How remove sliver of letterboxing?

[John Rofrano]

[Peyton Todd] “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”

It’s not odd once you understand that DV video does not use square pixels. The pixels are actually 0.9091 wide. 0.9091x 720 is 654.552. Since you can’t have a fraction of a pixel, when you round up you get 655×480 which is closer to 4:3 (so we call it 4:3 even though 640×480 is really 4:3).

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

The reason it’s importune tot know is because QuickTime on Windows has a hard time with non-square pixels so sometimes you need to do the math so that it can use square pixels.

Glad I could help. It reminds me that I have tons of DV tapes from when my kids were young that I’d better capture to a hard drive because the tapes are unplayable!

~jr

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

[Peyton Todd]

Many thanks for the explanations. I was able to figure out that the missing VEG never existed at all; I had purposely not saved it, under the mistaken impression that the bad parameters I had entered would mess up whatever the specs were of an earlier version that I mistakenly assumed did exist. When I started afresh today, everything worked fine.

I still haven’t fixed the ghost problem in the other video, but I’m living with it since I have so many other AVI files to edit.

As to old AVIs, I wonder why yours can’t play. Mine were originally black-and-white recordings made on 1/2-inch reel-to-reel tapes in the 1970s, which already couldn’t play by 1998 since (a) very few of the old machines still existed; and more importantly, (b) when one did play them, the oxide that stored the info had degraded to the point that it gummed up the VTR head and caused it to grind to a halt. I had to have them rescued at about that time at great expense by a company called Vidipax. The technique was to scrape off the loose oxide and re-record them to VHS. Then I digitized them myself via Vegas Video.

Peyton

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks. Yes, the ghosting is still happening. Just to clarify, I don’t believe what I’m rendering technically qualifies as an ‘event’. The full source video is loaded to Vegas as one big event, and what I’m rendering is a selection within it. Per your post, what I did in hopes of improving matters was to make sure the edges of the selection fell at a location reached by cursoring with the arrow keys instead of clicking with the mouse. That did not improve matters.

Based on the 29.97 fps vs. 30 fps question, that might seem to make a difference since the template I use for rendering is MOV 3Mbps, which defaults to 15 fps, an even fraction of 30. But the Customize Template option lets you choose 29.97 instead. I appear to get identical results with both choices however.

One oddity about the ghosting – though perhaps not so odd to someone who understands it – is that it’s not just a faint copy of the protagonist moving exactly beside him and offset a little bit. Rather, at one point the protagonist reaches out to grasp something. What one sees is the ghost (fainter) arm reaching out first, then it’s suddenly joined by the ‘real’ (i.e. less faint) arm.

Anyway, bottom line, I’ve decided for now to just live with this problem and move on to the many other tapes I have to edit, most of which don’t have this problem.

Come to think of it: although I did make sure the edges of the full selection were at frame edges as just described, I did not attend to that issue in determining the size of the sub-titles (these are tapes of a child whose speech is not easy to understand), which I placed in a different video track by means of inserted text events. I made those the same length of time as the spoken sentence they matched.

[Brad Leigh]

Peyton
Interesting you mentioned the original Videos were shot on a black and white machine. The original Black and White standard was 30 Fps not 29.97. I know that they were transferred to VHS where one would expect the conversion to be done, (or at least pulled down when played back)but I know that 1/2 machines well at least Betamax was capable of recording B&W@ 30. I would double check the frame rate ( you can use movie inspector in Quicktime) and that quantize to frames is on so that the video is being placed exactly on the frame boundary.
Brad

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

[John Rofrano]

[Peyton Todd] “I wonder why yours can’t play.”

Sorry, that was a spell check error. I thought I typed “before the tapes are unplayable!” but it translated it as “because the tapes are unplayable!”. I can play the tapes just fine and I should capture them while I can still play them and also while computers still come with firewire ports to capture them.

It’s important to re-evaluate your archive strategy every few years because those of us with analog and digital tapes view them as an archive but you have to maintain hardware that can still play them.

~jr

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