[John Rofrano]

Sam, I agree that this is not relevant to the OP. I used child porn as an example because it is clearly objectionable to everyone without regard to the legality of it. OK, so let’s say you were a big “pro-life” advocate and someone who was “pro-choice” used your music for their video about abortion. Or you are a Christian and some atheist propaganda video used your music. Or someone used your music in a pro-fur video where they were killing baby seals (c’mon everybody loves baby seals) The point I was making was an artist has the right to say, no you cannot use my music for that purpose. Granted, no artist would object to their music being used in a video with a cat and a ball of string… unless of course… they were a dog lover who hates cats. 😉

Your point is well taken about the law and the reality of usage. They quite often are worlds apart.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
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[John Rofrano]

If you want to use higher resolution images to zoom in you can do that providing that you use Pan/Crop to do the zooming. Pan/Crop will use all of the resolution of the original photo. Track Motion will not! Track Motion will downrez to the project resolution first and then add the movement so never use Track Motion to zoom in (only out).

As for 24p vs 30p the only difference is rendering time. Remember, Vegas has to make video out of the images so by using 24 instead of 30 you render 6 less frames every second. that’s a lot of extra frames to wait for at the end of the day. This is why most animation is done in 24p as well. It’s just less work to render. I do all of my photo montages at 24p (‘cuz i don’t like waiting). 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

The names get displayed as chapter names when you use Insert Scene Selection Menu. They will never display on a root menu because they are scenes.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

> do I have to do anything to the photos properties to make them hdv friendly?

If they are 5, 8 or 10 megapixel photos you should really resize in a photo editor to make them closer to the resolution of your project. Don’t forget if you are making videos at 30 fps out of a 10 megapixel image you are asking Vegas to resize the photo 30 time a second. (no it doesn’t resize once and reuse it… it resizes each and every frame!) HDV is 2MP so a 10MP image is 5x more information than you really need. If you are zooming in to the photos allow more resolution for the zoom but just resize to what you need.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

If you suspect the graphics card then turn off hardware acceleration and see if the problem goes away. If it does, update your graphics drivers and try again.

If you PC is only a single core AMD then it is not nearly powerful enough to handle AVCHD. AVCHD requires at least a DualCore although I would recommend nothing smaller than a QuadCore.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

> However, as a musician and a guy who runs a record label, would I *care* if somebody made a video of their cat playing with a piece of string, and put my song on as the soundtrack, and then gave it to their buddy? No

Point taken… BUT… I’d bet if the person was making child pornography videos and using your music as the soundtrack and handing them out to their friends or selling them you would probably care A LOT! That’s the whole purpose of requiring a license. You have the right to say who can make a derivative work and you should not give up that right so easily (I’m a musician too). 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

I’m not convinced that the chroma key is the problem. That’s why I said to render some unprocessed MPEG2 video first and see if there is some other problem. I have done entire projects with MPEG2 footage that a client gave me from his DVD camera and I used Mercalli to steady the footage and I edited it just like any other footage and had no problems at all.

There is no logical explanation for your problem. That’s why I would try to methodically try and build a new project adding one more thing and render at each step to see if at some point you can recreate the problem. It may just be the length of the project and amount of FX and capacity of your computer to process it all. We just don’t know.

If you want to render it all to another format and then add the chroma key, I would render to DV AVI. You will loose some color information but it’s a format that is relatively small and works well with Vegas. Otherwise you could install a codec like Huffyuv or Lagarith which are both lossless but produce much larger files. It is just less of a hassle to use DV because Vegas already has it installed.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

If you are using Vegas HDV capture utility is has some bugs that Sony is aware of, but has not fixed in several releases. Scene detection cuts frames off of every scene and includes the frames from previous clips after the split point. It sounds like this is what you are seeing and you are not doing anything wrong; it’s just a know bug.

What you need to do is in the HDV capture utility, open the Prefs and on the General tab uncheck [ ] Enable HDV scene detection. This fixes *most* of the problem. I say most because it still mysteriously cuts your clips at random places in the capture. Very annoying for those of us using HDV tape. 🙁

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

> So if I create a New Project with the HDV 720 template (but set the fps to 24, since I have no need for 30 as I’m not using actual video source footage), then I should be good to go.

Yes, if you want to work in 720p then set your project to the HDV 720-24p (1280×720, 23.976 fps) setting. There is nothing to change after that.

> Then, later I can render using the H.264 codec for the Vimeo HD upload, and another appropriate setting for the DVD, is this right?

Yes, for Vimeo, Vegas Pro 9.0 has an Internet 16:9 HD 30p template under Sony AVC that is perfect (1280×720).

For DVD use the DVD Architect 24p NTSC Widescreen video stream under MainConcept MPEG-2 and render the audio separate as Dolby Digital AC-3

> Question, how is 24 fps rendered since all “video” that plays in DVD players or on the internet is of course not actually 24 fps, right?

Right. If the device is capable of what we loosely call “24p” it plays at 23.976fps. If not, 2:3 pulldown is added (known as telecine) to bring the 24p footage up to 29.970.

The internet can actually play 30fps or any fps you’d like for that matter so it is possible to render at any fps and play it back on your own web site. It’s just that sites like Vimeo and YouTube re-encode your video to their format so it’s best to stick within their recommended guidelines.

> When rendering out to video, does it really matter then what you use as the project settings, since in the end isn’t all video around 30 fps?

The project setting matter to the extent that you don’t get surprised by the render if it doesn’t match. If you are editing in 30 fps and you make a crossfade that is 12 frames and then you render as 24 fps, those 12 frames are now 9.6 frames because you lost 6 fps. Since you can’t have 0.6 of a frame you may see some strange ghosting as Vegas tries to figure out what to do about it. So it’s always better to keep your project settings the same as your render settings but when you are re-purposing video for several formats this is not always possible.

> Sorry for the basic questions, but it will be good to get off on the right foot.

These are actually very good questions that people don’t think of asking until they are well into editing or in trouble with their render. You keep asking… that’s how we learn 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

You can’t add them to the timeline. What you need to do is add the first one to the timeline. Then drop the rest of them into the root of the project tree on the left. Finally, set the END ACTION of the video that’s on the timeline to play the next video, then change the next video’s END ACTION to play the next one, etc. until they are all played. This makes a big chain of video clips that will play one after the other.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com