[Fabio Mereghetti]

I was afraid of this kind of answers.

Do you guys think it would be manageable to create a dual boot system with two different 80GB HDDs to boot from, one with Seven and the other with XP (to make a smooth transition)?

And about seven: would vegas 9e run on it?

Thanks.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks.

And do you know if Neoscene files will be compatible with Avisynth and Virtualdub and Sony Media manager (and Vegas 9, of course)?

Thanks again.

Edit: and does it ALWAYS deinterlace 50i sources?

[Fabio Mereghetti]

@John

I’m thinking to move from old Cinefrom HD to new Neoscene 5.x. I know I can’t upgrade so I have to buy it.

What do you mean about that ccow coupon?
Who is entitled to have it?
How?

[Fabio Mereghetti]

I was thinking at some point in time that it would be better to have the renderings on a separate hard drive, to optimize rendering times through hard-disk access times

Western digital RE3 or RE4 have two processors on board and that may drastically improve “self” read/write speeds.

I have both, but haven’t done any test, yet. If and when I’ll do it I’ll share the results.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Of course, being the amateur I am, I looked at the TM700 as a second (not “secondary”) camera primarily because the HV40 lens starts from something like 45mm (equivalent) and I would like to have a wider angle to play with. For some time I thought to buy a Bolex Aspheron wide angle adapter (700€) because I think it is the only one that has anything (sorry Canon and Raynox).
But, for almost the same money I could buy a second baby so I started looking and asking around.
I confess that I feel HDV as better than AVCHD but these feelings are not based on a real knowledge so I have to study the matter a little bit, first.
For the “unknoweldged” me, by now, a stronger compression ratio sounds as more info lost and I hear that editing with a single core (Athlon FX 53) is out of the question. I feel it as MP3 against a lossless codec.
As you can see, I started this thread asking about information loss while editing so, you can understand my point.
But John ended his post with… what you can see is what should count.

Unfortunately, John, my eyes are not so trustable…

By the way, do you know any HDV cam with a nice wideangle starting from less than 35mm?

Thanks.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

So, have to stay with HDV. (Had a quick look at some price…)

I’ve began to understand a bit and enjoy the power of Avisynth.
That means that in some cases, from an HDV source, I could end editing in Vegas, than apply some AVS filter, than finish back into Vegas and maybe than render to mpg2 for DVDs or MP4 for my media center. I have two brand new 1TB WD RE3 hard disks in a RAID 0 array so I tend to use AVI uncompressed as intermediate. The alternative is Cineform HD with Vegas 9e.
I haven’t delved deeply into colour space conversions yet (with video, at least) so let me ask you, John: should I have to be concerned about it due to my editing workflow or I shouldn’t care?

Thanks.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Stephen, I really understand you, I’ve been through all that not more than a couple of months ago, before John put all his patience together and took me by hand to this path. More than a step by step process it was like some southern Italian religious march: two steps forward then one step back, two forward and one back……
But… slowly, slowly catchy monkey!

I think your last doubt is my fault because I felt the lay-out of my post was not perfect, especially about the answer to your third question, but I thought it was all to long already so I delivered it.

What you have to bear in mind is that whatever the rendering template you will chose at the end of your editing, the “deinterlace method” will be used by Vegas only if and when it will need to.
I don’t know when this is needed but “if and when” it will, Vegas will look at that box and will use the method you choose. Even in this case, if you then will choose to render to an interlaced output Vegas will give you just what you asked for: an interlaced output.

So, in short, that box bear no relations with your output. At least not a direct one…

To really understand if and why an output should be interlaced or not, you should look around the net and learn in detail what interlacing is. Then you can go on with what the different methods and tools can do to turn it into progressive. You will soon discover that many horrible things can take place like create a frame mixing pieces of information taken in two different instants in time or throw away half of your so-many-pixels frame that made you choose that camera instead of the less-pixels one, just to mentions some. Maybe there are smarter deinterlacers around but with them it will take an hour to render five seconds!

