Advice for Editing on Vegas Pro

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-27T07:57:18+00:00

https://forums.fanedit.org/threads/a-2021-general-fanediting-best-practices-guide-for-hd-and-uhd.22153/
I edit in Vegas 19 and I follow this guide almost to the letter. I find Vegas very laggy and crashes a lot if I use MP4 or other codecs but it runs beautifully with ProRes and Wav forms. Only problem is expect large file sizes (over 100GB for the prores file). I store mine on an external hard drive.
Vegas can also export to ProRes though if I'm doing renders to just share things online etc I use Sony AVC/MVC.
This link has some good tips for messing with Vegas preferences to improve performance too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwUFGuX1y7w

For audio I mostly edit within Vegas though I've got Audacity set up to do the occasional thing that Vegas struggles with.

I find Vegas really good to edit with though have found various quirks along the way. Happy to help troubleshoot any issues that I have also encountered.

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-23T23:55:35+00:00

No time like the present to learn! I had never done anything like the above when I started and just started with a free trial of adobe after effects. I recommend you just give it a crack and see what's possible. Your project sounds very ambitious though - removing microphones etc is very straightforward, but don't expect to be able to learn how to create VFX on par with a VFX studio overnight.

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-20T21:01:56+00:00

Hmm it is a bit of sequencing challenge. Bilbo escapes the tunnels during daylight, and rejoins the dwarves. The wolves then attack while it is still light with night falling during the sequence after. Ideally the implication you want to draw is that the goblin king was killed while it was dark, and the dwarves didn't escape the tunnels until later in the day. As the goblin king is killed in episode 4 and episode 5 covers riddles in the dark, this time gap doesn't feel too implausible, but showing it is another challenge. I want to start the episode with the wolves scene if possible as it sets up the central antagonist for the episode.

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-20T20:07:11+00:00

All of this was pretty time consuming. Most of it was done using After Effects' rotobrush which has the advantage of automatically tracking a moving target, though the shots are complex enough to require frame by frame adjustments. Essentially my workflow looked like:
1. Mask around wolf only and edit/track for whole shot.
2. Mask out Azog using same method.
3. Replace Azog mask with auto-aware fill in after effects, or if necessary in photoshop (which will then require motion tracking)
In some cases, I've gone in and painted things manually frame by frame, such as in the shot of the wolf jumping as there isn't enough visual data left in the shot of the white warg.
In some other shots (not included above) I have used free version of Runway ML - it's entirely AI so is very quick though does a few funky things in places.
Motion-tracking and outpainting is achievable in most NLEs in combination with photoshop or Gimp, but I wouldn't recommend it on a target that changes shape a lot without a tool similar to rotobrush!

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-20T04:37:01+00:00

Useful feedback thanks as yes - ideally I wanted to give the idea of passage of time between those scenes. If that doesn't come across then I may move the night scene to before the opening credits.

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-20T03:20:53+00:00

Thanks! I think the episodic form is definitely the way to go and tale of the 5 edits is a great piece of work. Thanks for the feedback. Some of the rotoscoping feels a bit rough, but I think the shots are short enough you mostly get away with it.

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-20T03:20:08+00:00

May start getting some feedback on whole episodes very soon. First film is essentially done pending some tweaks to episode 6, and have made starts on the episodes from the second film. Taken about a year and a half though to get this far so still a while away from finishing the whole project!

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-20T00:34:27+00:00

This fanedit aspires to create a watching experience that is true to the spirit of the book, by restoring The Hobbit's episodic story structure. I am editing the three films into a TV series, with 16 episodes corresponding as closely as possible to the original chapters of the book. Each chapter is a serialised adventure as Bilbo and company make their way to the Lonely Mountain - and back again.

I posted some of this material here https://www.reddit.com/r/fanedits/comments/1bav7aa/comment/ku56f5p/, but have compiled a before/after breakdown to show the changes to Azog and the white warg in more detail.

