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Motion Picture Workflow?
I’ve been helping some producer friends edit a feature-length film that we shot last year. We’ve been editing with Vegas Pro 11 (we both have the same version and build). Periodically I would drive to their home to help them edit scenes and then all the hard drives that we were using were synced and I take a hard drive home with me to continue editing. We followed this method once before on another movie and this workflow went pretty well. Each scene had its own Vegas project file, and I would do the color correction and grading on one scene at home (always using a calibrated monitor and the Vegas video scopes!), while the producers were editing another scene. I would e-mail them the Vegas project file and they would overwrite this over the project file of the same name that they had on their hard drive. The only thing they had to do was enable the Vegas Video FX attributes for the color correction and color curve presets that I had created on the hard drive at my home. When we edited in this manner on the previous film, we had to make sure that the file structure for the video files and sound effects were in the same folders on each drive, both at their home and mine.
We shot this new movie at 1080p, 30fps and editing with 720p project settings. When the editing is finished for a scene, we’re switching the project back to 1080p and rendering in “Best” quality. But I’m concerned that if we render each scene this way, won’t we lose quality (the finished film will eventually wind up on BluRay) if we put all the rendered scenes in a new timeline and ultimately have to render the timeline again for effects, etc? Shouldn’t we nest the projects in one timeline? Do any of you uber professionals work in this manner? -
6 Replies
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First off, I don’t think it’s helping to edit in 720 and then switching properties to 1080. I don’t think there is any advantage in that at all.
If you render part of your project out with the MXF format, you will loose nothing by putting them back on the timeline again.Roger Bansemer – PaintingAndTravel.com
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I think, since we weren’t using really high-powered computers, the concensus was that the timeline would play better if the project was in 720p.
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Maybe someone else will chime in but it doesn’t change the fact that the footage is 1080 on the timeline. It doesn’t change that.
What does make a difference is your preview settings. I ususally have mine set for “preview / auto”
And then if I need to see something a bit clearer I change it to something higher.Roger Bansemer – PaintingAndTravel.com
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Whatever your preview setting is full, 1/2, 1/4 determines the pixels that Vegas has to process during your editing. This is keyed from the project settings. So 1/2 means 1/2 of project settings. 1/2 is 1/4 the pixels to process.
If your project settings and source files are the same size, and you are not using full for preview then you have one interpolation of the source frames to the display size.
If you preview at 1/4 but your preview window is bigger than this and you have the scale option on then that adds another interpolation per frame.
Each interpolation adds a bit of overhead.
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I have always found that Vegas runs the smoothest, fastest when my project setting match the resolution of the media.
The only time I dumbdown my project settiings while working to speed things up is when I’m building a credit roll.
Did you try running vegas with project settings matching media?
Of course this has nothing to do with rendering, I will often do garbage renders at a lower res.
Bi7 2600 3.4 Ghz 8Gig Ram , Win 7 Pro, Vegas Pro 12
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Actually, Brad, we had been doing that on this project. It just seemed to play better on the timeline if we changed the project properties to a lower resolution.
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