[Brett Underberg-davis]

“Also, if your video is smaller than the project settings, you may try to open up the Event Pan/Crop settings for each segment and right-click–>Match Output Aspect. This will resize the video to the appropriate size (and it may crop it to fit the output size as well).”

Ditto what Naiche says here. You probably want to either define the project to match the actual specs of the source video, or use Naiche’s suggestion here (that would be my choice if you’ve already done a lot of work in the project as it’s presently defined) — the “Match Aspect” and “Match Source” buttons are lifesavers when it comes to working with mixed aspect ratio originals and whatnot. And I hate to admit how long I worked with Vegas before realizing they existed, and doing all sorts or labor intensive nastiness to get the results I wanted, or anything remotely close to what I wanted. 😉

If this is not actually responsive to what you’re seeing and struggling with, maybe some screen caps uploaded for us to look at would benefit everyone by focusing us on exactly what could be happening in your case?

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I’d also title and save my project file pretty soon. 😉

And be sure to do some incremental saves here and there so you can go back if you get boxed into a corner as you’re learning to move the mask and keep focus on the track you’re working on here. It’s very easy at first to get onto the wrong track and start making changes you later regret, or that are just in the wrong place. 😉

But you probably spotted the track problem 20 mins before I typed all that… it gets easier… trust me.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

If by “titler” you mean the Credit roll trainwreck, I totally agree.

I’m just using the text media generator here, and so far I’m now on track to a roughly 20 min render (60% done as I type) now that I chopped the text into smaller blocks. It’s not the most intuitive thing and I agree too… I considered briefly rendering as a series of alpha-layered pngs in Photoshop, but for what I need that seemed like overkill.

From what I’m learning here, I’m guessing I could speed up the render a lot if I chopped it into a sequence of many more smaller text blocks. Right now it’s about 5 blocks of text… the original title only “card”, cast list, 2 or 3 tech lists and my vid production credit at the end. The 1.5 hour render had everything but the show title stuffed into one long card. But as I finish typing this there are 3 mins left in the render so I may just live with what I have now. 😉

[Brett Underberg-davis]

Hard to read at that resolution, but it looks like you have track 2 selected in the 2nd screencap, but your mask in the first pic is defined in a keyframe within vid track 1??

You didn’t merge or render the two tracks together did you?

In any case, to move the mask within the clip, you’ll need to add keyframes on the mask envelope, visible in the first screencap. Does that make sense?

[Brett Underberg-davis]

That’s the best choice if you’re aiming at YouTube’s normal quality but since mid-December there are many other options. I don’t know if you can create custom render templates in the trial version, though. If you can, however, and your original footage is NTSC or PAL widescreen, you might want to create a 640 x 360 template (in MainConcept or Sony AVC (mp4) to get what YouTube calls “High Quality”.

Or you can go as far as a 3-10Mbps, 1280x720p (square pixel) render to get their new “HD quality.” The format CAN in theory be almost anything Vegas will render to, but again, the AVC/AAC codec combo, multiplexed into an mp4 container is usually your best bet, especially if you decide to go past the trial stage and use full-featured Vegas Pro.

If either mp4 option is unavailable in your version of Vegas, some of the WMV or QuickTime presets in the older, consumer-crippleware’d or trial versions might be the next best choice.

Whatever you do, be sure when you render to make the pixel aspect ratio square (1.0) or you’ll wind up with some aspect ratio distortion in most cases, assuming your original clips come from a camcorder that uses an anamorphic format such as NTSC Wide or HDV.

You may speed up rendering slightly by also making your Project settings a near match to the resolution that you’re looking to create on YouTube, but I usually try to make it match my main source quality and then down-render to something that matches my target transcoding quality for YouTube — especially if the project is also something I think I might also want to render at some later date for DVD production, or for BluRay, once burner and BD blank media prices drop significantly and more people are demanding that format.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I’m using Vegas Pro 8 and have been using it or its consumer-oriented predecessor(s) for some time, about 5 or 6 years, at least. Pro 8 since about early summer 2008?

Due to the limitations of my previous computer and budget, I did a lot of projects where I’d shot in HDV, but captured in SD/AVI. I have one particular project where I have a heavily keyframed timeline, especially on the video stream, and I’m now considering replacing the SD capture with its HDV/M2TS counterpart.

Is there a simple way to copy the envelope(s) from the SD clip in my project onto the HDV footage — or sort of swap the footage and retain the full envelope information?

The best online version of this project probably is the one that appears here:

https://www.vimeo.com/2589796

Would defining the HDV footage as a separate take be a good approach? Or is there something much simpler? I’ve just tried getting my head around the way multi-camera takes work in Vegas, and I have to say so far I’m a little frustrated, but then the footage I was using in that project was not really multicamera per se, but separate takes from separate nights’ performances, each with unique timing that might not have been ideally suited for treatment under “multicamera editing”?

This is nothing 12 hours or so of hands on work won’t cure — but before I do that, I wanted to see if there are better ideas, especially when, in the old project I wanted to freshen up, the footage is really essentially identical, except that the one version has been downconverted. The source tape is the source for both clips.

Of course one twist I’m already noticing is that my original project consists of 3 separate clips in AVI (due to the 640MB limit?) while the HDV capture got all that as part of in one considerably longer clip.

