Make sure to follow the video tutorial embedded below to ensure that you are following the correct procedure to render your video!

Listed below are the settings you will need for my custom 1080p rendering template. When you go to File > Render As.. , find the Windows Media Video (.wmv) presets and customize one, inserting the following settings:

AUDIO TAB:
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Audio
Attributes: 192 kbps, 48 kHz, stereo (A/V) CBR

VIDEO TAB:
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Video
Image Size: Custom – 1920×1080
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.00
Frame Rate (FPS) – 30
Video Smoothness – ~80-100

BIT RATE:
Internet/Lan: ~ 4M – 8M

PROJECT:
Video Rendering Quality: Best

Creating the kill counter is very easy! Follow the simple steps below:

1. Download the kill counter template I created for free! (Click Here and Right Click on img, Save As..)
2. Open up the kill counter template in Vegas and place it on a new video track.
3. Open up the track motion (button located to left of video track, look for a black arrow inside a white box pointing towards a blue box).
4. Resize the kill counter and move it to where you want by using the track motion.
5. Exit track motion.
6. Insert new video track, right click and Insert Text on that video track.
7. Customize your text to say “Kill Count” or “Kill Counter” or something similar! (Change position of the text, add a shadow to the text, change the colour if you want, etc..)
8. Right click on your text layer and click “Copy” or use CTRL+C.
9. Past your text layer on a new video track (CTRL+V) and click “Create a new source of this media” when prompted by Vegas.
10. Right click on this new text layer and click Edit Generated Media.
11. Change this text to the number of kills at start of the clip, probably 0, and place the text where you want it on screen.
12. Now, move to the place in your video clip where your first kill occurs.
13. Click on the Number text, (probably 0 at the start) and click S on your keyboard. This will split the text. Delete the text to the right of your cursor. (If confused, view video tutorial below.)
14. Copy the number 0 text, and paste a new source of the text beside it. Go to Edit Generated Media and change this number to 1. This represents the fact that you now have one kill.
15. Repeat step 12-14 for each kill, changing the number to represent the number of kills you have.

There you go! You now have a simple Kill Counter in your video for your gameplay!

Watch the video tutorial below if you need extra help:

To stay classy, we’re going to put the instructions in a nice list down here for you to follow. Let’s go:

1. Open Sony Vegas (Pro 8, 9, 10, 11, etc..).
2. Open up your two video clips in Vegas. (You can use Open in Vegas, or simply find your clips in a video folder and drag and drop them into the Vegas window.)
3. Place both video clips on separate video tracks.
4. Sort out your audio. Two audio tracks playing together won’t sound great. Try using one of the audio clips, or even replace both of them with custom music or sound.
5. Go to the “Track Motion” on the top video track (your first clip) and click it. The “Track Motion” button can be found to the left of the video clip, the button has a black arrow inside a white box, pointing towards a small blue box (great description right?). If you move your cursor around the buttons to the left of the video clip you should find it easily!
6. Once you have the track motion open, ensure that “Lock Aspect Ratio” and “Scale about Center” are NOT on.
7. Now, ensure that the scrolling cursor at the bottom of the Track Motion window is at the first keyframe, click CTRL+Home to set it to the first keyframe.
8. Now, place your cursor at the top left hand corner of the box shown in the Track Motion window. Click and drag it to the right. Watching your preview, you can see your clip skewing in size to the right. Stop when you are satisfied with its position.
9. Before closing the Track Motion on the top track, click in the top white space where it says “(Untitled)” and write in “Right Hand Side Split” or something similar. Now hit the Save / Floppy disk icon to the right of the text. This will save the preset for future use and will be available from the drop down menu!
10. Now, close the track motion and open up the track motion for your second clip! Repeat steps 6-9, and when naming it as a preset be sure to say “Left Hand Side Split” or something similar.

That’s it! You’re done! You’ve now created a split screen effect in Sony Vegas!

Make sure to watch the video tutorial if you are having trouble:

