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I cannot believe how horrible it is…
I get horrible fuzzy image results with Vegas Pro 9.0.
I have been using Vegas for 8 years. I am self taught, but have actually produced a TV show on PBS using Vegas 4.0. Even then I always felt the image quality was sub par. That was shot using a Canon XL1s. It looked okay on broadcast, not as sharp as, say, TV news, et. al., but I attributed it to TV stations having super expensive cameras. Yet it always bothered me that I couldn’t produce a sharp, clear image.
Even way back then, I met a guy who had shot a documentary with a hand-held mini-DV camera (2003) that he shot in Cambodia. He had edited in Final Cut Pro on a Mac. I was shocked and physically nauseated by how incredibly sharp his image way using a consumer grade camera. Here I had spent $4K and my image sucked.
Fast forward to 2010, I have Vegas 9.0 Pro, and Sony Z5U, (fairly) new computer, and I am still cursed by horrible output. I shot footage in 1080 60i, and captured to .m2t format. I view it using VLC Media Player and it looks pretty sharp.
As soon as I bring it into Vegas, it looks muddy. I have 22″ screens so I maximize my preview window and set it to best/full. Albeit, it appears much clearer than my Canon XL1s, I cannot produce output that is as clear as the input image.
I am stepping down to NTSC DV output using as many defaults as possible. I have tweaked for days trying to get better quality and many different codecs, but they all suck. It gets “projectile vomit” worthy when I try to make the image smaller for upload. Adding EVEN MORE pain I go to this guys website (https://www.goodsidestudio.com) and view his demo reel which is 320X240 (or whatever) and it is CRYSTAL CLEAR!!! NO interlace lines, 3D motion graphics is perfect, the image is perfect.
THEN I put my current project on DVD and view it on my 15 year old, 240 lines resolution TV and it makes me want to quit doing this altogether. I had asked for tips in this forum before, and someone told me to turn field order for the project and output to “none – progressive scan” and I almost died when I saw the image on my TV (as well as my personal DVD player) jumping all over the place, and horrible fuzzy image to boot.
Someone talk me in off the ledge. What am I doing wrong??? What settings would you recommend?
Vegas can’t be this poor a product of no one would use it. It has to be operator error. HELP!!!
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2 Replies
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I’m not sure what your current problems are, but I can tell you that your earlier problems did not come from Vegas. They came from your XL1s. It took me awhile to figure out what the problem with that camera was even after I began seeing the difference between it and the GL2. In short, the XL1s has pathetic resolution. The difference in sharpness between it and the GL2 (I was using both in two camera shoots) made that quite obvious. So, it was the camera rather than Vegas.
You can, of course, also be making other errors. I suggest posting more details regarding file formats and processing. I am quite happy with the image Vegas produces. I have not seen noticeably superior results from software such as FCP, Premier Pro, and AE.
BTW, I have found that a substantial boost in sharpness produced by the sharpness filter reduces the visible difference between the old XL1s video and the GL2. I am also now shooting with an XH-A1, and I’m quite happy with the results.
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Yea, you should not be having these problems but you need to give us a lot more information about your project settings, media formats, render settings, etc. Most people cause these problems themselves by changing the defaults and not knowing what they are doing. So if you have changed any defaults we need to know about it. If you have changed defaults and don’t remember what you changed, I would reset Vegas before trying to fix this by holding Shift+Ctrl when starting Vegas. This will return it to all of the factory defaults as if you just completed a fresh install.
If you are working in DV, I would start Vegas with Shift+Ctrl to reset it. Then use the appropriate DV project setting for your region and don’t change anything. Edit your video and render to one of the DV templates and don’t change anything. The output should be fine. By default, Vegas produces output as good as your input if you don’t mess with the templates that Sony has provided.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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