D. Eric franks
Forum Replies Created
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Personally, I think the best size for still images is “very large”, maybe up to 4000 pixels on a side. This will slow Vegas down a tad (but not much), but it gives you a lot of creative flexibility with zooming and panning and whatnot.
How to zoom and pan and fill the frame? Use the Event Pan/Crop tool. The button is on the right side of the clip. This can be tricky to get it exactly right at first, but lock the aspect ratio when you do get it perfect and then do your thing.
To simply fill the frame when a picture is almost filling, but not quite and that’s all you want to do, you can use the Track Motion tool. This is not the preferred method most of the time because it works at project resolution and not at image resolution, but it is very useful for minor cropping and fixes.
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You could use a Pan/Crop mask on a duplicated clip in a track above with a blur filter on it. You can create masks of any shape, even multiple ones and animate them (tediously!) to follow the action.
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Depends on the format of the source video, but if you are getting the files into Vegas, then I assume you are really good to go. If the aspect is wrong, manually telling Vegas the correct ratio is the solution (as John says) and there’s no loss in quality or anything.
If you are capturing SD 16:9 DV, you might get .mov or you might get .dv. The MOV files with NTSC will work fine in Vegas, but If the footage is HD something or other, there’ s a good change it just won’t work on a Windows machine, since QuickTime is crippled on that platform and simply doesn’t have many of the codecs you might need, not even if you wanted to give Mr. Jobs $1,000 for them. Sigh.
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Of course your audiences’ monitors aren’t going to be calibrated either, so while John is right (of course!), it could be argued that, by and large, it doesn’t matter. There are definitely situations where it does matter (e.g., broadcast, corporate clients, brand identity and just plain getting it right), but I basically don’t trust my monitors anyhow or the environment esp. with LCDs, it makes a difference whether the fluorescent lights in the office are on or how much daylight is pouring into my home studio. And I don’t trust my 40+ year old eyes anymore either. All that is to preface the FREE recommendation that the Vectorscope and (especially) the Waveform monitors are good tools to spend an afternoon learning. You can then tell – at a glance – many things with absolute certainty.
NOTE: On the other hand, even if you are 100% certain you’ve got everything exactly and technically correct, there is still the Art…and there’s always the client. Both can trump the monitors on occasion.
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First, match your project settings to your source media. The easiest way to do this:
1. File > Properties
2. On the Video tab, click the Match Media Settings button.
3. Browse to one of you Flip Ultra HD files and select it.No thinking required! Now, when you render, you’ll also want to render the same format. I’d use the MainConcept AVC codec, but many folks like the Sony AVC – either or. These are the base render settings for 720p30:
1280×720
progressive
30 fpsThere’s probably a preset for this if you look. Now the tricky part: the data rate. For YouTube, I generally crank out a data rate as high as I can get, usually 20Mbps, but anywhere in the 10-20Mbps range is fine. For playback on your computer, you might consider a less stressful data rate of 10 Mbps (the camera shoots at about that data rate). And if you were e-mailing this file or hosting it yourself, I’d select something like 2-3Mbps.
There are other settings you can play with, like VBR vs. CBR: I don’t think you’ll find these matter much compared with the above.
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I don’t think the AVI will work and it’ll be too big for non-test stuff anyhow.
If it’s not in the source and it’s not in the rendered MP4 file played back on your computer and it’s YouTube, then I’m not sure what we can do except make sure you match YouTube’s exact specs for uploaded files so that it does as little conversion as possible. I haven’t checked in a few months to see if YouTube has made any new changes, but these two formats work for me:
* 1920×1080, @24 or @30 fps, progressive scan for the interlacing (25fps probably also works fine)
* 1280×720, @24/25/30fps, progressive scan
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OK, wild guess time: The machines will be equally fast while editing (both will run at 2.8 GHz when asked to do so), but the 4-core/8-thread i7 chip will be many times faster than the dual-core CPU for apps that take advantage of it, for example (or when voice dictating and editing at the same time – which you’ll probably never do!), I would expect rendering to be a lot faster, maybe even twice as fast. Rendering isn’t everything for most workflows, however, so this might not be that big of a deal.
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Great and thanks for the followup!
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You are referring to the tearing/blinking, right? It’s in the source footage or does it only show up on render? If it’s in the source, there’s no hope of fixing it. The artifacts are showing up between the main I frames, so if the render is causing it, changing the way you export will help: Try using MainConcept AVC to MP4 out of Vegas with a pretty high data rate (10-20Mbps). You could also experiment and render to a giant lossless format too (QuickTime MOV with the Animation codec or AVI Uncompressed), just as a test.
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Not sure why you can’t crop them out with the Event Pan/Crop tool, but that is the only way to eliminate the black lines IF they are in the original footage. Just make sure Maintain Aspect Ratio is selected and crop in 3-5 pixels and you should be good to go.
One problem I occasionally run into with masks especially is that you can get noticeable lines and borders when applying filters to clips. So, when I do a mask, it works perfectly, but when I add a little color correction to it, the edge becomes apparent. I haven’t figured out a solution to that other than a pre-render of the correction to the clip before applying the mask.