1.  Go to File > Render As.. . Select the template you use for rendering usually, and click “Customize Template”. A window should pop up allowing you to customize the template settings, make your way to the “Bit Rate” tab. Lowering your bit rate will reduce the file size of the final rendered video, thus decreasing the rendering time. I recommend keeping the bit rate between 3M – 8M .
2. Get rid of un-needed effects/video tracks. If you are using video effects that you don’t feel you need for your project, and you don’t think they make a difference to your video, remove them. The more effects you use, the great time Vegas has to spend to render your project. The same goes for video tracks, if you have several video tracks, Vegas needs to work to merge these all together, so the less tracks you have, the faster your rendering will be.
3. Close all the programs that are open on your computer that you aren’t using besides Vegas. Close your internet browser, your iTunes, your Skype, everything! This way your computer will be able to focus on running Vegas smoothly, and doesn’t have to worry about running your other programs. This way, your computer is only really trying to run Vegas, the rest of the processes open should be negligible (check task manager, CTRL+Shift+Esc) .
4. When you begin to render your video project, leave your computer. Close all programs, as suggested in Step 3, and leave your computer. Go for a jog, go outside, enjoy yourself (away from your computer!). This way, you aren’t using programs besides Vegas, slowing down your computer as described above!
5. This is the most common tip, but I only recommend it if you are leaving your computer whilst Vegas is rendering, as described in step 4. Open up the Windows Task Manager (CTRL+Shift+ESC or use CTRL+Alt+Delete) and from here right click on Vegas.exe . Scroll down to “Set Priority” and set it to “High”. What this is doing, is it’s telling your computer that this program, Sony Vegas, is a high priority. Because of this, your computer will put a focus on Vegas and give it a priority above to the rest of the processes currently taking place. Remember to only do this if you are leaving your computer as it will decrease the performance of all other programs. Also, remember to reset the priority when you return after rendering, using the reverse of what you just did. Set the priority back to “Normal”.
6. Enabling GPU acceleration in Vegas will also help to both reduce the rendering time of your video slightly and increase the overall performance of Vegas! To enable GPU acceleration, go to Options > Preferences and then go to the Video tab. For “GPU Acceleration of Video Processing” select your graphics card. If you cannot select anything from this drop down menu and only see “Off”, this means that your computer does not support GPU acceleration.
7. Finally, to avoid the laggy video preview, we’re going to reduce the quality of the preview. To do this, make your way to the drop down menu above the preview window which displays the quality of the preview. Click on the menu and select Preview > Half . What this does is it reduces the quality of the preview which eases the amount of effort Vegas and your computer has to use to preview the video in best quality. This will help your video project play and preview smoother, with a bit less quality.

Build

The build of the headphones is solid. The speakers are 40mm diameter speakers. The ear cushions are made from a soft, mesh fabric to allow for maximum comfort. The actual earpieces themselves rotate around to form the “DJ style” fold. These are connected to an extendible headband with a leather top and soft cushion underneath to rest on your head. The flexible microphone boom adjusts to any comfortable position or can be rotated out of the way when not needed.  The cable features a 3.5mm plug for line output and also a USB connector for power, mic connection and stereo audio.

The 16ft (4.87m) cable allows for ample freedom of movement while you play. Connected to this cable, is the control panel for the headset. From here, you can adjust game sound volume, chat volume, level of bass, switch on and off the audio expander, and switch on and off your mic. Also, there are two LEDs displayed on this control panel. One relates to the microphone, red LED meaning the mic is muted, green meaning it is on. The second LED is for chat boost, a brilliant feature implemented in the headset that reacts to game volume, meaning that, if you come to a point in the game where the action sound effects are high in volume, the headset will automatically boost your chat from team-mates to ensure you do not lose your conversation.

Sound Quality

The sound quality that is emitted from the Turtle Beach PX21 Headset is incredible. The headset picks up everything from subtle game sounds in the background to big explosions, maintaining the perfect balance.  The headset does not feature surround sound, however, with the ability to turn on or off the audio expander and the ability to adjust the level of bass, you can find your perfect fit. The added feature of chat boost adds to the experience, allowing you to listen to your game volume without having to worry about adjusting your chat volume whilst playing.

Mic Quality

The microphone quality is superb. On several occasions, I have used the Turtle Beach PX21 microphone to record audio onto my PC. The audio is crisp and clear, and the addition of the flexible microphone allows you to adjust the distance between your mouth and the microphone, making for the perfect fit for your recording situation.

Overall Result

Overall, I feel that the Turtle Beach Ear Force PX21 Headset is a solid headset. For a retail price of $79.95 I think it’s a definite buy. The combination of comfortability, amazing sound and microphone quality, and then the additional features make this headset a great addition to any gamers set-up. The fact that this headset is also universal, meaning it works on Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC !

★★★★☆ – 4/5 Stars Overall

Video Review/Overlook:

Where can I buy one?

• Directly from the Turtle Beach Website – here
• Amazon (US) – here
• Amazon (UK) – here

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Hooking up your monitor to Vegas is very simple!

1. First of all we’re going to need to hook up our monitor properly. We’re going to navigate to Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display\Screen Resolution .
2. Once in this window,  Display should be 1, Resolution can stay as it is, Orientation at Landscape and for Mobile Displays we’re going to set it to “Extend these Displays” ! This means that our external monitor is going to be an extended monitor of our laptop/PC , meaning we can drag a window from one screen to the next!
3. Now, the next step is to open up Vegas.
4. Go to Options, Preferences and navigate to the Preview Device tab.
5. Move down to Display Adaptor. From the dropdown menu there, you need to select number 2 display, your external monitor.
6. Make sure you tick scale output to fit display.
7. Then click Apply and OK.

