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Scaling questions Vegas Movie Studio
Here’s the situation:
Me and another editor are working on a series of messages from a seminar; I’m flying with Premiere Pro CS5.5, and he’s using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 11. Everything was shot in HDV 1440 x 1080, and one of the final output mediums will be DVD (which I’ll be handling.) Complicating matters is the fact that one camera wasn’t framed right for several of the messages the other editor has, and will need to be scaled/cropped somewhere around 140%.
Now for several questions:
1) How do project settings/scaling/rendering work in Movie Studio? I.e. the other editor has been working in 1440 x 1080 projects; if we want to crop in before going to 720 x 480, can he just adjust the project settings and scale away? Or regardless of project settings, will Movie Studio scale the source media up (140% in this case), then back down to the output resolution?
2) But then, depending on how good the scaling for Movie Studio is in general, should we be going from 1440 x 1080 to DVD resolution in the first place? Alternatively, he could just render out at full size and I’ll do final scaling to DVD myself in AME or Encore with “Maximum Render Quality” enabled. That would either have him scaling up the footage that needs to be cropped within Movie Studio, or a longer route, one of us scaling the source files up in Virtual Dub or something.
Thanks in advance for any advice on how to handle this workflow.
-N
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3 Replies
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[Nathan Brunner] “1) How do project settings/scaling/rendering work in Movie Studio? I.e. the other editor has been working in 1440 x 1080 projects; if we want to crop in before going to 720 x 480, can he just adjust the project settings and scale away? Or regardless of project settings, will Movie Studio scale the source media up (140% in this case), then back down to the output resolution?”
Have him work with his project in the native 1440 x 1080 resolution and use the Pan/Crop tool to crop the shot as needed. Movie Studio will scale everything up as needed.
[Nathan Brunner] “2) But then, depending on how good the scaling for Movie Studio is in general, should we be going from 1440 x 1080 to DVD resolution in the first place? Alternatively, he could just render out at full size and I’ll do final scaling to DVD myself in AME or Encore with “Maximum Render Quality” enabled. That would either have him scaling up the footage that needs to be cropped within Movie Studio, or a longer route, one of us scaling the source files up in Virtual Dub or something.”
I would have him render the SD DVD version from Movie Studio so that it has the full resolution of the source for doing the downscaling. This should produce the highest quality. If he gives you HD then it will be upscaled to HD and then downscaled again by you which might not be the best quality. Have him do the downscaling once.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Thanks for the reply. So if I understand correctly, he can work with the HD project and scale up when he has to, but as long as the output is SD, Movie Studio won’t actually scale anything up if it doesn’t need to?
Also, is there anything else to be aware of in the HDV to DVD workflow within Movie Studio – i.e., does it matter one way or the other whether “adjust source media” in the project settings is ticked, or whether “best” should be selected for rendering quality?
I know with Adobe, there can be a noticeable difference when “maximum render quality” is enabled for downscaling to SD…but I don’t know if something similar is necessary in Movie Studio.
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[Nathan Brunner] “Thanks for the reply. So if I understand correctly, he can work with the HD project and scale up when he has to, but as long as the output is SD, Movie Studio won’t actually scale anything up if it doesn’t need to?”
Yes, when it renders from HD to SD it will use the full HD source so that it will actually be scaling down the crop from HD to SD with no scale up.
[Nathan Brunner] “Also, is there anything else to be aware of in the HDV to DVD workflow within Movie Studio – i.e., does it matter one way or the other whether “adjust source media” in the project settings is ticked, or whether “best” should be selected for rendering quality?”
Adjust source media is a convenience that automatically crops media to the project aspect ratio. If you turn it off and see black bars, just crop the media manually. Otherwise keep it on and it will do it for you. Rendering to Best quality of recommended when resizing so I would render to Best when going from HD to SD. For HD to HD you can use Good.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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