blurring and jagged when panning

[John Rofrano]

Is it only when you render to MP4 or is it any format? Are your rendering to 24p? or 29.970?

~jr

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

[Frank Rizzo]

I have only tried to render to MP4 because I’ve gotten best results with it in the past. I have tried rendering to both 24p and 29.970. Also, when I play the raw AVCHD/.MTS files with windows media player, it actually looks sharper and I don’t see the blurriness.

[John Rofrano]

[frank rizzo] “Also, when I play the raw AVCHD/.MTS files with windows media player, it actually looks sharper and I don’t see the blurriness.”

That is usually caused by a mismatch in frame rates. Your camera does not shoot 24p. This is why Canon calls it 24f! I believe it is 24 frames with pulldown added into in a 29.970 stream so the stream is 29.970. When you right-click an event and go to the Properties and look at the Media tab, what frame frame does Vegas think the footage is?

~jr

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

[Frank Rizzo]

Vegas shows the event to be 23.976 (IVTC Film). And according to the Canon manual,

“24F – 24 frames per second, progressive. Using this frame rate will achieve the same cinematic look as PF24, the difference being that video is recorded as true 24p.”

The manual then says that I would need to use supplied software ImageMixer 3 to convert movies recorded with this frame rate to standard definition. I didn’t think that would affect me since I have no need for standard definition. But is it worth trying to see if it produces better results in Vegas?

Thanks for you help.

[John Rofrano]

[frank rizzo] “Vegas shows the event to be 23.976 (IVTC Film)”

That’s good. Is you project set to HD 1080-24p (1920×1080, 23.976 fps)? That would match the source. Then to render, I would use the MainConcept AVC render type and with the Default Template which should match your project properties.

~jr

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

[Frank Rizzo]

I did everything you suggested, but the rendered version using MainConcept MP4 was not as sharp as the Sony MP4 version. So now I’m going to try cineform on the files. Maybe that will help?

[John Rofrano]

[frank rizzo] “I did everything you suggested, but the rendered version using MainConcept MP4 was not as sharp as the Sony MP4 version”

The reason I said to use MainConcept codec was because I thought that the Sony AVC codec doesn’t support 23.976 frame rate but I see now that you can type in a frame rate other than what’s in the drop down list and if you select Sony AVC with the Default Template it will default to the 23.976 of your project so try Sony AVC with the default template.

~jr

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

[Frank Rizzo]

Okay, pretty close. Most of the footage looks good; there is still some bluriness and ghosts on a few of the pans, but that may just be a case of too much the camera. In any case I have enough cuts to get by without it. But that does bring up one last question: considering the problems I had with true 24p on the vixia, would I be better off remaining with their version of 30P?

And thank you for your patience and wonderful help.

[John Rofrano]

[frank rizzo] “But that does bring up one last question: considering the problems I had with true 24p on the vixia, would I be better off remaining with their version of 30P? “

You bring up an *extremely* important point…

You don’t swing a 24p camera around like a 60i camera!!!

You need to learn to shoot for 24p. It’s not just a “switch” on the camera settings. It’s a different style of shooting. As you have seen, you can’t do fast pans! Your moves need to be slow and deliberate. 24p will stutter easily if the camera moves too fast.

I would find a picket fence and practice slow pans on it to get use to how fast you can pan before you get ghosts and stuttering. The vertical bars on the fence will help you understand how much motion you can apply to the pan.

30p will be way more forgiving but if you really want the 24p look, you’ll need to learn to shoot 24p.

~jr

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

[Frank Rizzo]

Excellent advice, as always. Thanks a ton. One last question/observation: even though I’ve shot in true 24P, it seems like converting to cineform neoscene files is worthwhile because it is so much easier to edit than with AVCHD. Is that your impression? Is there any downside I’m missing other than larger files after converting. Thanks.