Vegas Pro 13 & Mercalli plugin problem

[Wayne Waag]

I use the Mercallli plug-in in V13 quite frequently and it works quite well. My suspicion is that your problem has nothing to do with Mercalli, but rather an issue of your combination of media properties, project properties, and render settings. In any case, you need to provide a lot more detailed information. Screen shots of these three would be the most helpful, as well as on overall screen shot of your timeline. Without such basic information, we really have no idea.

wwaag

[Martin Stanesby]

Hi Wayne,
Thanks for the reply.

As i mentioned, my properties have not changed and all was ok before hand. Also, it’s not a rendering issue as I’ve not even got that far yet.

However, I have attached two screen shots…Screenshot 1 is of the project properties, Screenshot 2 is of the event properties.

thanks

Martin

[Wayne Waag]

[Martin]

The screen shots are quite helpful. A couple of things. Your media is 1280 x 720 at 50fps, Progressive. However, your Project settings indicate 25 fps interlaced (upper field first). Why? You should probably change that to Progressive and also Disable Resample of your events at 50fps. That will make Vegas skip every other frame, rather than trying to do an average or resample. You should also set your Full Resolution Rendering to Best rather than Good and change your Deinterlace Method to Blend, just in the event you also have interlaced footage. And finally, why the odd frame size (1920×804)? Do you have other media at 1920 x 1080? Just curious. Another question, what’s your intended delivery mechanism? Media file? Youtube? Bluray? Anyway, I’d first try to change the Project Properties to Progressive and disable resample.

wwaag

[Martin Stanesby]

Hi Wayne,
Thanks for the reply.

Actually, the project settings of ‘upper field first’ was not meant to be that, it changed as I’ve been messing about. My project settings are matched at progressive, but this makes no difference to Mecalli’s behaviour anyway.

As I mentioned earlier, my project is 25fps and some of my clips are 50fps for slo-mo reasons, this should be fine.

I disable resample on my clips.

In answer to the frame size, this is movie industry standard cinematic widescreen setting, and perfect for wedding videos.

As I mentioned earlier, these settings have not changed, and Mercalli was working fine previously. But here’s a new spanner in the works…..
I opened up a new vegas pro blank project and copy and pasted the clip into this and the Mercalli result was fine. So I decided to copy and paste the rest of the project as well thinking the current project may be corrupted somehow. No it’s back to the way it was? Can you figure this one out??

[Wayne Waag]

When the Mecalli clip worked OK in the new project, what were your project settings? The same as the event (1280 x 720) or the 1920 x 804? What may be happening is that during the analysis phase, Mercalli may be rendering at the project setting (1920 x 804) rather than the event setting (1280 x 720) and given the fact that the aspect ratios are different, this may be causing the problem. Under render settings, select avi, and scroll down to the appropriate mercalli template. Select customize and it will display what the frame size is. If it says (Use Project Settings), change that to the actual size (1280×720) and see if that has an effect.

wwaag

[Martin Stanesby]

Hi Wayne,
Thanks for the reply.

Ok, I see that and I’ve made the change, but I’m a bit confused here. These are render settings but I’m using Mercalli plugin within Vegas? If I make the alteration you suggested then i would need to render out a project using this setting but I’m not doing that? I’ve saved the setting but no point me clicking ‘render’??

Am I missing something

Thanks
Martin

[Wayne Waag]

Am I missing something

No need to render. Just close. These are the render templates ONLY used by Mercalli. When you do the Mercalli analysis, it should use this template with the selected frame size rather than the Project frame size.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

If this doesn’t work, another thing you might try is to change the overall project settings to 1920 x 1080 and do your Mercalli analysis. At least the aspect ratios would be the same. If it works OK, then change the project settings back to 1920 x 804 and do a short test render.

wwaag

[Martin Stanesby]

Hi Wayne,
Ok, So I changed and saved the render setting as you showed (although this doesn’t delete the original one so I don’t know how Mecalli decides which one to use?)
However, this didn’t make any difference.

I changed the project settings to 1080 but this didn’t work either 🙁

I appreciate you trying so far.

Martin

[Wayne Waag]

Martin,

Sorry that this seems to be going nowhere. Perhaps a set of fresh eyes would help. Since you were able to make it work in a new project for individual clips, a backup would be to copy those events in need of stabilization into a new project with the project properties the same as the media properties, do your stabilization, render each event using a lossless codec, and then import the stabllized clips back into the original project. Although laborious, it would work, but you really shouldn’t have to do it that way. As a final question, I presume that you are redoing the Mercalli analysis after each change? Is all your footage 1280 x 720? If so, you might temporarily change your project settings to that frame size and reanalyze a test clip.

wwaag