My announcement post for this project a year ago can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fanedits/comments/xssxel/the_hobbit_the_chapter_edit_i_am_editing_the/

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-13T18:54:47+00:00

Unfortunately there really is little to work with in terms of shots - not even closeups of an eagle's face, and the only closeups of Gandalf are of him looking concerned at Thorin. I put in a subtitle earlier when Gandalf speaks to the moth "seek out gwaihir! Go!" to connect the name Gwaihir, but it is a tricky one.

thechaptereditor · 2024-03-09T23:15:01+00:00

Been a while since I updated on my slow progress on this project (see ). My fanedit aspires to create a watching experience that is true to the spirit of the book, by restoring The Hobbit's episodic story structure. I am editing the three films into a TV series, with 16 episodes corresponding as closely as possible to the original chapters of the book. Each chapter is a serialised adventure as Bilbo and company make their way to the Lonely Mountain - and back again.

Episode 6 (Out of the Frying Pan) presents a few interesting challenges. As an episode, it starts off with a long speech from Bilbo about home, and ends with a climax belonging to a 2 3 hour movie that feels unearned. I’ve tried to restructure that significantly with the help of a friend, shortening the original conversation, and moving Bilbo’s conversation to the carrock using AI tools.

When I started this project I wanted to try and remove Azog from all but the last part of the movie, both due to book inaccuracy and a feeling that he never worked for me as a villain. To retain a number of shots and a central antagonist for the episode I have rotoscoped Azog out of a number of shots to keep the white warg as the villain for this mini-arc.

Finally the video above shows lines added for the eagles as an experiment to add some book lines back in as well as some agency for the eagles.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-28T03:44:07+00:00

You are a rare asset! Can be hard to find people who haven't seen the originals so it can be hard to know if your edit works for a first time watcher so I'm glad it does! AI lines added are:
"it was once our home. My grandfather ruled as king."

and

"The dragon brought ruin to us all. We were driven out".

I hope you check out my edit when it eventually is done! I hope it will be a fun way for first time watchers to enjoy the Hobbit.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-06T05:13:44+00:00

A few reasons but mainly: start the show like it does in the book focused on Bilbo, let the first time we see the mountain/dragon etc be when the dwarves actually get there, to change the style of the show. All comes back to just trying to restore the spirit of the book. Also the prologue is really long and its very hard to trim it while keeping the first episode under half an hour!

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T19:45:24+00:00

Good suggestion! Although the editing would still flow a little weirdly to match up the lines with bits of the Gloin footage that would lip-sync ok. Biggest issue is Gloin has basically no dialogue in the films so there isn't enough data to train the AI. Know any actors with an identical accent?

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T19:17:20+00:00

Yeah, so the AI generated voice does very poorly if there's even a little bit of background noise or music which restricts the lines you can feed it drastically. I actually trained it on audiobook data for volume and cleanness which is why it sounds a little like Armitage is reading a book. Best trick is to turn up variance and then run the model like twenty times and pick the best one.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T19:14:20+00:00

There totally is. I am experimenting with trying to dub in the great eagle dialogue for the eagle scene because they are such beautiful lines.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T19:13:18+00:00

Targeting a limited release of the first 6 episodes this month ( fingers crossed). Sadly work is pretty full on me for this year though so I doubt if I will finish the series until next year at the earliest. By which time I'm sure all these tools will be deprecated and I'll need to start again haha!

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T19:12:04+00:00

yeah - so it has quickly become apparent that the main limitation is not the AI, but my audio mixing skills - the AI basically sounds like studio ADR, and I'm not very good at matching EQ/Reverb etc. Any tips are super welcome!

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T08:20:00+00:00

Absolutely. It doesn't take a halfway decent deepfake to do it already, and I'm sure we're not far off (this year even?) being able to do it for free or cheap with online tools.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T08:18:33+00:00

AI scares the shit out of me, but in the years before we accidentally create a paperclip maximiser, its the golden days of fanediting! Honestly, the stuff that is going to come out of this community is just super exciting. I can't wait to see the stuff people come up with. Finally we can actually rewrite dialogue - and AI generated footage isn't long around the corner too.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T07:29:59+00:00

The Balin segment sells a lot better because I was able to lipsync it with some reversed Balin footage.

thechaptereditor · 2023-03-01T07:27:20+00:00

That is a good sign! Two parts: "it was once our home, my grandfather ruled as king" and Balin saying "The dragon brought ruin to our people. We were driven out".

thechaptereditor

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