The Lengthy Vegas Process

[Tyler Wentzel]

Hey Allen, sorry I’m getting back to you so late.

I’ve apparently been rendering to “Untitled.” Hmmm…I missed the specially-suited DVD Architect templates…That explains a lot. I suppose that should have been common knowledge, but I missed it, so thanks a lot for that advice!

As long as I’m here, I’m planning on purchasing the JVC GY-HD100U 720p camcorder. What steps would I need to go through in order to ensure that the video would look its absolute best for capture and render? There are so many templates to choose from! (The JVC is a 24p camera.) As I look at the templates, I don’t see any that would be fitting for a 720p camera…they look to be all standard definition aspect ratios, but I suppose you can just type in the aspect ratio you want in the settings (in that case 1280 x 720) right?

Thanks much!

Tyler

[Brett Underberg-davis]

If you’re talking about DVD rendering, and since you bring up DVD Architect I have to assume that’s the case, you are locked into rendering to a DVD-compatible format, and that’s what the templates give you. I won’t embarrass myself by speculating about how things may work if you are working on a Blu-Ray disc, though, as I have yet to justify the expense and probably even my quad core machine is inadequate to render that level of detail in less than painful amounts of time.

I do find, however, that with a Canon XL H1, shooting in any of the available HDV 1080i formats, that I get best results by defining my project in full HDV quality before essentially downconverting to the 720×480 anamorphic format that DVD imposes on you. I would expect you would get similarly better results setting your project to match the specs shot by your camera, and rendering to find a close match on the DVD side. Most likely, you’d want to preserve the frame rate, but only a comparison of several candidate rendering approaches will determine conclusively what looks best to you.

There might be some disagreement on this (and I’d like to hear contrasting points of view) — but I know that the DVD I recently created for our local marching band was certainly appreciated, though anything would be after looking at band footage shot by 1-chip, SD cameras with blurry, mickey mouse lenses.

[John Rofrano]

I’ve never worked with the JVC cameras but Vegas Pro does have a HDV 720-24p (1280×720, 23.976 fps) project template that seems ideal for what you want to do. This is what I would use and then render to whatever format you need to deliver to. In other words, if it’s DVD use the DVD Architect templates, if it’s Blu-ray modify one of the 1920×1080 templates to use the lower 1280×720 resolution.

~jr

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