Blu-ray Challenge: How to take a 30fps video to 24fps, encode in HD on Vegas 8 Pro, and burn Blu-ray on a Mac.

[Angelo Mike]

Did you disable resample on all the video events that aren’t 24 fps already? That’s the first thing I’d do, and you would do that in the project. If you don’t, Vegas will try to blend together the extra frames to make the video 24 fps, which will give you a bunch of artifacts. Perhaps that’s what’s causing your problem.

[Angelo Mike]

I just noticed your project settings as well-you may want to put all the 30 fps footage in another Vegas project, render it out to 24 fps (while again disabling the resample on all the video), then putting that into your 24 fps project.

[H.t Baldwin]

‘Disable Resample’ is checked on every piece of video/film/still.
Has been throughout the project. (That usually causes my render to
freeze midway if I don’t).

I’ve made a DVD before of this project (with slightly different settings – no upper field) and it played great. Was told to choose
upper field for HD this go around.

[H.t Baldwin]

Angelo, thanks for starting this thread off. Render the footage twice?
Would this be necessary? I’ve gone 30-24fps with this documentary (burned to DVD) before and the 90 minute video played perfectly. I’d appreciate a little more information if you have the time.

I’m reading up in the meantime (we have 2 weeks to get our final copy done)
and it seems that there are so many variables in 30-24 conversions/blu-ray settings/going pc to mac that…well, bit lost. Can anyone see the solution based on my specs and give a step by step process to try? I’ve read a lot from Stephen, John, Angelo, Mike, well all of you! You guys know your stuff.

Should field order be none? do settings need to be different going to a mac to burn?

many thanks.

[John Rofrano]

If your source is HDV 29.97 I would set your project to HDV 29.97 same as your source. It’s fine to render to 24p from a 29.97 project. This will give you smoother playback on the timeline. I also would not disable resample. This is what makes the motion choppy because it’s simply deleting frames instead of blending them for smoother motion.

It should also be noted that shooting for 24p is different than shooting for 60i. Your camera motion needs to be slow and deliberate because of the lower frame rate. If you really want 24p you should record in CINEFRAME24 on your FX1. This way if you are moving your camera too fast you’ll see it in the viewfinder and not in the edit bay when you try to convert.

A workflow that I really like is to shoot CINEFRAME24 and then use CineForm NeoScene to convert that to true 24p (at 23.976fps). CineForm will reverse telecine the footage better than Vegas can.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[H.t Baldwin]

Hi John,

Thanks for the steps and explanation. I’m about to render out a
new file based on your suggestions. Can you tell me if the following
sounds good?

Project properties are back to 29.97 (HDV 1080-60i Template). And I changed every piece of video/titles/film clip/still photo to ‘Smart Resample’ (under Switches if someone has similar situation). Are my settings of Field order – Upper field first / Motion blur: Gaussian / Deinterlace: None, set as they should be?

My project properties audio is set to Stereo (not a 5.1 surround project – i saw on another of your posts you have to set this early in your work) / 48,000HZ / 16 Bit depth / Best quality

And then on video Render settings, I’m going to render using Blu-ray 1440×1080-24p, 25 mbps template (w/video quality – High (31)) – should I keep Field order – Upper field first like project properties?

And on the audio side, would you use Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro or Studio,
and what template/settings?

Last step, will we be set to burn out a good Blu-ray disc (after dropping in MPEG Streamclip) with our Toast settings: MPEG-2 format/ Average bit – 24.0Mbps/ Maximum bit – 24.5Mbps / Re-encoding – Never?

I’ll try a new copy and screen once I hear back.
A HUGE thanks to you.

[Angelo Mike]

[H.T Baldwin] ” Render the footage twice?
Would this be necessary? I’ve gone 30-24fps with this documentary (burned to DVD) before and the 90 minute video played perfectly. I’d appreciate a little more information if you have the time.”

I don’t know if it’s necessary since I’ve never tried the workflow you’re doing, but I would try it as one step of the problem solving process to see if it works. I would open your project, and while that’s open, open a new Vegas project. Then copy the 29.97 fps footage from your current project to the blank one, and render that out to 23.97 to closely match the original video as far as resolution, bit rate, and codec. Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t think that’s necessary, but if I were having this problem then I might try it.

Like John said, you could de-select “disable resample” as well. I might disagree on him there, if only because for the last five months I’ve rendered out 24 fps footage from 30 fps by using “disable resample” before rendering, and the footage looked fine. I’ve even done it with footage that went from 30 fps to 24 fps and had to be rendered in mov for a Mac editor to use for online video and didn’t have any problems there. So that’s just my experience.

But if you’re having different results, you may want to change things like that as a method of isolating what the problem is. You can render the project out a few different ways, only changing one thing each time, in your further tests.

[H.t Baldwin]

A quick additional note for John –

I’m just back in the timeline after the project properties adjustment.
I’ve never seen mouths of people on video move so fast! and fingers fly! Seems like any motion is sped up. Has de-selecting ‘disable resample’ caused this? I’m okay with it for now if the final result is smooth, but would be very hard to edit with new settings. What do
you think is going on?

[John Rofrano]

[H.T Baldwin] ” Are my settings of Field order – Upper field first / Motion blur: Gaussian / Deinterlace: None, set as they should be?”

No. You never want to set Deinterlace: None when working with interlaced HDV footage. It should be set to the default Deinterlace: Blend Fields. Sorry I didn’t catch that when looking at the screen shot of your project properties. You must have changed this from the default at some point.

[H.T Baldwin] “And then on video Render settings, I’m going to render using Blu-ray 1440×1080-24p, 25 mbps template (w/video quality – High (31)) – should I keep Field order – Upper field first like project properties? “

No. Progressive means no filed order. You should not be changing the Sony templates. The fielded order for the Blu-ray 1440×1080-24p, 25 mbps template is None (progressive scan). This is what you should leave it at.

[H.T Baldwin] “And on the audio side, would you use Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro or Studio, and what template/settings? “

Use Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro with the Stereo DVD template.

[H.T Baldwin] “Last step, will we be set to burn out a good Blu-ray disc (after dropping in MPEG Streamclip) with our Toast settings: MPEG-2 format/ Average bit – 24.0Mbps/ Maximum bit – 24.5Mbps / Re-encoding – Never?”

Why are you doing this? The video that comes out of Vegas is all set for Blu-ray. Why process it again?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[H.T Baldwin] “I’ve never seen mouths of people on video move so fast! and fingers fly! …What do you think is going on?”

Did you change the playback rate of any of the clips by accident? Only the playback rate would change the rate of play.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com