@doug_mccarron

Hi

This is how the 'running time looks for me on both my laptop and PC - the colour is a mid blue and is clear to read, however on your monitor it will appear differently.

The issue you are having is likely to be due to differences between your monitor(s), and what you see will not be what we see, and also the age of the monitor - as it ages the colour balance will shift and, depending on the illumination type, darken.

The above image is from colour calibrated monitor which has been set to a standardised brightness and calibrated with a SpyderX calibrator.

Try adjusting the colour balance and brightness/contrast/gamma settings of your monitor to seei if you can improve the viewability.

HTH

John EB
Forum Moderator

@johnebaker @doug_mccarron

Hi John.

I'm trying to follow the logic of your comment 😕 and my previous now seemingly stupid question I posted earlier.

When I print screen I take a snapshot not of what my monitor screen projects or what I see, but the instructions to make a percentage calculation of which pixels are active at what relative brightness. So not an actual shot of what I am seeing on screen as the screen provides it but its projected output to its pixels as provided by the instruction set for the screen to project.

So if I then take a screen shot of my screen and put in next to a capture of your screen shot as seen on my monitor, they will look identical on my screen, and will be what I am used to seeing normally. Not what you see on your screen. Does that make sense?

If so then your screen capture will look the same to Doug as what he normally sees when he fires up his version of VPX. Yes?

Ray.

I agree with Doug. The VPX interface is ugly and difficult to read because of the colours, especially that ghastly blue. Movie Edit Pro/Movie Studio is much nicer.

Like white, or yellow, or light blue. The way it is they might as well make it black on black.

@CubeAce. @doug_mccarron

Hi

. . . . When I print screen I take a snapshot not of what my monitor screen projects or what I see, but the instructions to make a percentage calculation of which pixels are active at what relative brightness. . . ..

My point exactly, as I said above 'the colour is a mid blue and is clear to read, however on your monitor it will appear differently'.

What you see depends on the colour profile the GPU is using and the brightness, contrast and gamma settings of the monitor.

We all have the same colours in the program up to the point where the colour profile is applied, after that the colour profile, monitor settings, and colour balance of the monitor illumination determine what you actually see.

To see the image and interface the same as I do you would have to colour profile your monitor with colour profiler hardware and software.

I did not include the final 'component' of the chain - the viewers own perception of colours incorrectly referred to as 'colour blindness'.

HTH

John EB

@johnebaker

A few 'cones' short of an ice cream then?

Or maybe something to look forward to?

I agree the blue is visible to me but I also agree Magix could do better with their choices to encompass a wider user base. I doubt if anyone at Magix notices as they would probably not hire a developer who could not see what they were looking at and they should be working with accurate colour capable monitors.

Ray.

You guys are overthinking this. Blue on black is bad, period. Look at your MEP verses VPX. What's better?

@AAProds

Hi Al.

Actually I prefer the blue, sorry but I also prefer working with a dark theme on my desktop and I have control over the ambient light in my work area. I'm sure it is a worse experience working with natural daylight. I also think screen size plays a part. I would find it hard to use this program effectively on a screen size of less then 28" at arms length.

In this instance though, would it not just be better to use what extras VPX or MS provide?

You can disable the track for export.

Ray.

I use a 32 inch monitor myself.

I think they could just make it something we can set on our own monitors. They do have display options, background and text colors could easily be options.

@AAProds

Hi Alwyn

. . . . Blue on black is bad, period, . . . .

IMHO there are much worse combinations than blue on black.

. . . . Look at your MEP verses VPX. What's better? . . . .

What's the difference? Mine are both mid blue when active ie there is a clip on the timeline.

John EB

@doug_mccarron

While it may seem an extra three steps I don't see what is wrong with my workaround solution.

Ray.

@johnebaker

John,

What's the difference? Mine are both mid blue when active ie there is a clip on the timeline.

We're talking about the text:

Is there any way to make the time a useful and readable color? Why would a programmer make it so difficult to see as the time stamp is one of the most critical pieces of information when syncing up everything?

@AAProds

No, the initial inquiry was about the time stamp in the programs' monitor view.

In MS it is light grey on dark grey. In VPX the Timestamp is light blue on dark grey and to me and John, easily visible. To me personally, the light blue numerals used in VPX are more easily read than the light grey used in MEP \ MS.

In my personal opinion, one thing other than personal eyesight and the monitors actual colour accuracy (pixel display wise) that could possibly make a difference is if an individual actually colour calibrated their monitors correctly or not.

