stop motion animation with vDub and Sony Vegas – problem

[John Rofrano]

> I have several thousand images batch processed with PS CS3 and downscaled to about 2000px widen each scene ( 6 of them, each from 80 to 700 frames ) turned into video clips in virtual dub.

Just FYI, there was no reason to use virtualdub just to turn the images into video. You could have imported the pictures as an image sequence right into Vegas. (just thought you might like to know for next time)

> Now the problem im facing here is that im not sure what kind of aspect ratio and resolution to start a new Vegas project with.

On option is to work in the resolution of the source video. In the project properties, use the Match Media button (it’s a folder icon on the top right) and navigate to the video file. This will set Vegas to match the resolution and fps of the video from virtualdub.

> I know the wanted final render is quicktime mpeg4 with 720 x 756, and I would prefer it to be 16:9. I have so far been getting letterboxed either on top and bottom or on both sides.

That’s because 720×756 is not 16:9. 16:9 means the ratio of width to height is 16 units to 9 units. If 720 is your 16, then 405 is you 9. If 756 is your 9, then 1344 is your 16. Anything less will have black bars.

> Any suggestions on what res & aspect ratio to start the project, and whether I need to change the aspect ratio and/or res of the individual clips?

If the source video clips are not the resolution of your final output, an alternate approach to my first suggestion is to start the project in the output resolution. This has the advantage that you can use Pan/Crop with the Match Output Aspect option to match you final output perfectly. Since you did say that you wanted to Pan and Zoom, this is probably your best approach.

> Another problem is that there needs to be another low res copy for online use of the video, I suppose this changes the situation with the aspect ratios.

Not sure why the low res wouldn’t use the same aspect but with less resolution?

~jr

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

[Joona Raevuori]

Thank you for your response, John.

I hadnt been working with vegas for a couple of years, I knew there was a way to bring the images in as a sequence but I had several non-vegas related problems with that method.

I managed to work myself around this the hard way:

I started a DV PAL widescreen project. I had all the images first horizontally squeezed to 70.3% of the original width as I calculated that would compensate the overall change due to 16:9 format, then recropped to 2048px x 1152px so I would have enough resolution for zooms and pans etc. This seems to have worked just fine, all i had to do after was to have all the pictures in individual folders turned into 10fps .avi files with vDub, then change each clips ratio to 1.4xxx in Vegas media pool.

Basicly what I suppose I did was what camcorders do, I just did it manually?