David Shirey
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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To address your actual question of should you buy an HDTV at this time, it sounds like the answer is no. If you don’t have access to hdtv programming, then the only other question would be if you watch a lot of dvd’s. Those can at least take advantage of widescreen television, if not full HD resolution. If you have the money, sure, get an hdtv so dvd’s fill it out and you can edit all your montages in widescreen resolution so they’re “future-proof.” If the videos are just photos, you should save the project files and source images, then in the future just change the project to HD and rerender a bluray.
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Geez that’s handy info. I’ll have to be even more careful next time we need to do that.
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I can tell people from experience that the high bitrate of bluray files can cause problems. Not with longevity since it’s still new, but with compatibility. We had Sony’s low end blu-ray player, (the 350 I think?) and playback became very jerky when the variable bitrate got up around 30mbps. When it was down around 24mbps everything seemed fine so we just rerendered. Of course the same files played fine when burned on a bd-r instead of dvd-r.
Also the PS3 won’t recognize the bluray menus when burned onto a dvd-r. It reads the file structure instead, which is a benefit to us because you can choose the video files and copy them right to the PS3’s hard drive. I do wish they’d add a video playlist function for trade shows though.
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As Douglas said, that’s exactly what you can do, although I’ve always done it from DVD Architect, not from the Vegas timeline. And not to sound too much like a Sony fanboy, but I love dropping short HD videos onto a dvd-r, then saving them to the hard drive of our Playstation 3 in the office. We’ve got a lot of demos sorted by category so that when clients come in we can just whip through videos and play something that will give them an idea of what we do.
And not to sound like a PC fanboy either, but when we finally did have to get blu-ray burners, I got the cheapie LG drive for like $250. On the same day we ordered an MCE external blu-ray drive for the Macs in the office. It ended up being backordered for 2 weeks and cost $600, and when it got here it was the exact same LG drive I had ordered, only in an external enclosure 😛
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[John Kert] “Burn it as Blue Ray (not more than 4.7 GB) on Regular DVD-R (need Blue Ray Burner). Then you can play that on your Blue Ray player.”
You don’t actually need a Blu-ray burner for that, but you do need a player of course.
-dave
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Well it’s probably a little late to mention this, but for anyone searching the archives for digitizing on FinalCut Pro and transferring to Vegas, maybe this post will be useful.
If you’re digitizing in FCP on a mac with an external drive, you need to be aware for what format the drive is. Normally when you buy a drive from a store it’ll come as FAT32 so they can advertise it as being compatible with both mac and pc’s. That’s nice and all but the FAT32 format is a little out of date, and one problem you might run into with video is it’s inability to have a file over 4GB. Ideally if you’re editing in Windows you want to have the drive formatted for NTFS. Mac OSX isn’t going to be able to read or write to NTFS drives out of the box, but there is a free application that will allow them to do so. It can be downloaded here: https://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
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[Danny Hays] “I believe the overscanning on an LCD TV is from the player and not the TV. I can connect a computer via VGA with media player full screen and there’s no overscan, while if I use other sources they sometimes will overscan. Hope this helps. Danny Hays”
Cropping the video signal shouldn’t really be seen as a flaw in a television set, it’s actually supposed to be able to cut the edges. TV channels would often broadcast signals that would have things you don’t want the viewer to see on the edges. For example the timecode data at the top of a beta tape, or if you used a fisheye lens on a shot and the corner of the screen has the edge in there. It’s actually not a bad thing to have the image cropped by 3% or so.
LCD’s and Plasma’s that have VGA or DVI inputs for computers aren’t going to crop those inputs unless you go into the menu and expand the image so they are cropped. Computer screens don’t crop so there would be no reason to do this on those inputs. It’s not something a dvd player is doing on the way to the television, because if you were to capture that same signal in the Vegas capture window you’d see everything right to the edge.
With the HDTV’s nowadays the cropped area is smaller than what you might get with old CRT’s. I’m also told that CRT’s can actually get worse over time, expanding the image and cropping more. I had an old toshiba that cropped the right side so much that it would often hit the edge of the station watermark that tv stations stick in the bottom right side, which is normally inside the title safe zone.
I don’t know if I’ve done a good job explaining this or not, but the long and short of it is this: despite this new era of high def, we still need to be wary of the action and title safe zones. Especially those of us using a vga or dvi monitor as a viewing device from Vegas that isn’t cropping the image at all. It’s easy to forget just how much of the picture might go missing on some people’s sets.
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As someone who spends way too much time putting together montages of photographs in Vegas, I think the real lesson to be learned here is for people to stop putting the subjects of photographs right up to the edge of the picture. If people pretended there was a “title safe zone” in their still camera and simply took one step backwards so that everyone fit in frame, we wouldn’t have this problem 😛
And while you’re at it, explain to all those corporate yahoos who want their powerpoint presentations converted to DVD to stop cramming the text up to the edge of the frame. Okay I’m done ranting!
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The quote from the help file seemed pretty unambiguous and I’m surprised it doesn’t do what it claims, but I’ve never tested it as my workflow is exactly what Mike was describing. Are there very many chapter stops? If you render out a new file and replace it on the dvd layout, would it be much trouble to just drag the chapter markers over to their new positions to preserve the menu, or would it be less effort to add the new chapter markers in vegas then redo the menu in dvd architect.
I always try to do as much work as possible in Vegas since everything transfers into dvda so easily, whereas doing things in dvda can sometimes be a hassle.
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As long as they both share the same name but with different file extensions, Architect should automatically link them.