At any case, I did some tests with the same clip of few seconds and tried all the permutations of the settings I could use and with the help of some clever tools (Virtualdub and Avisynth) I could easily compare the different outputs and choose the best. In case of DVDs, you should always try your tests with a DVD player and, at least, two different TV sets: a good one and a poor one. I wasted a couple of weeks trying to understand what I was doing wrong and when I moved the DVD player to the 37″ Pana plasma I discovered that my DVD was of a real good quality. It was just a wrong TV set problem.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

the rendering engine makes use of the CUDA cores

With any codec or only with Sony AVC?

[Fabio Mereghetti]

I’m just an amateur so I’m not telling you what YOU should do but I tell you what I understood after many answers I got on the same subject. As I got all I know from the experts of this forum and I know they could be a little tired to keep on anwering to the same questions over and over, let me try and say what I learned here.

1. If producing DVD from my footage what should I change in the project properties. Do I need to deinterlace?
I have read so many posts about this that I now start to doubt myself. if i use the 1080 50i HDV template do i need to deinterlace this, as most if not all of my customers are going to view on an LCD television using a set top DVD player?

I have read lots of posts telling me to blend fields. Which is correct in this situation?

In theory, the best quality you can get from an interlaced source is to keep it interlaced. All the DVD players can deinterlace properly and they won’t let you notice if the source was interlaced or not. So, even if the TV set is the latest progressive one, if you watch the footage through a DVD player you are safe with your interlaced source.
Deinterlacing always starts with a main compromise (blend or interpolate fields), then goes on with what technic to use to deint and never ends with a better quality image than the original one, so…
Maybe, a little more important thing is the frame size. As you surely know HDV is 1440×1080 PAR 1.333 aka 1920 (1440×1.333)x1080 against the DVD widescreen format that is (PAL land) 720×576 PAR 1.456 aka 1049 (720×1.456)x576. So you have to deal with different DARs and you have to choose if you want black lines on the sides or to crop or resize the whole footage with the useful “match output aspect ratio”.

2. If I then want to use the same timeline to produce a Blu-Ray disc to i need to change the project properties? Which render template would be best to use for DVD architect?

I don’t know about BD but the project properties should always match the render settings (see the answer to you 3).
If you like the results, the best choice in term of productivity should be the built in Mainconcept “DVD Widescreen video stream for DVD Architect” template (maybe with the “save markers with media” option) because with it you get a straightforward way to go from Vegas to DVDA and, once there, you can automatically create scene selection menus with a single click. When you choose the template to render, be sure to choose the right settings to avoid a recompression in DVDA. You will have to render the audio stream alone (AC3 is a choice) and give the rendered stream the same name as the video one. When you’ll load the video stream in DVDA it will automatically load the audio too.
If you don’t like the Mainconcept output you can choose to frameserve to another compressor and do a little more work to import the chapters marks into DVDA.

3. If producing MP4 for website or Iphone use do i need to deinterlace or change anything else in the project properties for this timeline?

Yes, I think it would be better to deinterlace. If you choose to do it, be sure to chek these settings:

Project properties:

In the upper part of the dialog you have the settings that are used for all the generated media: titles, 3D transitions, ecc. Here you should choose “None” in the Field order box so all the media will be progressive.
In the lower part of the window there is a box called “Deinterlace method” or something like that: here is where you tell Vegas which method to use to deinterlace interlaced sources if and when needed. Understand that some plugins or effects might deinterlace and re-interlace without you noticing so it’s always safe to have something different than “None” in this box. Whether to blend or interpolate it depends mainly on the content of your footages.

Render templates:
At render time, in the render template, you should find there too a field order box where to choose between Upper field first/Lower field first/None (progressive).
At this time you should also check to be sure you won’t have black lines on the sides. If you didn’t choose to resize all the events or tracks with “Match output aspect”, here you should find a “Stretch video…” choice. But I’m not sure this would be the same.

Hope some of the knowledged people here will quickly correct me if I wrote something wrong or confirm if everything is correct.

Thanks.

(Sorry for the length.)

@John R.
Hope I could be considered a good pupil of yours.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Thanks.

And what about tape indexes?

Does anybody know if “DV quick scan” (Ulead/Corel video studio) would work as a stand alone too?

Thanks