it adds the ability to quickly create animated text in your projects.
The new Titles & Text plug-in gives you more robust options for quickly adding basic text elements to your projects.
The third piece to the text and titling enhancements gives you powerful 3D tools —including text extrusion—courtesy of our friends at NewBlue. The NewBlue Titler Pro opens up all kinds of creative possibilities for your titles. To use the NewBlue Titler Pro, go back to the Media Generators window and select NewBlue Titler from the list. Drag the Default preset onto your timeline.
There's a lot to this titler, so I'll just touch on a few basics for now. With NewBlue Titler Pro you can position, scale, and rotate your text in all three dimensions. For instance, change the Y rotation setting to rotate your text along the Y axis and swing it like a door swings on its hinges. Then, click the Style button. Here you can add both 2D and 3D elements to your text like faces, outlines, and shadows. For 3D elements, adjust the Extrusion slider to give the text 3D depth.
Click the Library tab. Here you can apply effects, create graphical shapes, choose a preset style for your text, start with a template, and add transitions into and out of your text. All of these elements are completely customizable and thus offer you a virtually limitless palette of possibilities to work with in creating your text. Figure 4 shows an example of the types of things you can create with the NewBlue Titler Pro plug-in.
The NewBlue Titler Pro plug-in gives you sophisticated tools for creating 3D text.
OFX implementation
With Vegas Pro 10 we introduced support for OFX (Open FX) technology. In Vegas Pro 11, we've rolled out the implementation of OFX to include many more of the default plug-ins such as video effects, transitions, and media generators.
Switching to OFX has wide and significant implications for Vegas Pro and users. There are now many, many more third-party plug-ins that work with Vegas Pro and so you have a wider variety of tools to work with.
On a practical level, OFX plug-ins give you much more control over the parameters of the plug-ins and specifically over the animation of those parameters. In previous versions of the default plug-ins, you could animate the plug-in parameters with the keyframe controller area in order to change those parameters over time. However, you could only animate those parameters in a sort of global way. In other words, you could set a keyframe and change any or all of the settings. With OFX, you have more granular control over parameter animation. Instead of setting one keyframe to serve for each parameter, with OFX plug-ins each parameter has its own individual animation control. Thus you can create very sophisticated animation of parameters independently of all other parameters.
Figure 5 shows the Secondary Color Corrector interface. Notice that each parameter has an Animate button associated with it. Click any Animate button to add an animation envelope to the keyframe controller area where you can set your keyframes and create your parameter animation.
With OFX-based plug-ins, each parameter can be individually animated.
Along with the OFX implementation, we've added a new Radial Pixelate plug-in. This filter enables you to pixelate your video from an established center point and can be used as an interesting special effect. Figure 6 shows my video with the effect applied.
The new Radial Pixelate plug-in can yield interesting special effects.
The new Star Wipe transition can also yield interesting special effects during the transition from one clip to the next.
Simplified and improved media stabilization
We introduced video stabilization in Vegas Pro 10 and have improved upon it in Vegas Pro 11. If you've got shaky video footage, the stabilization tool can help make it more usable. To stabilize shaky footage, you must apply the stabilization at the media level. To do that, right-click the event in your timeline that holds your shaky footage and choose Media FX from the menu.
In the Plug-In Chooser, select Sony Stabilize from the list of plug-ins and click the Add button. Then click OK. Choose a preset from the Preset drop-down list or manually adjust the stabilization settings. Click the Apply button to apply the changes you've made. Once the plug-in finishes processing, play your clip and notice how much smoother the movement is. If you're not entirely happy with the results, adjust the settings again until you find the right amount of stabilization for your video.
Stereoscopic 3D tool improvements
The introduction of the stereoscopic 3D editing tools in Vegas Pro 10 made Vegas Pro a definite leader in 3D editing workflow. And now those tools have gotten even stronger. We've added Floating Windows controls to the Stereoscopic 3D Adjust filter which enables you to easily address edge violations in your 3D footage. An edge violation occurs when an object that is set into the 3D space simultaneously appears to float in front of the screen and intersect with the edge of the screen.
When this happens, the viewer's brain perceives conflicting visual clues that it uses to judge 3D depth. For instance, some clues tell the brain that the image is floating above the screen plane, but the fact that the image touches the edge of the screen conflicts with those clues by telling the brain that this image must be at screen depth since it actually touches the screen edge.
When you encounter an edge violation in your video, add the Stereoscopic 3D Adjust filter to your media. Adjust the Left and/or Right Floating windows controls to crop the offending video stream away from the edge of the video where the edge violation occurs. When set properly, this takes the strain off of the viewer's eyes because it removes the conflicting visual clue that prevents the brain from properly perceiving 3D.