Ray.

OR Magix could give an option to change the color.

CUBE ACE - I didn't see your work around until right now. That does solve the issue. Thank you.

Though I still think Magix should give the option to alter the display and time colors.

But thank you for that suggestion.

Douglas

@doug_mccarron

Hi Doug.

There is a page where I suspect Magix staff do monitor for feedback on VPX 13 if you add the person who set it up in the reply. At least they should get a notification. It's here.

The choice for altering colour has been reserved I think for the track layout as that makes knowing which track is used for titling, or different camera angles or music backing tracks etc more easy to see at a glance. So yes they could do it. Personally I would be happy if all text used for track identification, time stamps, clip information, other, was left white on a black background. Also some text information never scales with the view when zoomed in on. That can be good or bad. What I remind myself is whenever anything is added it contributes that bit more to the amount of processing power that is taken way from the main job of editing smoothly as systems get older with newer versions of the program.

Magix has already admitted optimizing Vegas to work best with 12th generation Intel processors here. Of course there is never any such announcements for us poorer MS \ VPX users but I suspect similar progress with newer releases of both programs.

Anyway I'm glad my option works for you and hope the additional adding of a track is not adversely affecting your playback. It would be industry standard practice for most Film and TV editors to have such a time code showing in the monitor picture normally provided by a SMPTE time code so that is why I suggested it.

Ray.

@CubeAce

HI Ray

. . . . . Of course there is never any such announcements for us poorer MS \ VPX users but I suspect similar progress with newer releases of both programs. . . . .

I do not think we are the poorer users, we have a lot of features that Vegas does not, as an ex Vegas user I would not go back to it.

I suspect there are no announcements because we are already ahead of them, both with the Intel optimisations that were made after Nvidia dropped support for NVCUVID (CUDA based encoding) and now with the Infusion engine.

Vegas is being brought into the modern age.

. . . . .  It would be industry standard practice for most Film and TV editors to have such a time code showing in the monitor picture normally provided by a SMPTE time code . . . .

I have no SMPTE timecoded video with me at the moment (working from my laptop) however, IIRC, the timecode display is there, you have to drop a SMPTE timecode video for it to become active.

The other difference to take into account is the Vegas has a predominantly US user base and VPX is mainly in Europe and is used by professionals for TV broadcast etc .

John EB

@johnebaker

Hi John,

I was mainly referring to detailed announcements regarding changes to the interactive parts of the software. Not that we were necessarily a poorer relation in the development sense although I've noticed a rise in problems from users with 12th generation CPUs and no third party GPU asking questions on the forums.

I have never seen similar announcements for MEP or VPX for any processor generation or GPU for that matter.

The letter in the Magix news area I point to is not even mirrored in the Vegas programs specification area.

Most of the time we are left without any specific details to go on and as some people have noted in other threads, the average user is not prone to going down such technical rabbit holes to find solutions.

Sometimes it would just be nice to know what page we are on.

Ray.

@CubeAce

Hi Ray,

 . . . . Of course there is never any such announcements for us poorer MS \ VPX users but I suspect similar progress with newer releases of both programs. . . . .

Once in a while comments/problems pop up on the Vegas forum about things that we, VPX/MS/MEP users take for granted.

Two of them are cropping and PiP or rather Size/Position/Rotation.

Vegas has fantastic compositing features but fails on some of the basics. See this thread and this one (we have Bézier handles in VPX) and another one on the same topic. There are more. Here's one.

What we know as Size/Position/Rotation with the ability to resize and move objects on the preview monitor by dragging (cannot do this in Vegas as far as I know), the equivalent in Vegas is "Track Motion." For us, Track Motion is an effect to have an object track something is a video.

As John EB pointed out, we have a lot of features that Vegas does not have, multiple movies and nested timelines (from within the same project) being a couple of them. Another is the inability to apply a transition to all, a range, or selected objects; nada in Vegas.

For new users of Vegas 19, there's no manual. And the list goes on.

My only complaint about the colours on the screen in VPX are the track names. They are very faint and you have to mouse over them so that they'll go black and become easily visible. This was on the Bug List as a complaint, not a bug.

@doug_mccarron

Just an aside, but if you need to quickly see the start location time of an object, select the clip and open the Object Trimmer (Shift+N). The time at the beginning of the clip is shown. You can quickly move along the timeline and see the start time of objects using the Object Trimmer and the left and right arrows.

Need to nudge the object by a frame or two? Just use the left and right arrows above the time box.

John CB