How to letterbox all the events in a project at once?

[Raymond Pace]

[John Rofrano] Otherwise you are asking Vegas to convert your footage on-the-fly in order to preview it on the timeline.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what do you mean exactly by this? Would it somehow be easier for Vegas to preview 1280×720 events in a 1280×720 project, as opposed to 720 events in a 480 project?

[John Rofrano] ” What is the resolution of your original source video?”

Correct me if I misinterpreted the question, but this is a project with a ton of different events, ranging from 360p to 1080i.

[John Rofrano] ” What is the resolution of your delivery format? (is that 1280×720?)”

If you mean the resolution I want the entire project to be rendered in, then yeah, that’d be 1280×720.

[John Rofrano]

[Raymond Pace] “Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what do you mean exactly by this? Would it somehow be easier for Vegas to preview 1280×720 events in a 1280×720 project, as opposed to 720 events in a 480 project?”

There are no dumb questions. Questions are how we all learn. Yes, what I meant was if you have footage that is 1920×1080 and you set your project to 720×480 and you press PLAY, Vegas will need to resize your 1920×1080 footage to 720×480 30 times a second in order to play it back at the project resolution. This takes a lot of CPU resources to do. If, however, your footage is 1920×1080 and your project is 1920×1080 then no resizing is required and it’s much easier for Vegas to play this footage back.

[Raymond Pace] “Correct me if I misinterpreted the question, but this is a project with a ton of different events, ranging from 360p to 1080i.”

OK, so you have mixed footage. What I always recommend is if you have source footage that is a mix of resolutions, is that you set your project to the resolution of your largest delivery format which you indicated was 1280×720. So I would set your project to 1280×720 unless, of course, you want that letterboxed as well in which case set your project up for 1280×536 (2.39:1). Then when you render to 1280×720 you will get black letterbox bars.

Does that make sense?

~jr

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

[Raymond Pace]

[John Rofrano] ” Does that make sense?”

Absolutely.

I really appreciate the help.

[John Rofrano]

[Raymond Pace] “I really appreciate the help.”

Anytime. Feel free to ask more questions as you go though the project. Good luck!

~jr

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

[Raymond Pace]

Okay, apparently I lied.

When I changed the project settings to 1280×536, I got large letterboxing bars on either side of a 1280×720 event I was experimenting with. Is this normal?

[Will Kee]

Yes this happens for me. It’s a bit annoying because you would assume that changing the project resolution vertically would chop off the top and bottom parts of the frame since you are changing the vertical resolution while keeping the horizontal resolution the same.

I’d love an answer to this. How can I change my vertical project resolution so that my footage is cropped vertically as opposed to adding letterboxing to the left and right of frame?

[John Rofrano]

[Raymond Pace] “When I changed the project settings to 1280×536, I got large letterboxing bars on either side of a 1280×720 event I was experimenting with. Is this normal?”

Yes, this is normal. What you have just learned is that you want to set up your project correctly BEFORE you do anything else. You now have to go back and crop all of your events to match your project. To do this, open Pan/Crop on each event and right-click and select Match Output Aspect and each event will be perfectly cropped to the new project aspect.

You can also change all of your events with a single click by purchasing a productivity plug-in like VASST Event Tools for $9.95 USD. Just use Match Selected Events to Project Aspect and they will all be corrected with one click of the Apply button.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m the author of Event Tools. 😉

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Will Kee] “I’d love an answer to this. How can I change my vertical project resolution so that my footage is cropped vertically as opposed to adding letterboxing to the left and right of frame?”

Open Pan/Crop and right-click on the frame and select Match Output Aspect and it will be corrected. The problem happens because your event maintains the original crop. That means your event is now taller than the project so you see black bars on either side to compensate. Changing the project aspect will never change the crop on the events, it will fit the original crop into the new project aspect.

~jr

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

[Raymond Pace]

[John Rofrano] “What you have just learned is that you want to set up your project correctly BEFORE you do anything else.”

Does that mean there’s a way to make sure any footage I insert into the project automatically matches the aspect ratio? So I don’t have to change it in Pan/Crop for each event?

Also, some footage that I converted from FLV to MP4 is showing up in Vegas as 120 fps, even though when I play the video in VLC Media Player and check “Codec Information,” it lists the video’s framerate as 30. Any idea what might be going on?

[John Rofrano]

[Raymond Pace] “Does that mean there’s a way to make sure any footage I insert into the project automatically matches the aspect ratio? So I don’t have to change it in Pan/Crop for each event?”

No. If your footage doesn’t match the project aspect you still have to crop it to make it fit. Vegas has no idea if you want to crop the top, middle, bottom, side, etc so you have to do this yourself. It’s just easier if you do this from the start. Otherwise you need to go back through the whole project and make sure someone’s head doesn’t get cropped off.

[Raymond Pace] “Also, some footage that I converted from FLV to MP4 is showing up in Vegas as 120 fps, even though when I play the video in VLC Media Player and check “Codec Information,” it lists the video’s framerate as 30. Any idea what might be going on?”

It’s hard to say, maybe something for messed up in the conversion from FLV to MP4? You can use a utility like MediaInfo to get the specs on the file. As long as it plays in Vegas it shouldn’t cause a problem.

~jr

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