Now when you go into Vegas, above your preview window there is a little button shaped like a monitor. You need to click “Video Preview on External Monitor” . Now when you preview you should see your video project preview on your external monitor!

Firstly lets take a look at the specs of this PC:

• Intel Core i7 2600K – a top end processor; power efficient and handles media processing flawlessly
• Corsair 16GB RAM – Four slots of 4GB meaning multitasking is done with ease
• 1TB SATA-III HDD
• ATI Radeon HD 6950 2 GB – very quiet, copes with majority of games easily
• Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Motherboard
• Cooler Master HAF 912 – great case, strong and sturdy.
• Corsair 600W PSU - also very quiet
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
• 8 USB slots, 7.1 sound and 24x Dual Layer DVD Reader/Writer

After hearing about this I had just presumed that Onlive was some kind of Steam alternative, similar to what EA’s Origin is trying to do. But just 2 days I ago I was on youtube and decided to go to a relatively popular youtuber’s page, TotalBiscuit. He has a series where called “WTF is…” where he reviews an indie game or a service that not too many people are familiar with.

The video on his page was that of the OnLive service and having heard of it but not knowing much about it, I decided to watch it. I will include the video at the bottom of this blog post but mind you, it’s fairly lengthy (37:44). So after watching it for a while he said that PC’s that aren’t that powerful would be able to stream game they wouldn’t normally be capable of playing. Intrigued by this, I paused the video less than 5 minutes in and decided to go download the OnLive client.

I downloaded it and had it opened and saw that the new Batman game was there, Batman: Arkham City, a game my laptop was definitely not capable of playing. So I opened up the batman page and saw that a free trial was available. I clicked the start free trial button and was absolutely shocked by what happened. The game opened, instantly. Bear in mind that this game is 11GB. After clicking it it allowed me to play 30 minutes of the game from the very start.

OnLive works by opening the game on servers and streaming the gameplay directly to your computer. You pressing buttons sends this information to their servers and they send you back the screen with VERY little lag. I was absolutely awestruck by this. I literally didn’t think anything like this, with this little lag, was even possible. Even with my slow-ish internet connection, 8 Mbps down 1Mbps up, I was able to play the game without the lag being too noticeable.Something even more amazing is that you can play all these games on your phone. Because it’s not about the power of your device and just your internet speed you are able to download the OnLive Android app and play these top tier PC games on your phone/tablet. I played Dirt 3, in full graphics, on my phone. My PC can’t do that. This stuff is mind boggling.

Would I use OnLive to buy my games though? The answer unfortunately, is no. While it is an amazing piece of technology, it would be impossible to play any sort of game competitively. Just imagine attempting to play Call of Duty or Battlefield where there was even a tiny delay between what you did with your mouse and what happened on-screen. The way I could imagine using this service best is to use it to play these 30 minute demos to find out whether or not you wish to buy the game somewhere else, which is definitely not what they intended.

It is amazing and you should definitely try it out but I would not use it to replace Steam.

-Colm

TotalBiscuit’s WTF is… – Onlive video:

To create these effects is simple, the only troubling part will be finding the image, but wait, we have you sorted there too! We’ve photoshopped up two new images, one is a Sniper Scope with a transparent center with some cross hairs, the other is a basic pair of binoculars with a transparent center!

1.  Binoculars – ( Click Here, then on image Right Click > Save As.. )
2. Sniper Scope – ( Click Here, then on image Right Click > Save As..)

To implement these images onto your video simply Insert a New Video Track in Sony Vegas (or any other video editing program), place your scope/binoculars image on the top track above your video. You should now be able to see your video through the transparent slot in the images!

Follow the video below as an example:

Firstly we are going to need to adjust the project properties by going to ‘File‘  then ‘Properties‘. The needed settings can be seen in the screenshot below:

(Make sure you check the box at the bottom of the dialogue ‘Start all new projects with these settings’)

Secondly we need to change the actual render settings by going to ‘File‘ then ‘Render As‘.
Scroll down on the ‘Output Format‘ until you find ‘MainConcept AVC/AAC (*.mp4)‘
Then choose the ‘Internet HD 720p‘ option. You should then adjust the settings accordingly with the ones I recommend which can be found in the screenshot below.

Once you have finished adjusting your settings, I recommend you save the preset by changing the name ‘Internet HD 720p‘ to your desired name.

Once you have done this, make sure you click the ‘save’ button located next to the template name.

You can see a step by step video of this tutorial below: