[John Rofrano]

[Dirk Wellekens] “So, when I am shooting AVCHD 1080 50p you recommend making my final renders also AVCHD 1080 50p. Only, I don’t see that option in Vegas, only AVCHD 50i. Also the templates for the Blu-ray also only show 50i. So, what do I use.”

AVCHD is a subset of MPEG4. You can always use the Customize Template button and change the template to match your footage. It looks like Vegas Pro might not allow you to change the AVCHD to progressive. If that is the case, you can start with the Internet MP4 template and modify it to render 50p. The results will not be AVCHD compliant but they will be MPEG4 50p. Also look under both the Sony AVC and MainConcept AVC render types because both have different AVC/MPEG4 templates.

As for Blu-ray, that specification supports AVCHD but it doesn’t support HD1080-50p which is why the templates won’t allow you to create that can call it Blu-ray compliant.

[Dirk Wellekens] “About your second remark. 50i and 25p are both 25fps, the 50i being interlaced, so I would guess 25p is better than 50i (as you capture all the information on 1 frame at 25p and in 50i it comes from odd and even lines). Is that right?”

It depends on your definition of “better“. With 25p motion is only sampled 25 times a second. With 50i motion is sampled 50 times a second. So 50i will give you smoother motion than 25p even though they are both 25 frames per second. The 50i will have more motion blur but some people (including myself) feel that is “better” than less blur but more jerky movement. As I said… It depends on your definition of “better“. ????

[Dirk Wellekens] “Then, the camcorder can record AVCHD 1080/50p (28Mbps / VBR), (1920 x 1080/50p) and also MP4 1080p/50p(28M) (28Mbps / VBR), (1920 x 1080), which are comparable in bitrate and fps. Why should I choose one or the other?”

AVCHD is a standard so that consumers can buy gear and software that works together. MP4 is a much broader standard but there is no guarantee that it is compatible with other MP4 formats. I don’t think it matters much which you choose but I have always used AVCHD for better compatibility with the software you might be using to edit it. The quality will be the same either way because both formats use the same bit rate.

[Dirk Wellekens] “Finally, there is also a 24p option. What is that for?”

Some people like the cadence of film. If you are going for a “shot on film” look then 24p will help you get there but you must be careful to pan slowly because you can’t swing a camera around at 24p like you can at 50p and get smooth pans.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Dirk Wellekens] “My new camcorder can do 4K and 1080p. I suppose 4K might be too memory intensive, so I would think 1080p is the better solution with an advantage over 50i, right?”

You are mixing progressive shooting with frame rates. 50i is 25 frames per second. 25p is 25 frames per second. So 50i and 25p are both 25 frames per second. When you say your camera shoots 1080p what frame rate is that? Is it 25p or 50p? You should render to the same frame rate that it was recorded at. If it’s 50p then render to 50p, if it’s 25p then render to 25p.

[Dirk Wellekens] “I have seen many discussions about how to render the 50p in Vegas, but most of them are about youtube, internet,… So my question is: what would be the recommended setting to render the 50p material into a final file for storage? I guess I can still render it to a Blu-ray ISO file as well with little adaptations?”

The quality will never be better than the original footage but you didn’t tell us what that is so we can’t give an accurate recommendation. I would render to the original format. So if you are shooting AVCHD 1080p-50 @ 25Mbps then make your final renders AVCHD 1080p-50 @ 25Mbps. You could, of course, choose another format like Sony MXF and a higher bit rate but rendering to the same format that you shot with is perfectly fine for final file storage.

[Dirk Wellekens] “A final question still: I read 50p is OK, but 25p is often not OK. So, when is the 25p preferred. I read somewhere that it has to do with technical and budget restrictions in film industry, but that doesn’t sound to me as an argument to incorporate it in modern camcorders.”

