[Daniel Hughes]

On your timeline, click on Event Pan/Crop of your footage of the clock face, like so:

A window will open and you will see a raw still of your clock face footage. It will have a dotted lined rectangular square the size of your video output frame on it, with points at the midpoints and corners for you to manipulate it. There are icons on the left column of this window. Mouse-over them and make sure you have checked ‘Lock Aspect Ratio’.
Now roll your mouse back so that your image of the clock face is smaller and click and drag one of the bottom corners of the footage (take the opposite side of the side you want to clock face to be on) and drag to expand it. The dotted outline of the frame will become larger but the clock face image will remain the same size. This will then appear smaller and smaller into the corner of your output frame.

Your dotted line rectangle represents the output frame so you can position it in relation to the clock face footage until it is sized and positioned as you desire.

If it is an analogue clock and/or is circular and you don’t want the background of the footage (I.E the square of excess footage around it), you can mask it away.

To mask, select the beginning of the timeline in the Event Pan/Crop window. You’ll notice there are two timelines:

Make sure you have checked the ‘Anchor Creation Tool’ in the left column sidebar, and you can begin just simply clicking around the clock to outline it. You can add curve to these lines and fiddle around with them, and feather them so they are less of a harsh solid edge.

Hope this helped!

Daniel Hughes
Amateur Writer, Director,
Director of Photography
United Kingdom

[Daniel Hughes]

I won a flip cam in a Pepsi Max competition! Was well chuffed.

I sold it on ebay immediately.

I then finally had enough money to buy a 550d (T2i)!

Daniel Hughes
Amateur Writer, Director,
Director of Photography
United Kingdom

[Daniel Hughes]

I haven’t had a problem with this type of rendering before.

What is the frame rate of the source footage?
Did you try changing undersample rate?

Daniel Hughes
Amateur Writer, Director,
Director of Photography
United Kingdom

[Daniel Hughes]

Sometimes I wish I was a mac owner.
Thanks for your time anyway!

Daniel Hughes
Amateur Writer, Director,
Director of Photography
United Kingdom

[Daniel Hughes]

Oh goodness. I grabbed some footage with more movement and it doesn’t seem to have worked 🙁

In this piece of footage the camera is panning left to right.

So Tools > Burn Disc > DVD… and I’m given a window with a drop down list and six options. They are of frame rates 50i, 60i or 24p, with a mixture of PAL, NTSC and 16:9 and 4:3, all spread across six combined options. So I choose ‘720×480-24p – 16:9 (NTSC)’.
I choose my drive, and hit ‘OK’. The video begins to render:

I have a feeling I’m doing something stupidly wrong… but that’s what it looks like. And that’s what the burned DVD looks like on other players 🙁

Thanks anyway for your comments, I’ll try to investigate this further and probably consult the vegas forum!

[Daniel Hughes]

Hi Dave.

I can’t quite understand how gamma affects frame rate. I tried burning a clip having changed the compositing gamma to 1 (linear), and I think it’s better, but I’m not quite sure. I just grabbed the footage in the screenshot randomly but it probably wasn’t the best for testing the movement and flickering. I’m trying again with some more kinetic footage as we speak…

Also, could you please explain gamma in the context of frame rates etc?
I’ve only ever known it to be to do with luminance in colour correction!

Thanks,

Daniel

[Daniel Hughes]

Unlucky man 🙁

[Daniel Hughes]

This is with Sony Vegas, burning straight to DVD?

Here is the project’s dimensions and frame rate, and when it’s in burning mode:

When I select the 24p option and begin the process, it renders the video with the correct properties to then be burned to the disk, but when it does this the frame rate seems to be exactly 24.000p, and there is this horrific flickery interlacing.

Gah! It’s quite frustrating! Although if I can’t seem to solve it or find a solution I guess I could just settle with the NTSC 60i thing…

[Daniel Hughes]

I was aware of that but I think I’ve done something wrong, as when I go to burn a clip onto a DVD and select 24p there is this awful interlacing. I don’t know if it’s because the project and its footage are 23.976fps when the DVD burning seems to be exactly 24.000fps.

I’ll try that speedup though, and I’ll also try a speedup to 24.000 to see if the burn looks any better.

I’ll also try the NTSC pull-down.

Thanks for those useful links!

[Daniel Hughes]

Hi again!

I don’t really have any written proof or statement of Quicktime having a poor decoder, but if you watch a clip on Quicktime that looks better (less grainy) on another player it is pretty evident that Quicktime has a poorer decoding system than the other player, so you can make an assumption.

I have tons of footage that I can watch in my editing software, on youtube, on my camera and it’s great, but as soon as I open it in Quicktime all this grain emerges from nowhere!

However, I use Sony Vegas, and with this the footage looks better than it does in Quicktime, but as soon as I set the pixel format to full range 32 bit, it becomes grainy and such, as it does in Quicktime. So perhaps Quicktime is changing the pixel depth of the footage and the result is grain? I’m not 100% sure.

So yeah, I pretty much have just accepted that Quicktime player makes your footage look abysmal when it really isn’t. I tend to not preview clips in Quicktime, to avoid depression.

I agree with white balance, it can be quite challenging to maintain continuity, and I had this problem as in some shots I had tungsten white balance, and in others I had accidentally left it on Daylight or something! I managed to salvage the shots though, just playing around with gamma, gain and offset, with a dash of saturation, try and stretch the ranges to match the other footage using histograms, waveform monitors and such. They’re really useful.

There is also a useful noise reduction plugin in After Effects with which you can… reduce noise. It’s the only noise reduction I’ve ever attempted and it didn’t disappoint! There are probably other programs that do this just as well out there also.
Something like that could be quite useful if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to rescue an essential shot, like a first kiss or something!