D. Eric franks
Forum Replies Created
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I use both versions regularly: 64-bit is my primary, but there are just some situations where some glitch (at least up to 9b) means I need to pop back into the 32-bit version. Speed? Meh. My impression is that it’s about the same. So why 64-bit? My personal workflow has me pre-rendering to Dynamic RAM all the time and you get more RAM (and longer previews) with the 64-bit version.
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I don’t think the technical variables in Project Properties or render settings have anything to do with the artistic aspects of the “Film Look” – you can definitely screw things up, but basically, if those variables are set correctly, that will preserve whatever creative choices you have made? Make sense? So if you are shooting 1080p24 or 720p24, matching your project and render settings to that will get you the best results.
Now, as to Color Correction and film grain and so on, there are a ton of tools. Vegas film fx are fine and when used subtly can be effective. I really like the Magic Bullet Film Looks plug-in, which is a great shortcut, but you can get 90% of where you need to go using only Vegas (Levels, Color a little grain) and you can duplicate most of the Magic Bullet looks IF – and this is a big if – you know what your target should look like. But if you had a Magic Bullet look or a movie that you wanted to imitate, there are folks here that can tell you what you need to do.
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I have one broad suggestion BEFORE you start shooting (and please don’t take this as patronizing – your question is a very good one, but it’s also very broad!): If you shoot with a “filmic” style, your video will look more like film. On the easy end, that means using a tripod (or, more advanced, a dolly). On the easy but very involved end, that means lighting your scene right. If you just did those two things, your video will look more like film before you even start editing. Poorly lit, handheld video will never look like a Hollywood film, no matter what you do to it in post. Well lit, properly stabilized video will look great, whether it actually looks like “film” or not.
Now, once you have your high-quality footage, there’s a lot you can do with Vegas’ color grading tools, but at that point, you need to look and your source and figure out a destination for it. What kind of film do you want to imitate? Alan Woo has a great little color analysis of some movies, just to start you thinking about this, again, in the very broadest of terms:
https://www.alanwoo.ca/project/pie/
and I’ve got a general little rant on 24p here:
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Are you working with HD footage?
Weeeelllll, I’ve got bad news, bad news and some “don’t worry about it” news: the “best possible quality picture and format [for a 100 minute project] that will still fit on a standard 4.6 gig DVD” is some form of H.264, which WMV is a variation of and is not very fun to edit at all. 4.6GB for 100 minutes is something like 6 Mbps, which is not that great, depending on your source (SD or HD). For example, YouTube HD is ~2 Mbps and a high end Blu-ray HD movie might be around 30 Mbps, just for comparison. And, for comparison, a 100 minute movie that occupies 22GB of disk space is very nearly 30 Mbps, so… that’s actually not bad for HD (although I still wouldn’t want to edit it).
I would recommend dividing the project up into chunks and not worrying about 22 GB, which isn’t outrageous at all for 100 minutes of video and is rather svelte for HD. Why, back in my day, we used to walk to the studio in snow that was up to HERE and our video hard drive was 13 GB and cost $800…
Ahem. Sorry. So, to the “don’t worry about it” news: once you are talking about 22 GB and a hundred minutes, the audio is irrelevant and will only add less than 5% to your file size even with NO compression at all. Use MP3 or AAC and the audio practically disappears.
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I agree entirely, Mr. Rofrano: DivX is a bad choice for editing. I will have to try AVI+Lagarith, but I have to admit that I use QT (animation) for almost all of my intermediate work, although the latest fiasco with the 7.6.4 version (DON’T install that one -stick to 7.6.2) might have me coming back to AVI. Great advice and thanks!
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I made a video summarizing how a flying camera support works with some ideas about cost and even building your own:
DIY Steadicam – Flying Camera Support
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I’m not entirely sure I understand the issue. PCM uncompressed audio files aren’t all that large, at least not when compared to video. For example, a minute of uncompressed 16-bit, 48 kHz stereo audio occupies about 11 MB of disk space, while a minute of NTSC DV video would take up roughly 206 MB. That’s without the audio, so including the audio in an NTSC DV AVI render, you get about 217 MB/minute. This is not a bad choice for editing and should be relatively smooth to edit. As to the sync issue, I really have no idea.
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First, Cinepak has been around since about 1991 and hasn’t really been useful since MPEG-1 came along and computers became fast enough to play it back. In other words, Cinepak has been a dead codec for about a dozen years! Second, AVI is an ancient format, but you can plug a lot of different options into it still.
More to the point, try installing the DivX codec and see how that works out. If you aren’t worried about file size (and, quite frankly, you shouldn’t be, since this is just an interim process involving temp files and disk space is cheap), then you can render out to AVI Uncompressed. This will result in even short files in the tens of gigabyte range.
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I can’t give you the specific answers for those cameras (I’m sure Mr. Spotted Eagle will be along any minute now – unless he’s out jumping today!), but the physical format of the media is unimportant. If your computer can see and read the SD card and copy the files to the hard disk drive, then you are good to go. But the real question is: Can Vegas read the digital movie files? And that is a question for Spot.
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In Vegas, right click the file, select Properties, and then on the Media tab, change the Pixel aspect ratio to… maybe 1.33 or possibly 1.21 – whichever looks right.