Film is shot at 24 fps because it was just fast enough to give smooth playback without wasting film which was prohibitively expensive. PAL video is 25 fps because the AC electrical current in your home is 50Hz which limited the refresh rate of Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT) which were incapable of producing an entire frame at that rate so 2 half frames were interlaced (odd and even scan lines) producing 50i which resulted in 25 fps. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Modern camcorders can shoot 25p and 50p because televisions don’t use cathode ray tubes anymore and modern TV displays are quite capable of delivering 50 full frames or more. 25p is preferred for footage shot at 25p or 50i. 50p is preferred for footage shot at 50p. If you are asking when is it preferable to shoot 25p vs 50p the only reason to shoot 50p if is you are recording fast moving objects and want smooth motion on playback. 50p produces smoother movement as you might expect. 25p is actually jerkier movement than 50i even though they both produce 25 frames per second which is why many people preferred 50p when shooting progressive.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I can highly recommend the Audio-Technica AT2020USBi Cardioid Condenser USB Microphone which sounds every bit as good as my AT4033a costing 2x as much. I own both and honestly, I can hear the difference but not by much. The AT2020USBi is the USB / Lightening version of their AT2020 mic. It records at 24 bit/96 kHz and is an amazing mic for the price.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Damien Lobb] “DNxHD/DNxHR should be the standard. As it is free to license and is very efficient, easy to work with (like ProRes) and is cross-platform friendly. “

What should be the standard and what is the standard are two different things. When almost the entire industry is using a Mac the argument is really moot. Apple ProRes is the digital intermediary format of choice. All Apple software products (Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor, of course FCP 7) manipulate it like butter even on a modest Core i5 iMac. Since Apple upset so many people with FCP X workflow changes driving them to Adobe, and then Apple upsetting them again by not keeping their Mac Pro hardware refresh up to date and driving more professionals to Windows, they have exacerbated the cross-platform problem all by themselves. Having said that, ProRes is still the industry standard and more and more cameras are now showing ProRes and the new ProRes RAW format so I don’t think DNxHD/DNxHR is going to become a standard any time soon. As I said, the solution is quite simple… buy a Mac and stop wasting time on formats. ???? (that’s what I did… don’t regret it one bit)

[Damien Lobb] “Magix really should consider supporting it.”

Actually MAGIX Vegas Pro 15 now supports the reading and writing of Apple ProRes files so MAGIX solved the problem by supporting the industry standard.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Hancock] “Do you know how the crop tool does in regards to oversampled footage? If you drop a 4K clip into a 1080p timeline, scaled to fit, then do the crop animation, does it reference the 4K or does it just crop and zoom in on the scaled down 1080p clip (in effect, softening the image)?”

I don’t know for sure (I would have to test this) but you would think that the purpose of Crop is to maintain the full resolution of the footage within the cropped area. Many people claim that one benefit of shooting 4K for people who still deliver HD is that you can reframe the shot, from let’s say a wide shot to a medium shot, with crop and still have great looking footage so I have to believe that crop does not downsample to HD and then scale up and loose resolution but rather crop from the original 4K footage in an HD project.

BTW, I didn’t realize that Scale uses ease-in/out. You have taught me something new. Thanks! ????

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

You’re very welcome. Make sure to take that copy to another Mac and try and open it and make sure that none of the media files are missing just to be safe. ????

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Paul Bosch] “I need to change the background of somthing that is not green screen.”

What you want to do is called “rotoscoping” and if you search for “rotoscoping fcpx” you will find tutorials on how to accomplish this. The easiest would be with a tool like SliceX from CoreMelt which is powered by Mocha.

Here is a tutorial on how to use SliceX for rotoscoping:

https://vimeo.com/154722247

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Vimeo framework” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[John Rofrano]

Motion can help you achieve this because it has particle emitters. What you need to do is place the person on top of the background and the explosion on top of the person so you need 3 layers. You cannot do this with the explosion and the background on the same layer as you have here.

You may be able to fake it by adding more smoke from Motion on top of the person to augment the smoke that is already in the scene but it may be very hard to match the same type of smoke. The easiest solution is use a clean background, then add CG explosion which reveals the person on a layer below the explosion as the dust settles.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Hancock] “FCPX is not linear, and cannot do linear scaling. It always has an ease function.”

That’s not the behavior that I am observing. I just used the crop tool to zoom in and pan and the movements were linear. Here is an example:

That looks linear to me (you may have to click on the image to see the gif animate depending on your browser).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

The bigger question is why do you feel the need to start the motion before the clip when no one can see it? I assume you are trying to compensate for the motion being non-linear with some ease-in/out curve but I believe it is linear by default so it makes no visual difference if you start the motion when the clip starts or if you start it earlier. The motion will look the same both ways.

Try it and see. If this is not what you want then please explain how having the motion start before the clip does makes it somehow look different? (again, assuming the motion is linear, which it is)

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com