which project poperty in this case?

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks for the clarification, John.
Makes sense. Given all this feedback, I’ll keep the project at 1080 and render out at 720, allowing me to pan/crop as well.

On 1920×1080 footage, what’s the most I can crop while maintaining good quality as I render to 720?

Gilles

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks Mike!

Gilles

[Jeff Schroeder]

I think you might have missed the point. If I will never render higher than 720 I can zoom in on my 1080 video without loss (to a certain extent). If I have zoomed in on my 1080 footage and then render at 1080 I will have a loss of quality.

Which is to say, I can zoom in on 1920×1080 assets, not past my delivery size, and still have good quality. If I zoom in to 720 and then render to 1080, Vegas must stretch to full resolution.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Gilles Gagnon]

Yes, I got it Jeff. It makes a lot of sense. As mentioned, I’ll keep my projects at 1080 and render at 720.

I’ll try doing some zooms/pans in my next project. This should allow me to mimic a dolly shot.

Gilles

[Jeff Schroeder]

Giles,

I don’t want to be a pain in the neck here, but, there is a fundamental difference between the two. You will have a loss of quality by that method.

Think of just one frame. You are zooming in on a picture and then blowing it up to 1080 (loss of quality) and then shrinking that blown-up picture to 720.

The other method of setting projects at 720 means: I have more pixels than required. My zooming acts like a crop and if I stay greater than the output size I will have more pixels than are required to compose the final picture.

But then I am stuck with 1280×720. Oh well, time for a Red-1.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Gilles Gagnon]

Hi Jeff, you’re not being a pain at all, i’m glad you’re cleraing this up for me. I guess I’m confused given the various responses. my confusion stems from the fact that I don’t quite understand what the project prop’s resolution settings actually do in relation to the source clip’s resolution.

If I get what you’re saying…
I should bring in my 1280 footage, and then set my project properties to 720. This will allow me to crop while maintaining quality. (output in 720)
Is this correct?

Thanks again,
G

Gilles

[John Rofrano]

[Gilles Gagnon] “If I get what you’re saying…
I should bring in my 1280 footage, and then set my project properties to 720. This will allow me to crop while maintaining quality. (output in 720)
Is this correct?”

Perhaps I can shed some light by qualifying my recommendation so that you understand Jeff’s point. I don’t pan/crop or reframe. I shoot for the edit so I keep my projects at 1080. If you want to reframe and crop, you would be better off setting your project to 720. At that point, forget about delivering 1080 because the cropping will get resized and you’ll loose quality.

In General:

If you are not cropping, it’s best to keep your project at the resolution of your source footage and render to whatever deliver formats you need.

If you want to crop, set your project to the size you plan to crop to. This will give you the best quality at the cropped resolution.

Hope that helps you understand what both Jeff and I are recommending.

~jr

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

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks a lot John. It does.

The reason I need to crop/pan for this particular project is that it was a single cam event shoot (jazz band). I had very little options as to where to be located, low light, etc.

I’m hoping to crop/pan to add a bit of lateral movement to the shots and perhaps some zooms to add dynamics.

So, I’ll set my props to 720 and render at that res. (I hope I got it right).

Thank you both for your patience.
Gilles

Gilles

[James Houghtaling]

Ok, now you guys got me confused. I always set my project settings to match the native resolution of the footage. Usually, that’s 1080p. If I decide to zoom into a frame I never go beyond 720p because that’s the typical size I render and upload to Vimeo. When I render at 720p those frames I zoomed in to are rendered at full 720p without any loss in quality. Right? No different than if the project setting was 720p in the first place. But my method allows me to also render at 1080p and the only loss in quality are those events where I zoomed in. My titles and original footage remain 1080p. Other than slower full frame preview, what harm is there to keep the project settings at the highest to match the original footage?

—————
My Hardware:
Core i7 2.67GHz; Nvidia GTX580, 12 gig RAM Win7 64bit.

My Software:
Vegas Pro V11 with Boris Continuum Complete 8, VASST Ultimate S; Bluff Titler; AE5; PhotoPaint and other stuff.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Can anyone comment on James’ question for clarification please?

What he brought up also makes me confused… again… 🙁

Cheers,
Gilles

Gilles