[Brett Underberg-davis]

Looking at the screencap again (as displayed on YouTube) my main guess is that the background is perhaps a still with no bias as to PAR… It looks like it’s getting windowboxed at the usual ratio seen when someone submits video that’s meant to be widescreen but contains its own letterboxing and is thus not filling the YouTube screen space.

The larger mask overlay looks like an NTSC video, being laid into the project using the anamorphic settings typical of SD 4:3 ratio footage from any standard DVD or similar anamorphic source. It’s still windowboxed,but not quite as severely as the background. Hopefully John will manage to confirm something like that from the .veg project file.

I’d guess that much of the problem exists in the Pan&Crop timeline, or at least could be corrected there.

If it’s showing up differently in the Preview window than it does on YouTube you might also take a look at whether “Simulate Device Aspect Ratio” is checked when you right-click on the preview image itself? At least I’m pretty sure that option exists in both Vegas 8 and 9(9 being where I’m checking at the moment, being in the middle of rendering stuff).

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Thanks for the advice.

I’ve been reporting this repeatedly, at least by means of the crash reporter, in the most verbose formats that facility provides. Though, after having it happen and reporting it a few times after I installed 9.0 Pro, I did simply avoid MainConcept codecs for several weeks while learning the other new features of Pro 9.0

I was just asking here since the forums here seem to be somewhat more active than Sony’s and I thought I might confirm whether others were seeing the same error, or could spot signs in the error details that might suggest an interim workaround, or give some sense whether a reinstall might be desirable or likely to fix the issue, or just a waste of time.

Since I can render adequately for now both for DVD production and streaming on vimeo or YouTube, and the MainConcept codecs are desirable but non-essential (in my case), I was hoping to get some sense of the issue that would tell me if a reinstall was likely to be a waste of time, considering the effects this has on my workflow for now.

Again, thank you…the crashes have been reported each time they’ve happened.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

There are at least two (main) places (and probably uncounted ways, considering how many I’ve found along the way) to mess up aspect ratio, especially when rendering for streaming video sites.

In Vegas 8+ the first main one is in setting Project Properties. It’s also possible to mess up in many aspects of the Pan&Crop settings for your various layers, which to look at the still you shared, is something I suspect is happening here, leading to the funny overlap of the masked image on the composited background.

You get yet a third chance to mess things up in rendering settings. Until you’re very comfortable with the effects and very familiar with the fact that most local media players will compensate for anamorphic settings, for instance when you render something in 720×480 (16:9 widescreen or 4:3 standard ratio) for use in DVD production, where these settings are not just appropriate but almost essential.

The problem can thus hide itself at least somewhat until you upload to YouTube or vimeo, where only square pixels are “understood” and everything uploaded is assumed to be using square pixels.

Your local player can generally read the metadata in video files, indicating what aspect ratio to apply to individual pixels, enabling a 702×480 field of pixels to be reshaped to almost any rectangular shape you desire.

I hope that’s a little clearer than my rushed reply of earlier this morning.

The best practical approach is probably to render some very short test videos playing with various settings, layers, cropping and so on until you feel that you intuitively understand what’s going on in each area: project properties, pan & crop keyframing and rendering settings. The more you mess with it and make mistakes the better you’ll gradually come to understand what is happening and how to fix it (and also how to use it to your creative advantage).

[Brett Underberg-davis]

This is the wrong aspect ratio for YouTube. 720×480 implies an anamorphic pixel aspect ratio. For YouTube you either want 640×360 (16:9) or 640×480 (4:3) — either way the PAR should be square, aka 1.0. More detail later if that’s not clear.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Hopefully there’s a fairly simple answer for this that won’t call for waiting for the first patch to Pro 9.0.

From the time I installed Pro 9.0 a few weeks ago, I have been unable to render using the MainConcept AVC/AAC codec combo. Sony AVC has worked fine, but in Pro 8.0c I’d become accustomed to using MainConcept over the Sony version and would at least like to compare them. Since search did not reveal this as a screaming issue either here or on Sony’s own forums, I’m guessing that perhaps the codecs simply did not install properly or I’m missing something else in the set up.

When I have tried rendering using any of the existing presets that came as part of the basic installation, a fatal exception occurs that crashes Vegas Pro 9 completely.