Pointers to the right tutorials would be appreciated, as I suspect this is simpler than I’m making it at the moment.

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[Brett Underberg-davis]

Thanks for getting back to this. I know what you mean about busy, my free time since November was mostly tied up in shooting, capturing or editing band footage, first for my weekly DVDs for the band director, and then assembling the “Season Highlights” DVD for the Band Parents Association. It was a great learning experience, but rather exhausting.

In the end I think my best audio, at least from the D50, came in the end from setting up (usually) very near to where I was shooting from, ideally on top of the announcers’ booth, when I could get there. From that vantage point there might have been a little more “air” and crowd noise than ideal, but at least I could monitor and adjust recording levels from there — which goes to your point about a mixer and quality mics, items that are all on my wish list — and I did get some moderate quality mics along the way, including studio-type mics too delicate (and with pickup patterns inappropriate) for the demands of this particular task.

You mentioned before the quiet levels on my first shot at the Pennridge performance. With experience and some outside reading I came to realize that I was applying some filters (especially compression) in a completely counterproductive way. My more recent versions should be a bit more listenable, preserving enough dynamic range but not taking it to extremes that render much of the track as very quiet — the new mix resembles closely the quality I generally managed to attain for the DVD release, which was pressed through (and delivered) just before the Holiday break.

Since it was already online I decided to repair or replace, where possible, the track you heard. Something about the first try was so bad, apparently, that it may have affected the video frame rate of the original video that remains in place on YouTube — a change that seems to have coincided with their first attempt to present HD video on the site, starting in mid-December. I’ve left the bad track up in part because so many people have been passing it around locally that more and more of the hits on that video have been coming, it seems from family and friends who got the link via email, IMs or whatnot. I decided to link the improved render/mix since YouTube doesn’t allow video replacement, and hope that some people will notice the links and click through to the decent version. 😉

You might be interested to take a glance at or comment on the comparison video I did, taking my on-camera audio and comparing it to both a fairly raw mix of the original D50 PCM track, and a mildly processed and compressed rendition made solely from that track.

Let’s see if this links.

Just in case the link fails again, here’s the raw URL:

https://www.vimeo.com/2655404

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[Brett Underberg-davis]

I do this job because my daughter is in the marching band, and I want to have a record of that that is better than what they had before. I have the equipment because I’m a business writer who saved a lot of money over the years, who won some awards long ago for dramatic writing, and the more I know about video from the inside, the better I can do the kind of work I want to do, namely screenwriting and related efforts. (Though some of the footage I’ve shot also has me flirting with the idea of putting together a documentary, assuming I could scale that project up and find some funding to do it right).

No one is offering money for this job, nor have they ever done so. Nor are they likely to in this environment.

I do it because I am at best a talented amateur as a camera operator, DP, sound person, and editor, and I don’t have enough years left in my life to want to waste it do wedding videos or deal with cranky clients who think they own me because they pay a piddling fee, just so I can say I’m getting paid. I make more in interest, even in this market, than most local clients are likely to pay.

I hold myself to a far higher standard than this particular job is ever likely to justify in purely mercenary terms. But if I do it well enough, who knows, I may also wind up with a reel that I can use to get the sort of related work I might actually want to be doing?

I worked for years at max pay in jobs I detested on any number of grounds. It gave me some life experience, though, and I do hope at some point to translate that into a project or projects that may eventually pay off, though I really can’t look at them that way and stay (relatively) sane.

Sorry if that attitude aggravates the pros. But this job was never put out to bid, and if I were not a part of it, it would still happen, the only difference would be that it would be shot on consumer vidcams using just built-in mics and whatever sound accidentally made its way to them.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

p.s. I should have said “a reason” rather than “the reason” as I’m sure there are many other reasons why individuals treat audio as an afterthought when (ideally) they should not.

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I realize I contradict myself. But the reason people toss the sound to someone unqualified is usually desperation. I would love to have a good sound person, but most of what I shoot is shot on no budget. Not low budget, NO budget.

If I could trust a neophyte to run the camera I’d probably choose that over having them run the sound. In most cases, with my XL H1, I try to do both, or set up a recorder as well as I can, separate from the cam. It’s a bad compromise, but the other choice is not to get the shot at all.

I’ve begged those surrounding my efforts to try to find someone better at sound than I am, to handle recording and mics and all the rest. While I knew it coming in, my experience over the past few years has reinforced what you and other pros say in spades. I actually think audio is generally MORE important to the viewer’s sense of quality than image is, in almost every case.

Sometimes the people I volunteer for even have great the equipment lying around unused someplace. What none of us seem to have is endless free time to gather and persuade good people to crew the shoots the way they ideally should be crewed.

I don’t (generally) get paid for these shoots. I come with a $10K camera, $10 tapes and another $3K in sound equipment, not counting several $1,000s in computer equipment and editing software I use in post much of the time — and my investment (which seems foolhardy, especially in the face of a major recession) has been largely predicated on my doing the best job I can under the circumstances in hopes that those associated with my “charity” jobs may think of me sometime when they are shooting something where there are people actually willing to pay for production values. Frankly it’s (emotionally) depressing and it probably should be, considering out collective attitudes have done a lot to make the looming (economic) depression a near certainty.