Vegas settings to create DVD of my screencast

[Mike Kujbida]

You’ll get better quality by rendering to MPEG-2.
If the program is under an hour, use the settings I gave Pikea Manley in the “Output problem when burning w/Architect Pro” thread.
It should be right below this one.
If your source quality is good, the 2-pass option won’t be necessary.

[John Hopple]

Hi Mike,
Thank you for the response. Below is a person that explained the problem. He mentions that there are certain settings I need on Vegas 8. He will not give the settings unless I purchase his video. Is there truth to his statement? Finally, is the setting simply Mpeg2?

Thanks,
John

“There are some settings you need to change for camtasia avi movies imported into any video editing program.

Basically you are taking a computer generated video with square pixels and importing them into a video editing program expecting rectangular pixels.

Unless you tell the video editing program what to do with that clip to adjust for the pixel shape difference, you will get poor quality.”

[John Rofrano]

Here is what I’ve found works really well. It starts by not expecting video captured at 1680×1050 desktop resolution to be readable in a tiny 720×480 DVD sized video.

1. Capture using 1280×720 screen dimensions. That means resizing whatever program you are using to 1280×720. This is easy using Camtasia 6
2. Capture to the AVI file format (not CAMREC) so you can edit immediately in Vegas
3. In Vegas, use the Match Media Settings option in the project properties to match your Vegas project to the Camtasia media. If you used the settings in #1 this should be Custom (1280×720, 15.000 fps) progressive, square pixels.
4. Add the Sony Sharpen FX with about a 0.500 setting to the video track with the Camtasia footage. This will clean up the edges to make text more readable.
5. Use Pan/Crop to zoom into areas of interest in your video. Remember, a DVD is only 720×480 resolution. Don’t try to pack too much information into that tiny space. Zooming is your friend.
6. Render using the standard DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream template. Rendering direct to MPEG2 in Vegas will give you the highest quality over creating an AVI and re-encoding it in DVD Architect later

Follow these steps and you should have a pretty good looking Camtasia tutorial on DVD.

~jr

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

[John Hopple]

Hi John,
Thanks for the help. Am I right by saying no matter what I do the screencast will not come out as good as looking at your own screen?

Thanks,
Jpohn

[John Rofrano]

> Am I right by saying no matter what I do the screencast will not come out as good as looking at your own screen?

There will always be some loss as long as what you are showing is being resized into 720×480. That’s why zooming in is helpful so that there is minimal downsizing from the original. Also, TV is interlaced so you are taking a progressive capture and splitting it into fields which will degrade the fine lines in your video. That’s why using sharpen is so important.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

BTW, I’ve added a tutorial on this to my web site called:

Editing Camtasia Footage in Sony Vegas Pro

This gives you step-by-step instructions with screen captures and circles and arrows, etc.

Hope this helps,

~jr

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