Thanks Grazie, good to be here again. Looking forward to seeing what tools/plugins the Vegas community needs now.

Welcome back, Satish!

Welcome back Satish! How about giving us some way to frame serve directly into Handbrake. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to do that!

I spoke with the Handbrake developers some time back (2009) about frameserving, and this was their reply:

"

Notice he said "non-trivial," not "impossible."
;?)

Welcome back Satish.

One plugin I see a need for is a low pass filter to wrangle aliasing.
I believe there's one already available from the open source community, it just needs porting to OFX.

Bob.

Wow... I'm glad to see you back.... will have some things for you
thanks!! and good luck!

satish, maybe a exposure plugin?

vegas don't have one, 3 plugins in sequence are needed to overcome this.

the inner workings are pretty simple, shouldn't be too hard to code i believe (just a inverted gamma)

Have you FBmn software's exposure plug-in??

I love the frameserver plugin Satish, It's the only way I render. I find that I like the results I get when serving directly to x264, or hcenc, and using custom avisynth scripts when needed. Thank you very much for this useful plugin, and your involvement in the community.

Ian

Fantastic to have you back Satish. I absolutely love Frameserver.

Here are some ideas for you:

1. Media Manager. The existing Media Manager appeared a few versions ago but has been undeveloped for a long time. There really doesn't seem to be a viable alternative in the market but it's badly needed by some of us. I for one would pay well for it and I think there would be scope for you to port functionality to other NLEs. My suggestions for the existing Media Manager are in the 3rd post on this thread. Also some of us delved beneath the hood in this thread.

2. Color Curves. I seem to spend half my life using the Sony Color Curves plugin but it's very basic and extremely fiddly to use. Here's some improvements to it that I'd like to see.
- much bigger window with a grid
- a diagonal bottom-left-to-top-right guideline
- real numbers on the axes
- live output of coordinates
- the ability to input precise coordinates
- clear indication of key levels (16,234,240)
- import/export LUT
- undo support [EDIT: this was added in either VP11 or VP12]
[ADDED] - ability to change the RGB master curve after "splitting" the individual Red-Green-Blue curves.
[ADDED] - make "Show all channels" default to ON, like it used to in VP10 and earlier

3. Deinterlacer. There is a Yadif plugin but there is scope for something better. A number of us do our deinterlacing in either Handbrake or QTGMC (an AviSynth filter) for better results than Vegas can give. My convoluted QTGMC workflow is here (and includes Frameserver).

4. Levels. Maybe an autolevels plugin, or a plugin to assist with getting levels right for web, DVD etc.. Vegas' poor and confusing handling of levels is a constant source of discussion on the forum.

Other areas you could look might be advanced resizing, denoising, sharpening, slomo/retiming, frame replacement (e.g. remove flash). I do all of this in AviSynth or VirtualDub for better results than Vegas can give.

I agree with Nick's wishlist.

And if you decide to pursue any of them, I think you should be charging us "something" for them, and not be giving away your genius for free. Nobody here, to my knowledge, has objected to paying for F. Baumann's color matching plugins, because they just work and are well worth a modest investment.

yeh a lot of Nicks suggestions look good.

a 32-bit 6-way color corrector (like AAV Colorlab) would also be useful... something simple, like Sat/Hue in After Effects is.

Media Manager and a Script-Spill Checker.

G

agreed. a spill checker would be good...

A better credit roll. The one that comes with Vegas is pretty limited. There are workarounds, but all are complicated and I have not had much success with them. OTOH, I have had great success with your frameserver. A jewel.

Thanks Nick and everyone, this is extremely helpful. Let me list what we have so far:

1. Media Manager
2. Plugin: Color curves
3. Plugin: Deinterlacer
4. Plugin: Levels
5. Plugin: 32-bit, 6-way colour corrector like AAV Colorlab or Sat/Hue in AE
6. Script spill checker.
7. Plugin: Credit roll

I'll probably start with one or two plugins initially to get up to speed. And I'll be glad if you all as Vegas users choose which ones they are. Please either vote for your choice from the list or I'm happy to hear other suggestions as well.

PS: @musicvid, thanks. Yes I'll charge something for the new tools as that would also support improvements and keep the development going.

