[Aaron Star]

Is the footage from phone?

You have to post more details like source “media info” (if you do not know that means check the forum sticky posts,) and project setup screen shots so that people can help you.

[Aaron Star]

Optimizing vegas has been discussed in several other threads over the years. The quick of it would be:

• 8x cores+, however more freq seems to make vegas more responsive than more slower cores.
• 16-64GB of single rank ram, depending on the amount of memory channels your MB has available. These days, I would start with 16GB DIMMs vs 8GB. If your motherboard has dual channel ability, use 2x 16GB single rank vs 4x cheaper 8GB DIMMs.
• Verify your memory bandwidth with “WinSAT mem” from an admin command prompt. Dual or quad channel ddr4 you should see 25-50+ GB/s. Memory channels and memory bandwidth is where you start to see the advantage of the Xeon class hardware. Cost generally prices most out of Xeon hardware, but don’t worry a standard desktop with good memory bandwidth will function well.
• Nvme drives for both Boot and project working.
• Use spinning disk for archive or project holding space. Always backup to something else, tape still the most reliable, but utilizing something like “windows storage spaces” in a mirror mode or the built in OS RAID 1, plus an external back up would work too. For example get 2x 4TB+ drives and mirror them with one of the RAID 1 technologies, and format them REFS. Then copy your project on and off the NVME working volume as needed. Then back up your 4TB drive to another external as needed.
• Load your OS (win10) UEFI boot
• GPU – depending on your MB and version of Vegas you will be using, you want to look for a GPU with high OpenCL compute speed, and support for NVENC (vegas 15+). 8GB+ of on board GPU ram, here again selecting the GPU with broadest memory interface and highest onboard memory bandwidth. Support for these functions allows the CPU/Vegas to offload higher math to hardware that can do it faster.
• Display port to your monitors running the latest version. Display port still has the most bandwidth for throwing pixels and color depth to screen. The DisplayPort cabling version/standard needs to match the interfacing on your monitors and GPU.

Hardware changes so fast that by the time you go to buy something, specific hardware recommendations will be dated.

[Aaron Star]

Just use something like Extreme Telephoto with panning shot to describe it in your plans. Create new work, and do not focus on how things were done back on 35mm film. Frame the shot you have in your imagination, and describe it the best you can.

[Aaron Star]

Cakewalk still kicking. I used cakewalk to do midi on a 386 way back.

Vegas can be used to record multi-track, but it comes down to what hardware will be used to do the multi-channel digitizing. It is possible to turn all the audio inputs on a pc into individual channels, using the built in audio interface. But this is not optimal for dynamic range when recording. Getting a good multi-channel audio I/O device would be the best, unless the tascam can operate as a multichannel audio interface via USB.

There are other posts on the forum that talk about what to change in the Vegas Audio settings to use multi-channel vs Windows Sound mapper. Then all you do is set the channel interface for each track, and hit arm, then record on the bottom screen controls. I believe the location the sound is recorded to is in the project settings.

A dedicated software like Cakewalk, Ableton, or ProTools might be a better choice. A Dante recording system would be the state of the art, since it gives a virtually unlimited channel ability. You can have as many recorders as you like, or input devices. Dante audio interface option would be a nice thing for Vegas to support, but unlikely it ever will.

[Aaron Star]

Depending on the distance from camera, I would say that shot is 100mm+ based on the background compression.

[Aaron Star]

Action scenes are normally an assembly of a lot of different angles and lens sizes. The clip you posted has a wide variety of angles and distances from the lenses.

The closest shot I see in the clip may have been a 85-135mm, with the actor is riding the horse about 10-20 feet away from the panning camera.

Akira Kurosawa used multiple cameras to film action sequences. So there are cameras hidden inside the huts you see in the wide shot, and then probably angles that needed to be “picked up” better after the action was completed ( like the CU on the horse rider.)

Telephoto is an odd camera term. Generally telephoto means the any lens greater than the following:

16mm standard 4:3 / ~2/3″ sensor = 24mm
35mm Academy aperture / 35mm motion picture vertical / DX sensor = 35mm
35mm Full Frame / 35mm still film sideways = 50mm

Your questions are all things your DP should be handling for you. That is why you are outsourcing/delegating your photography to them. As a director, I would just do your storyboard and determine image size there, and let the camera department determine how to achieve that image.

In reference to zoom vs prime, I would do some research as to why you use one over the other.

[Aaron Star]

Most people will shoot a chip cart and not white cards. Some will even rely on the chip cart on top of the slate. You can zoom way in on color software and set temps based on very small zones.

If your lighting is highly colorized, like neon signs in background with a warm highlight and a cool fill. Then most DPs will shoot a clean chip chart, off to the side, using the key lamp temperature with no filters. This will make sure your colorist does not tweek out that weak color tint you added with a gel on the lamp.

[Aaron Star]

Image size is related to your focal plane capture size, which you did not share. Assuming that the clip was shot on 35mm film, the clip looks cropped or “panned and scanned.” So the shots are wider than they appear.

The clip was shot before zoom lenses were made, so using a good non-breathing zoom lens would be an easy way to shoot this today. I would just stick with a prime set of lenses, and keep the camera as close as you need to cover the action, based on the lens selection available in the prime set.

When the clip was shot, there were no polarizer filter, or ND, and they likely did not even use color filters for the BW. So the shutter angle and stop can be reversed engineered given that the ISO of film back then was like 25-100 (remember development time can be manipulate the ISO.) The shots are in bright sunlight, so the light source is known.

Depending on how wide your action is, a set of lenses 15,25,35,50,85, and adding a 135 would be good options to have. Since the clips look to be 25mm – 85mm in bright sunlight, the stop would have been pretty high like T8 or more. This would make the depth of field large enough to handle the longer lens work.

When you start shooting long lens work, your 1AC makes a big difference, so keeping the stop high will help bridge a gap in skill.

[Aaron Star]

Oh. I see. My mistake on the video size and quality. The post about project size seems to be the solution to the problem.

[Aaron Star]

So your source material is 1920×1080 prores 422 @ like 400mb/s, and you are outputting to a hugely compressed format like AVC constrained to 8-bits and 24mbs.

Your media will never look the same, unless you work inside the box of what the compressed media is able to reproduce. You should be rendering to a codec and format that best matches the original format of the source media. With Vegas, HD-CAM SR-lite 422.mxf would be an HD grade prores HQ equivalent, or Sony XAVC-intra.mxf would another alternative.

Assuming your source media is actually encoded/produced at a high grade like Prores HQ 422. You should be CCing and rendering your project in 32-bit mode. Editing can be done in 8-bit mode. This is also assuming that your system has a better than 8-bit display & GPU, and proper high bandwidth cabling attached.

Your media looks to be animation, so you could alternatively work all your material in image sequence mode, using something like .PNG with no compression. With animation, this is a nice way to work because you can change 3 frames out of the entire sequence, and not render out an entire new sequence just to change a detail in 3 frames.