Jeff Weinberger
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve mixed HDV with DV in Vegas, and have gotten good results starting with HDV project settings. You stated that you tried that already and it didn’t work. You can try again, checking to make sure that your Vegas project settings are for HDV and not HD. You want HDV 1080 60i (1440 x 1080 29.97fps), upper field first, Pixel aspect ratio. The project settings tab has a box for deinterlace method, try ‘interpolate fields’ and video rendering quality ‘Best’. Then put the HDV footage on the timeline and highlight a short section to do some test renderings. See if a section with the white lines comes out okay when you render to Windows Media Video V9. Try rendering to the WMV template for 6Mbps HD 720 30P. That should do a rendering to 1280 x 720 29.97 Progressive. If that looks good, you could try intercutting that 720P WMV with your DV footage.
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Settings for Vegas 8 are included when you install the program. You can open the control panel for Contour Shuttle and choose to import settings, navigate to the folder for Sony Vegas 8 within the Program files folders and you will find Contour presets version 8.
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Have you tried viewing the HDV footage directly? You can use a player such as ‘Media Player Classic’ to view the HDV .M2T files fullscreen with different framing options. If the footage plays back properly, there ought to be a way to include it in your project.
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You mentioned that the project is being edited in Avid. I would export the timeline from Avid as 720 x 480 widescreen MPEG2 using DVD compliant settings, and then toss the streams into a DVD authoring program. Rendering from Avid as HDV and then rendering that HDV to DVD resolution adds an entire rendering stage that isn’t needed.
The HDV file system does use 1440 x 1080 frames, but when you create an HDV workspace in an editing program it processes the footage with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333, which is intended to display similar to footage that is 1920 x 1080 square pixels. Most editing programs have a preview monitor that can display your HDV footage as 16:9 intended display or actual 4:3 which appears to be squashed horizontally. If your editing program has HDV project templates and widescreen export templates, the “adjustments” to display as widescreen should automatically be entered by the templates. -
You could try to deinterlace the HDV footage and render it as uncompressed 720 x 480. There is a free deinterlace filter for Vegas by Mike Crash at https://www.mikecrash.com/ .
You could also try to deinterlace and render from another app if you have access to any. I usually toss footage into Combustion and deinterlace using it’s interpolate setting. If you can get the HDV footage looking good at 720 x 480, you should be able to cut it into your other footage. -
Are you sure that your HDV is intended to display as 4:3? HDV with a frame size of 1440 x 1080 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333 would display as 16:9. You could try to create a project setting for widescreen HDV, bring in widescreen HDV footage, and render as widescreen DVD 720 x 480.
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You mentioned that you tried rendering the HDV to a new track. Did you try to create a new project with HDV settings, drop the HDV on a track, render it as widescreen DV, and then go back to your initial project and use ‘replace footage’ to swap the HDV file for your DV version? You could also try changing the project settings for your mixed format project to HDV and see if rendering for DVD comes out better that way.
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Another advantage to having “Render frame sequence” as a render option is being able to select rendering with networked computers. Can the script method utilize multiple computers?
Some projects incorporate content that changes position and scale. Such as an HDV project 1440 x 1080 PAR 1.333 with moving overlays made from scaled down DV PAR 0.9 moving across still photos PAR 1.0. My concern with a script to render at the PAR of the project is that the process of changing the scale of all the content would be inaccurate, the content might be scaled down to a size that is close to within a few pixels of a Real frame. But some of the overlays could be a bit stretched and in slightly different positions.
There was a recent frame sequence post at the Sony forum about a project that involved 45,000 frames. Would you want to individually check 45,000 frames to verify that they correctly estimated the amount to rescale all the source content to closely approximate the project pixel aspect ratio?
Another reason to include “frame sequence” as a render option is so that it becomes an official part of the product that is featured in the ‘Help” files and manual. Not everybody goes out searching internet sites for workarounds. Some people will reach the conclusion that the product can not perform the process that they require. -
Vegasboy,
Another way to bring in a full screen non-zooming image is to create it using the frame size and pixel aspect ratio settings of your project. So for PAL 4:3 you could create a file 720 x 576 pixel aspect ratio 1.0926, or PAL 16:9 would have a pixel aspect ratio of 1.4568. A program such as Photoshop includes video templates and can quickly launch a new image with the correct settings. Photoshop can simulate device aspect ratio so that you can see how the finished project would appear on a playback device.
You can drop your non-square pixel image on the Vegas timeline, Vegas treats it as a square image and it does not fully fill the screen. But you can right-click the image, select Properties and uncheck the “Maintain Aspect Ratio” box. Your still image is treated like your video file and stretched to fill the screen. -
Rob,
Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro provide frame sequence rendering as an official rendering option. They guarentee the accuracy of the results and provide customer support to resolve any difficulties. I suspect that with Vegas Pro, the official policy is something like “our product does not offer frame
sequence rendering, we are not responsible for results obtained using scripts written by hobbyists that you found on internet message boards”.
I think that frame sequence rendering should be a formal render menu option that is part of the product, instead of something that can only be obtained through workarounds created by helpful enthusiasts.
I agree that the thread did get hijacked, thanks for contributing your observations, which have been quite helpful.