That credit roll has been terrible since day one whereas the Adobe Premier credit roll has been super since day one.
JJK

Access deshaker (for virtualdub) plugin from Vegas.
"Twixtor like" slowdown.
thx

@Tom Pauncz

satish would make free plugins, so, they are better ;)

@malowz Frameserver and my earlier plugins will continue to be available free, and new plugins I develop would be sold for a small amount

Satish,
Personaly I would like to see a plugin to draw a road on a map.
Like that (but more elaborated):
http://www.routegenerator.net/index.html

Thx

I'm now starting to develop commercial plugins and other tools to improve workflow of Vegas users.Satish,

I ran several software companies (a long, long time ago ...) so I have some idea of how to leverage development efforts and not waste time developing something that doesn't sell. It sounds like you are wanting to develop plugins and sell them, rather than simply give them away on the debugmode.com site. I find that a very positive and exciting decision, because someone with your knowledge of Vegas, and talents as a programmer could really make a huge difference to all of us in the Vegas community, and you could be financially rewarded for your efforts.

Here are some thoughts and ideas in response to your request for feedback.

1. Provide access to what is out there. You already did this with the VirtualDub plugin adapter that you put into your Wax program. I used this quite a bit in the early versions of Vegas, and it was somewhat useful. However, there were stability issues, and it was not easy to get GUI feedback when changing plugin settings. Perhaps the plugin architecture in the newer versions of Vegas would let you do a better implementation of your original idea, and also perhaps extend it to AVISynth plugins.

I think you will find, as others respond to your request, that denoising, gamma (levels), color corrections, slow motion, and deinterlacing will be the five most-requested enhancements. Since both AVISynth and VirtualDub provide an amazing array of plugin options for these tasks, you could leverage your efforts by providing access to these tools rather than trying to concentrate on just one specific set of requests.

2. Monitor which plugins people actually use. I recommend that you implement some way in which your updated plugin adapter (as you used to call it) can communicate to you which plugin is being used. This would give you very precise market research information.

3. Use information gathered in #2 to build dedicated plugins. Once you know which plugins are actually being used, rather than just what people request in forum posts, you can use this to build a really great plugin (or plugins) that goes beyond what is available via VirtualDub and/or AVISynth. Put another way, #1 & #2 let you collect money for your market research, while also providing a very useful product to the Vegas community.

As for specific ideas that are not available via AVISynth and VirtualDub plugins, but which might be really useful -- and which are things that people don't normally ask for because they don't exist -- I have several items that I requested years ago, back when I had a direct line to the development team. Here is a quick list of those features. You can send me a PM if you want more info on these, or if you want a more extensive list. Some of these may be difficult to achieve via the plugin architecture, but I can guarantee they would be extremely useful.

1. Incremental render. Vegas provides "smart rendering" for a few formats, but even for those formats (like DV AVI), it never provided the ability to easily update an existing render. Suppose your computer just spent twenty hours rendering a thirty minute project, but you then find ten seconds on the timline that you need to change. The idea would be that you could simply create a region around the section that you have changed, and you would ask to render that, and that newly rendered section would be "spliced" into the existing rendered file. I do this all the time, using a variety of external tools, but it sure would be nice to have it done automatically. You'd need to get access to some AVCHD and MPEG-2 libraries that would let you combine together multiple files without re-rendering.

2. Replace bad frame. Suppose you want to remove a photographer's flash, or you have a dropout that you'd like to fix, or you have video that was captured by a faulty capture card and it dropped a frame and then later duplicated a frame in order to keep the sound in sync. There are many other scenarios. Wouldn't it be great if I could simply position the Vegas cursor in front of the bad frame, press a button, and have a perfect, synthesized frame inserted at that point? It turns out that I do this all the time, with software I created, and it works stunningly well. Unfortunately, it requires a round trip in and out of AVISynth, plus several small Vegas scripts to make it work. No one except a nerd like me is going to want to do it this way. Here is a short demo of how amazingly well this can work:



I manually marked every single bad frame and then synthesized and inserted replacement frames. I have another before/after that shows the truck driving away, and even with the car and camera in motion, the repaired video looks perfect.

I have many other suggestions, but I don't want to make this too long. Some of my suggestions would entail quite a bit of development (there are about a dozen things that can be done if you have access to some really good motion estimation libraries). Others might be simpler, and I'll list two of them here without further explanation:

Text export/import so you can spell check titles, provide scripted input to title generation, and more.

Advanced project auditing. Many of my first Vegas scripts, a decade ago, focused on this, and some of these were incorporated into commercial scripts. This includes things like looking for small gaps or overlaps on the timeline; looking for "nudged" opacity levels; looking for missing final keyframes in still photo animation events (happens when you stretch events); and looking for duplicate fX (happens when you "paste attributes").

Thanks so much for your fantastic products and your willingness to continue to enhance Vegas. I use Frameserver every single day and could not live without it.