In addition to that improvement, we've added a Stereoscopic 3D depth control to the Cookie Cutter filter and the Cross Effect and Iris transitions. This enables you to control the 3D depth of the cutout created by these tools.
More effectively integrated Event Pan/Crop
The Event Pan/Crop tool has been an indispensible tool for many users for years. One feature that has always been there—but has escaped notice by many users—enables you to set the Event Pan/Crop tool to be Pre-Event Effects or Post-Event Effects. The default mode has always been Pre.
What this means is that the Event Pan/Crop tool has always come before any event video effects that you may have applied. For example, think of adding a noise filter to your event and then creating a zoom with the Pan/Crop tool on that event. With the Event Pan/Crop in Pre mode, the effects of the zoom happen before the effect is applied, so that the zoom does not affect the noise particles (that is, those particles would be the same size with or without the zoom).
In Post mode, the results can be drastically different because first the effect is applied and then the zoom. This means that you not only zoom into the video, but also into the particles. This makes the particles appear larger than before.
As I said, this feature has always been available, but has not always been easy to find. Vegas Pro 11 changes that. In Vegas Pro 10, a Pan/Crop indicator was added to the chain of effects in the Video Event FX window. That indicator told you whether Event Pan/Crop was in Pre or Post mode, however there was a different tool that was used to control whether Event Pan/Crop was in Pre or Post mode.
With Vegas Pro 11, we've made things much easier in this area. Figure 7 shows the Video Event FX window for an event that contains a chain of two video effects. Notice that the first item in the chain is the Add Noise filter. Next comes the Pan/Crop flag and third comes the Gaussian Blur filter. This means that the Event Pan/Crop tool is in Post mode in relation to the Add Noise Filter and in Pre mode in relation to the Gaussian Blur. With this new graphical treatment, it's much easier to see whether your Event Pan/Crop function is in Pre or Post mode in relation to the effects in your chain.
In this shot, the Pan/Crop function is Post Add Noise and Pre Gaussian Blur.
The major change is that the Pan/Crop flag can now be reordered in the effects chain just like you've always been able to reorder plug-ins in the chain. For example, if you want the Pan/Crop function to also be in Pre mode in relation to the Add Noise filter, drag the Pan/Crop flag so that it sits before the Add Noise button in the chain.
Beyond this enhancement, you can also now click the Pan/Crop flag (in actuality it's a button) to access the Event Pan/Crop tools within the Video Event FX window. This makes it easy to jump back and forth between the Pan/Crop tools and the Effects controls. This means that there is no longer an Event Pan/Crop window. Instead, the Event Pan/Crop controls always appear in the Video Event FX window. If you've used previous versions of the application, this really doesn't affect your workflow in those times when you're dealing with just the Event Pan/Crop tools. They still work exactly the same; it's just that they now reside in a window with a different name. But this change gives you all the benefits that we just talked about when working with Event Pan/Crop as part of a chain of effects.
Revamped Render As dialog box
Let's face it; nobody likes rendering! It takes time and it can be confusing because of all of the decisions and options. The GPU support we talked about earlier addresses the first problem and rendering to the AVC format can be drastically faster in Vegas Pro 11 than in previous versions of the application. To address the second issue—that of confusion during the render preparation process—we've revamped the Render As dialog box.
The procedure to access the Render As box is the same as it has always been. When you're ready to render your project, choose File | Render As. This opens the Render As dialog box shown in Figure 8.
The newly redesigned Render As dialog box helps organize the rendering decision-making process.
For the most part, the dialog box is pretty self explanatory. It's broken up into logical sections as you can see by the bolded headings. For instance, under the Output File heading, you choose where you want to save the file, give it a name and so on. Notice the small Expand button next to each heading. Click these buttons to reveal more options and/or information under the corresponding headings. If you have expanded the sections enough that they can't all fit in the window vertically at the same time, a scroll bar appears on the right to enable you to scroll down to additional options.
The options under the Output Settings heading let you choose which file format you want to render to. Each file format also has its own Expand button. Click the Expand button for all supported file formats and the list expands to show every template provided for that format.
While you've always been able to make these choices, the controls in this heading make things easier than ever. For instance, if you want to see only templates with settings that match your project settings, select the Match project settings checkbox. This sorts the options down and eliminates any option that doesn't qualify from your current view. To see all of the template options again, deselect the box.
Notice that each template has a hollow star next to it. These stars enable you to identify a template as one of your favorites. If you frequently render to a few specific templates, click the hollow star next to each of those templates. The star turns yellow to indicate that you've marked that template as a favorite. Now, select the Show favorites only checkbox above the list. This sorts your list and shows only templates that you've marked as favorites, which makes it much easier to find the templates you most often use.
