Sony Vegas Platinum 9: 1. project settings and 2. m4v video files

[John Rofrano]

[Peter Roos] “1. The source video is 24 fps, but in the project properties of Vegas I can only choose between 15, 25 and 29.97. What’s up with that? Does it even matter?”

Yes it matters. If you cannot get your project to match his source you should not be working on it because you will be making edit decisions based on the wrong frame rate. I didn’t realize that Movie Studio 9 didn’t allow for 24p but should upgrade to Movie Studio 12.0 which supports 24p editing.

[Peter Roos] “2. I cannot render to an m4v, only m2t”

If you use MainConcept MPEG-2 with the Blu-ray 1920×1080-24p, 25 Mbps video stream you can produce a m2v file. Once again, you may need to upgrade to Movie Studio 12.0 if your old version 90 doesn’t have this.

[Peter Roos] “…and I cannot change the aspect ratio either (the aspect ratio of the source video is 1920 x 1080). Is that a limitation inherent to my version of Vegas?”

So… 1920 x 1080 is not an aspect ratio it’s a resolution with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Why do you feel the need to change it?

[Peter Roos] “As long as the video is reasonable (so I can see what I am doing) it doesn’t really matter, I am not to deliver any video anyways. What do you recommend is a decent format for HD (balancing picture quality against file size)?”

Yes it DOES matter!!! You need to get the frame rate correct. if you are editing audio at a different frame rate, things are not going to line up. Here’s why:

Let’s say you want a particular audio hit to happen 3 minutes into the video. So you see the event on the screen, you make the audio crescendo and it looks perfect to you. The only problem is that you had your project set to 30 frames per second and the 3 minute mark for you was calculate as 3 minutes x 60 seconds x 30 fps or the 5,400 frame. You render the audio and give it to the other editors who drop into into the 24fps project and the hit comes too late at 3 minutes 45 seconds because the 3 minute mark at 24fps is frame 4320! Your edit was 1080 frames later!!! You blew it all because you are editing audio to a video at a different frame rate than it should be. So this is not something you can ignore. You need to upgrade to Movie Studio Platinum 12.0 if you want to work with editors who edit at 24fps (which is actually 23.976 but we won’t get into that for now). The timing that you see must match the timing they are seeing otherwise your audio edits will be off and they will get more and more off as the time progresses at a rate of 6 frames every second.

~jr

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