Following are the “problem details” that are provided in the problem report module that pops up after Vegas freezes:

Problem Description
Application Name: Vegas Pro
Application Version: Version 9.0 (Build 563)
Problem: Unmanaged Exception (0xc0000005)
Fault Module: C:Program Files (x86)SonyVegas Pro 9.0FileIO Plug-Insmcmp4plugmcmp4plug.dll
Fault Address: 0x130420E5
Fault Offset: 0x000020E5

Fault Process Details
Process Path: C:Program Files (x86)SonyVegas Pro 9.0vegas90.exe
Process Version: Version 9.0 (Build 563)
Process Description: Vegas Pro
Process Image Date: 2009-04-17 (Fri Apr 17) 13:12:56

Any/all helpful suggestions appreciated.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I’d start with audio compression. I tend to use the Track Compressor plug-in, but you can also do compression via the Graphic Dynamics plug-in. Either one allows you to toggle Auto gain compensation too — review the effect to decide if it helps or hinders.

If you have other audio elements in the mix you may want to have your recording of his voice on a separate track, so the plug-ins are limited to just the problem audio.

If your experience messing with audio is limited, the best option is to start off by applying the system presets for each plug-in and listening to their effect in preview. The more you play with it, the more you’ll learn what tends to affect what, and looking for potential solutions will become easier. Also, be sure once you’ve found an approach you like to save both any custom presets you make for individual plug-ins and also save your finished plug-in chain so you can call it up for re-use should you run into a similar challenge again.

Chances are you’ll need to add some band pass filters to reduce ambient noise, if the speaking voice is competing with any kind of ambient noise, which sounds likely to be the case. Depending on the nature of that noise the Track Noise Gate plug-in can also come in handy in some cases.

Explore the other standard plug-ins as well, you may find that some of them have presets that will help compensate for much of the noise the subject’s voice might be buried in. It’s hard to suggest specific plug-ins without some idea of what the particular challenges are in the audio (there might be very different kinds of background noise, for instance, fighting for attention on any given track where the spoken voice seems muddy).

But ExpressFX Audio Restoration and Multi-Band Dynamics (MBD) are two that I would also take a look at. The presets in MBD include several that can be useful for moderating defects in speech, especially if you find that you have to exaggerate one part of the frequency spectrum and kill many others to get an effect where the speech is what comes to the fore.

Good luck exploring the possibilities!

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Sony and MainConcept are definitely available in Pro 8… not sure about Pro 7 as 8 was the first Pro version I used. Possibly the confusion may be that Vegas never calls H.264 by that name, unless it’s buried in the help documentation. They refer to it as AVC.

I’ll leave it to someone more knowledgable to comment on the different blending methods for interlaced video. If the source file you’re using is already rendered as progressive scan, the interlace settings might be irrelevant. Not clear to me whether that is the case with the clip you mentioned, though.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Also, if you are using Photoshop or a comparable still image editor (GIMP or PaintShop Pro, for instance) instead of Vegas, they also contain a number of color correction filters, adjustment layers and so on that work very much as the color curves, color corrector and related FX work in Vegas.

If you get comfortable with one set of filters, the other set tends to be fairly similar, and will allow as much fine control or quick and dirty adjustment as suits your needs and available time.

Once you have a preset that seems to work, you should be able to save it and batch process a whole stack of similarly “off-color” (sorry, couldn’t resist that line) pics without too much pain and suffering.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I hope I’m not getting this wrong. Here’s a screen cap of how I save Filter Packages.

1. With the desired chain open in a Video track FX window, click the Plug-In Chain icon at the upper right (marked as “A”);
2. A Plug-in Chain window should open. In this case I’ve already saved the Chain as Fooo Foe — it was saved using the Save As… button, marked “B”

What I’m unsure of is whether there was also some change I made when I first saved Eugenia Loli-Quero’s set of color grading Filter Packages, using her recommendations and step-by-step instructions. If you can locate her posts or links to those Filter Packages it might offer additional steps or an optional add-ons (available from the Sony site, I think) that I seem to recall might have been instrumental in making this modification the first time around.

Please let me know if this helps or still leads to a brick wall. In the case of this chain, though, you’ll see that the saved chain also includes keyframes for each effect, set as they were on the track this was saved from. There might be limitations to where you can save such a Filter Package from too. This one was saved from a master FX timeline attached to the specific video track, not a chain associated with a single clip in the timeline, for instance.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Not sure quite what you’re looking for…

When I’m editing a sound cue that needs precise positioning I usually tend to loop or select a very small section, and at times I’ll identify a particular part of the wave form (sometimes presetting a reference mark in Soundforge before pulling the audio into Vegas, for ease of positioning… at least rough positioning) and slide (or nudge) it against the video, while keeping an eye particularly on the preview window.