[John Bollenbacher]

Hey Brian,

Sorry I’m a little late to this party, but I think that it should be pretty easy to do what you are talking about.

If you go into your Pan/Crop function on your event and make sure that your “size about center” button is selected.

Then whatever you crop in the image will appear in the center of the frame. In other words if you crop 30 pixels off the right and 50 off the left, the final video should have 40 pixels cropped on each side.

But to make this work exactly right for you, you will probably have to turn off “lock aspect ratio” right above the “size about center”

John Bollenbacher
10engines

[John Bollenbacher]

I’ve re-wrapped some of my EX-1 footage to .mxf, and I don’t know if it really takes much longer than copying the mp4’s your hard drive.

As someone who’s been editing for a while on a variety of NLE’s I’d have to say that not having true 3 point editing can be a shag. It’s closer in 8 with the overwrite option, but still not as exact.

That being said, the whole paradigm of 3 point editing is really left over linear style editing, but if you are used to it, it means that you don’t work quite as fast.

And the way that vegas selects portions of events can be a little hinky. You drag you selection over an event, but sometimes it does highlight, sometimes not… seems like there could be a little more precise control there too.

But I do feel like much of the editing can happen faster than other programs, especially if you trust it. Audio editing is by far the best of the lot.

If you come from another NLE, it will be like learning a new language; but if you are new to it I think Sony is more intuitive than most editors.

Good luck.

John Bollenbacher
10engines

[John Bollenbacher]

This is from the white paper put out by Sony Creative:

1. Shoot your video with your XDCAM EX camera.

2. Transfer your clips from your camera to your computer.

a. Install the SxS device driver and XDCAM EX Clip Browsing Software.

b. Connect your camera (or card reader) to your computer with a USB cable.

c. Your camera will prompt you to “Connect USB Now?” Choose Execute.

d. In the Clip Browsing Software window, select the clips you want to transfer to your computer.

e. From the File menu, choose Export, and then choose MXF from the submenu.

f. In the Export to MXF dialog, choose the folder and file name you want to use to save your clips.

g. Click Start. The clips are converted to MXF format and copied to your computer.

3. Drag your captured clips from the Explorer or Project Media window to the timeline to create events.

4. Edit your project as needed.

5. Render your project for your destination format.

So I think the explorer only works with .mxf files. But I’d love to see the documentation on using the xdcam explorer to rewrap the mp4’s if you’ve seen it somewhere.

Thanks for the post.

John Bollenbacher
10engines

[John Bollenbacher]

Thanks David,

I did notice the change as I rolled the focus; but I guess I was too hardwired to always go slightly off focus. Will remember for the future. Cheers.

[John Bollenbacher]

This post might be a little bit easier to read and more to the point:

https://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_pixels.html

[John Bollenbacher]

It’s probably a square Vs. non-square pixels.

Here’s a post that might help.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/pixel_madness.php

[John Bollenbacher]

Interesting.

A quick jump over to iStock, and I saw that a HD quicktime movie there was rendered with the JpegMotion B codec, which Vegas has.
Maybe you should start there.

Good luck.

[John Bollenbacher]

Fraser,

I guess the question is how are you finally going to show this material. You could burn a DVD (mpeg2). I assumed that you had to have it in a quicktime format, and that’s why you were rendering to it. Unfortunately, QT is losing the race in the small files size/quality ratio. Although H.264 codec for QT might have given us the best quality for small size; but don’t see it here as an option in Vegas yet.

[John Bollenbacher]

Cinepak codec looks pretty good (not as good as the Motionjpeg), but is about half the size and plays very smooth.

[John Bollenbacher]

So far MotionJpeg A has been the best quality to size ratio. Much smaller, but looks good.

I edit a lot on FCP and a really good codec is the dvcproHD codec, but not seeing that here… so I’ll try a few more.