Question about Rendering Video

[Edward Troxel]

Inside Pan/Crop, you right-click the image and choose “Match Output Aspect” (or you use a script which will do that for all of them at once for you).

You might want to take a look at the Video Scrapbook video at https://www.jetdv.com/excalibur

Edward Troxel

[Jsteinamite]

Yes, I already used the “Match Aspect Ratio” option for all of my still images and in the preview winodw, they appear to be filling the whole screen. It’s only AFTER I’ve rendered them that they end up having the black bar on the sides. Any ideas why that would be happening?

Jonathan Stein

[Randall Raymond]

Did you take a 4×3 project and render to widescreen?

[Jsteinamite]

Man, I hate to sound stupid but here goes…

In response to your question, “Did you take a 4×3 project and render to widescreen?”, my answer is that I’m not sure. I’m really figuring all this out as I go.

How do I check these two things:
-Is my project 4×3?
-How do I know if I rendered to widescren?

Jonathan Stein

[Randall Raymond]

Under file, project settings, you choose the format 4×3 or Widescreen. So if you choose 4×3 as the format and then in the rendering choices chose widescreen – the render will have pillar bars left and right. If you chose widescreen for your project and rendered to 4×3 – you would get bars top and bottom – ‘letterboxed.’ Hope that clear things up.

[Jsteinamite]

You wrote:
Under file, project settings, you choose the format 4×3 or Widescreen. So if you choose 4×3 as the format and then in the rendering choices chose widescreen – the render will have pillar bars left and right. If you chose widescreen for your project and rendered to 4×3 – you would get bars top and bottom – ‘letterboxed.’ Hope that clear things up.

So, I checked under File>Properties (there was no actual “project settings” option under the File menu), I could see that the template setting was Custom (320×240, 29.970 fps), which in my understanding is 4×3. Right?

Then I went to “Render As” and the Template setting is “Default Template”. In the Template dropdown box, there are many possible option, including widescreen ones (that I guess I don’t want in order to get rid of black bars). How do I choose the proper template. I think I’m leaning toward rendering in DVD format but under Template, it seems that there is an overwhelming array of DVD options. Which do I use?

Jonathan Stein

[Randall Raymond]

Yes, I meant ‘Properties’. Let me ask: where or how do you intend to play your rendered video. Mpeg2 is vastly different from Windows Media. If you want to watch your movie full-screen on your monitor – then either will work – just pick the right pixel size for WMV.

The top bit rate most of us for ultimately burning to DVD is 8000 for the video – that leaves headroom for quality encoding of the audio.

Constant or Variable bit-rates are your first choice. Most of the other controls never need be touched. So my advice is take a one clip and encode it all sorts of ways to get the hang of things. Start with a low low constant bit rate and encode that – looks crappy, right? Picture quality and bit-rate are determined by the amount of movement in a scene. Variable rates take care of scene changes especially on a two pass variable bit-rate encode. The first pass plans the encode and the second pass works the plan.

[Ralph Hajik]

jsteinamite,

Here’s another approach. If you have black bars on each side , try using a Media Generator (Noise Textures)for a backdrop supplied by Vegas. It’s pretty cool when you use your imagination.

Ralph Hajik
Westmont, Il

[Jsteinamite]

This is great advice. I’m going to practice using different bit rates..

Jonathan Stein

[Randall Raymond]

[jsteinamite] “This is great advice. I’m going to practice using different bit rates..”

Just make sure you’re at exactly 60 seconds on the test clip. What should the test clip be? Average in terms of transitions and movement in the clip. Then multiply by your time line length.