How remove sliver of letterboxing?

[John Rofrano]

Let’s start with your project settings. They should be NTSC DV (720×480, 29.970 fps). If you want to render to square pixel format you must use 655×480 not 640×480. This is because NTSC DV is 720×480 with a Pixel Aspect Ratio of 0.9091 and when you multiply 720 by 0.9091 you get 654.553 which rounds up to 655×480.

~jr

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

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks – that worked beautifully! But now there’s a different problem: a ‘ghost’ image of the main protagonist’s body. This is a weaker image appearing next to it, showing the outline of its edge that looks to be about 3 inches from the real body outline – or of course what would be 3 inches if the body were full size on the screen. It doesn’t appear in the original AVI file, although one can see a hint of it, barely noticeable, maybe a half inch from the edge of the body. I thought one of my earlier versions had appeared without that ‘ghost’, but perhaps I was mistaken – in any case I don’t remember the parameters used there.

What I was using till now was 15 fps (for no particular reason). I changed that to 29.97, which seemed to have no effect either way. Also my choice of Sorenson Video 3 was random, made out of ignorance. There are lots of other options available, none of which I understand…

[John Rofrano]

[Peyton Todd] “But now there’s a different problem: a ‘ghost’ image of the main protagonist’s body.”

Ghosting can be caused by changing frame rates which blends frames to compensate. Make sure that your render frame rate matches your media’s frame rate, which should match your projects’s frame rate.

One thing you can do is right-click on the video event, go to Properties and check Disable Resample. If this fixes the problem it’s definitely related to frame rate.

~jr

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

[Peyton Todd]

Unfortunately the source, project, and render frame rates are all already set at 29.97. And Disable Resample is already chosen.

I also tried ‘Best’ quality, in addition to ‘Preview’ and ‘Draft’ but they didn’t help either.

I thought DeInterlace method might make a difference so I tried the choices there, since the existing choice said ‘Blend’ and you mentioned blending. But the others didn’t help. ‘None’ made matters a lot worse since frames seemed to drop out – anyway a jerky result.

[Peyton Todd]

Now I have the opposite problem with a different video: it’s ‘letter-boxed’ with the black slivers on either side. (I think there’s a different term from this, since it doesn’t resemble looking through a mail slot, but I’ve forgotten what it is.)

Anyway, the source is 720 x 480 (4:3) 29.97 fps, DV (Sony) (NTSC) (DVCPRO) as before. I’ve been trying different pixel sizes and custom frame sizes as before, and they all have their effects (usually unexpected ones) on the black borders, but all I know at this point is just trial-and-error, which could go on forever.

Oddly, my first attempt was simply to increase the width, which I did from 480 to 490. This fixed the problem on the sides, but now it truly was letterboxed again (with the black borders only at the top)!

[Mike Kujbida]

Stab in the dark here but open the Pan/Crop window on the event, right click and choose Match Output Aspect.

[Peyton Todd]

This could be on the right track, Mike, since when I chose ‘match output aspect’, the “vertical letter-boxing” (as I’m calling it, since I forgot the appropriate term for the vertical equivalent of letter-boxing) disappeared in the preview window. But not in the actual output, unfortunately.

[John Rofrano]

[Peyton Todd] “I think there’s a different term from this, since it doesn’t resemble looking through a mail slot, but I’ve forgotten what it is”

It’s called “Pillarboxing” because of the two black pillars on each side of the video.

[Peyton Todd] “Anyway, the source is 720 x 480 (4:3) 29.97 fps, DV (Sony) (NTSC) (DVCPRO) as before. I’ve been trying different pixel sizes and custom frame sizes as before, and they all have their effects (usually unexpected ones) on the black borders, but all I know at this point is just trial-and-error, which could go on forever.”

So your project is set to NTSC DV (720×480, 29.970 fps) and you drop a 720 x 480 (4:3) 29.97 fps, DV (Sony) (NTSC) (DVCPRO) video on it and you get pillarboxing? Wow that’s odd.

What file format? AVI or MOV?

When you right-click on the event and go to Properties | Media, what does Vegas Pro think the file dimensions are? (maybe post a screen shot of the media properties tab)

~jr

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

[Brad Leigh]

If the Ghosting is still continuing (hard to tell from the posts) one more thing you might check. Is the video event placed exactly on the frame boundary? In older versions of Vegas I used to turn this off to fine trim an audio edit. Sometimes I would forget and place a video event in the time line or move an edit that was slightly off the frame. As John R pointed out to me there is no need to turn off Quantize to frame in the newer versions of Vegas. This can cause ghosting. Also I use a lot of clips generated from an animation program that outputs quicktime Animation codec. Even if I set my other software to 29.97 FPS it would create a file that was 30 FPS. This caused ghosting until I set Playback rate -.01 percent. This doesn’t relate to your problem, but what I noticed was sometimes I would still see ghosting after I fixed the problem and the cure was to restart Vegas and reopen the project.
Brad

i7 2600 3.4 Ghz 8Gig Ram , Win 7 Pro, Vegas Pro 12

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks for sticking with the problem, John. I’m ashamed to say that after a half hour searching, I can no longer find the VEG file I was dealing with. All the evidence (dates on yesterday’s renderings, etc.) points to a particular VEG that no longer exists on my PC for some reason, not even in the Recycle Bin. I tried again with the video clip I thought it must have been but no problem occurred with it when I set the properties to what you told me – not even letter-boxing. (It seems odd, by the way, that the MediaInfo report on these AVIs says 720 x 480 but 4:3 ratio… Vegas seems to know to go with 4:3.)

For now I’ll just have to wait till the problem re-emerges, which may soon happen since I have lots and lots of videos to edit, all of the same type as this one.

Meanwhile, I have your solution for the most common problem I’ve been experiencing, which is the letter-boxing. And thanks for providing the term ‘pillar-boxing’.

Incidentally, I have no particular desire to go with either square or .909-size pixels. Square is just what keeps popping up as default.

Peyton