If you want even more sorting power, click the More filter options link. With these options you can choose to view just audio or video templates, or templates that use a framerate that matches the framerate settings of your project, and so on. And if that's not enough, click the Expand button next to the Output Format heading. This reveals a search field where you can type in key words to narrow your template search. You can see how robust this new dialog box is when it comes to sorting through and finding the file formats and templates you need for your render process.
Of course, when you're done making all of your choices, click the Render button to kick the process into gear. And, if you're rendering to one of the AVC formats (either Sony or Main Concept) and you have a qualified graphics card that supplies GPU power, let the GPU kick in and watch how much faster your render is as opposed to previous versions of the application.
More flexible control over related events with Sync Links
The new Sync Link feature gives you the ability to define multiple events as being related to one another. In a way, this is similar to the grouping function that's always been a part of Vegas Pro, but grouping lacks certain flexibility that can sometimes be important. The Sync Link feature provides this flexibility.
Grouping can be very helpful because grouped events will always move as a group. In other words, they'll maintain their relationship to each other on the timeline. This is often a very important feature. But it doesn't offer much flexibility. If five events are grouped together, you can't move one of them without moving the others. While this is often desirable, there are times when you do want to move an event separately from other events in the group.
For instance, say you have a video event grouped together with four audio events—a narration track and three tracks of sound effects. Now you discover that one of your sound effects events has been positioned incorrectly and doesn't match the video. In order to fix the problem you would have to click the Ignore Event Grouping button, adjust the sound effect event, and then click the Ignore Event Grouping button again to turn that feature off. Not a huge deal if it happens once, but what if you know you'll have to do this a bunch of different times? Now all of those steps to ignore event grouping start to add up. This is a perfect use case for Sync Links instead of grouping.
Sync Links enable you to establish a more flexible relationship between events on your timeline. With this feature, you can link several events to one main event—I'll call it the control event. To do this, select all of the events on the timeline that you want as part of the Sync Link. Then, right-click the event that you want to act as the control event and choose Create Sync Link with Selected Events from the menu.
You can see my events in Figure 9. The two events on track one, as well as the event on track three, are linked to the event on track two which I've made the control event. Notice that the control event looks just the same as a normal event while the events that I've linked to it no longer take up the entire vertical height of the track. The space above the events on track one and below the event on track three give you a visual clue as to which direction the control event lies.
The events on tracks 1 and 3 are Sync Linked to the control event on track 2.
Now select the event on track two as I have done in Figure 9. Vegas Pro 11 gives you another indication that events are Sync Linked to the selected event. Notice the purple outline around all of the events that are linked to the control event. Now, drag the control event to the right. Notice that all of the events you linked to it move along with it, just as if the events were grouped. However, the big difference is that you can move the linked events independently. For instance, drag one of the linked events (other than the control event) to the left. None of the other events move with it. But, drag the control event to a new position and notice that all events—including the one you just moved independently—are still linked.
Sync Link enables you to create a relationship between events that you want to keep together while preserving a bit of independence. This enables you to tweak the events that are linked to the control event without affecting all of the other linked events.
Integrated Upload to YouTube
Everyone wants to get their videos to YouTube and now we've made that process even easier in Vegas Pro 11. To upload your project to YouTube, choose File | Upload to YouTube. In the Upload to YouTube dialog box, fill in the appropriate information and choose your Broadcast options and Render quality. Click Upload and your video is on the way to the web.
And more...
We've made some improvements to both the Mixer window and the Mixing Console to make those tools easier to use. We've added support for NVIDIA 3D Vision on single-display systems using the Windows Graphics Card device. And we've added support for RED EPIC clips.
And finally, in addition to making rendering to the MainConcept AVC format much faster by tapping into the GPU of supported graphics cards, we've beefed it up by adding several MP4 templates for Internet distribution and made it possible to create a progressive download MP4 file that allows your viewers to navigate to different portions of your video as it streams, even before the entire video has downloaded.
While the big news is the utilization of GPU processing supplied by supported graphics cards, there are also several other improvements and new features that make Vegas Pro 11 a strong update. To learn more and to order your copy of Vegas Pro 11, visit www.sonycreativesoftware.com.
Gary Rebholz, is the training manager for Sony Creative Software. Gary produces the popular Seminar Series training packages for Vegas Pro, ACID Pro, and Sound Forge software. He is also co-author of the book Digital Video and Audio Production. Gary has conducted countless hands-on classes in the Sony Creative Software training center, as well as at tradeshows such as the National Association of Broadcasters show.
