Masking Problems on Sony Vegas 8.0

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Looking at the screencap again (as displayed on YouTube) my main guess is that the background is perhaps a still with no bias as to PAR… It looks like it’s getting windowboxed at the usual ratio seen when someone submits video that’s meant to be widescreen but contains its own letterboxing and is thus not filling the YouTube screen space.

The larger mask overlay looks like an NTSC video, being laid into the project using the anamorphic settings typical of SD 4:3 ratio footage from any standard DVD or similar anamorphic source. It’s still windowboxed,but not quite as severely as the background. Hopefully John will manage to confirm something like that from the .veg project file.

I’d guess that much of the problem exists in the Pan&Crop timeline, or at least could be corrected there.

If it’s showing up differently in the Preview window than it does on YouTube you might also take a look at whether “Simulate Device Aspect Ratio” is checked when you right-click on the preview image itself? At least I’m pretty sure that option exists in both Vegas 8 and 9(9 being where I’m checking at the moment, being in the middle of rendering stuff).

[Hannah Hayes]

Thanks, yeah I check “Aspect ratio” but the problem still turns up.

[John Rofrano]

> Hopefully John will manage to confirm something like that from the .veg project file.

Unfortunately, the project file Hannah sent has nothing in it and it’s only 5KB. I don’t know why I can’t see any media in it but she sent it several times.

What I think is happening is this: You have your project set to NTSC DV which is 4:3 yet you are trying to give the illusion of 16:9 by cropping. This is not necessary and fraught with problems (as you have seen). My advice is to set the project to 16:9 and edit in 16:9 and render to 16:9 which YouTube now accepts. If you really want to render in 4:3 letterbox that’s fine to. Vegas will do the right thing because it knows the project is 16:9. The problem is when you keep everything 4:3 and try to crop to 16:9 yourself because Vegas doesn’t know you want 16:9.

Here are the general steps to fix this:

1. Set your project to: HDV 720-30p (1280×720, 29.970 fps) for YouTube HD
2. Use Pan/Crop | right-click | Match Output Aspect to correct the aspect of events that do not match 16:9
3. Render to Sony AVC with the template: Internet 16:9 HD 30p

That last template is in Vegas Pro 9.0 and is the template that Sony provides for uploading video to YouTube. Hannah said in an email that she also had Vegas Pro 9.0. If you want to do this in Vegas Pro 8.0 you’ll need to make your own 720p template. Using Vegas Pro 9.0 just makes this easier.

If you keep your project properties the same as your delivery format, there will be no surprises.

~jr

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