Hard to say. All Vegas plugins are essentially standard DirectX Transform filters, but 6cc has only been verified to work in Sony Vegas, releases 4 and 5. If you find that it works in some other application, then I'd like to know about it! And if you "almost" get it to work, chances are I could probably tweak it into full compliance, so mail me in any case!

While Sony Screenblast Movie Studio seems to be Vegas's little sister and probably shares much of the same codebase, it appears to block third party plugin support entirely - probably to entice you into buying Vegas. Thus, 6cc won't work in Movie Studio. Sorry.

6cc will work on any recent CPU that supports either the multi-vendor SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) or AMD's 3DNow! instruction set. These special instructions are used to accelerate math calculations and memory operations by working with multiple bits of data at once. The image processing engine in 6cc is almost 100% written in SSE/3DNow!, and benefits greatly from this.

6cc should run fine on:

• AMD Athlon/Duron, Athlon XP/MP, Athlon 64, Opteron
• Intel Pentium 3, Pentium 4 and related Celeron models

As of v0.9.5, 6cc supports 3DNow! in addition to SSE. In time, if the demand is there, I'll also implement a fallback codepath for legacy x87-only CPU's. That would essentially extend support to ALL viable machines, but I expect this "last resort" mode to be very slow. As for MMX, it just lacks the accuracy for the calculations 6cc does.

Special optimizations for SSE 2-capable CPU's are also possible, but it's doubtful how much of a difference that would make.

Some people seem to get this problem with the installer EXE. I will look into a fix for this, but for now the solution is to download the "installer-less" ZIP file, and do the following:

1. Unzip the file into some nice folder (preferably under \Program Files\6cc or similar)
2. Double-click on the "install.bat" file (may only say "install" in Explorer). A message box should pop up saying that the registration succeeded.
3. (Re-)start Vegas and "aav6cc" should now show up in the FX lists, ready to use!

Note that you must NOT move the folder or the files after you've "installed" the plugin using the above method. To move the files, you have to first double-click on "uninstall.bat", move the files, then run "install.bat" again.

I've had a few vague reports of this, but it seems to be very rare. Please contact me.

Quite often you end up with masks looking something like this. Lots of "blocking" is visible, and it doesn't really look very smooth at all. Why is that? Is this a bug in 6cc? Nope, and it should in fact only occur on DV-sourced or otherwise compressed video material. It's actually a direct indication of how the color information is compressed and stored in such formats: the human eye is much more sensitive to changes in "brightness" as opposed to color, so they can get away with storing the actual "color" in a very sloppy way. That's the KEY to the compression gains of DV though! If DV looked perfect, it wouldn't be able to fit 60 minutes on a standard tape. In other words, the "show mask" option shows you the inherent errors in DV compression, and there's little I can do to help it.

The good news is that it probably won't affect the output quality of 6cc. Hue and saturation changes shouldn't make these "blocks" stand out like a sore thumb, but changing the luminance might.

There IS, however, a way to lessen the problem a bit, but I only recommend this if you're sure it's a problem for you, in a particular scene. Sony was kind enough to supply a "Chroma Blur" filter in Vegas 5, and this can be used to reduce the blocking considerably. Try applying a "Chroma Blur" filter before 6cc in the effect chain, and play around with the sliders and see if it helps. As an example, here is an example of how "Chroma Blur" can improve the blocking with both sliders set to "4.0".

Now, while this may improve the masks of 6cc, I do not recommend using "Chroma Blur" recklessly. The fact is that it achieves its "magic" by removing some of the color information in the image. It effectively "blurs" the entire chroma signal, but leaves the brightness signal alone. This "softens" the chroma blocks - if any, but it will also remove other high-contrast features. Here is a quick example of how "Chroma Blur" can ruin the color accuracy in the image. As you can see, it has basically softened the edges between the color bars, leaving us with a picture that looks considerably worse, with almost a "VHS" kind of quality.

Thus, don't overdo it, only use "Chroma Blur" if you're sure you need it!

(to be added)