[John Rofrano]

You can always burn it to a dual layer disc. DVD-DL will hold up to 8.5GB.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Neat Video will definitely help with noise reduction but it really depends on what is causing the poor quality is. If there is tearing or other sync problems there is nothing you can do after the fact. You need to capture the tape with a device that has Time Base Correction to clean things up on the way in. The fact that you captured a low quality VHS as more low quality MPEG2 makes matters even worse. The MPEG2 encoder does not handle noise very well at all and has probably made the original VHS footage even worse than the original.

You really want to capture bad VHS as DV AVI and clean it up before you render to MPEG2. If you want to capture directly to MPEG2 you should use a device that has the ability to do some noise reduction during capture. You have your work cut out for you.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Set your project to widescreen using one of the widescreen templates. Then add your widescreen media. Finally render using one of the widescreen templates. The key is to keep everything widescreen from project settings through render settings.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

You won’t be able to do it with the trail version because I don’t believe the MPEG2 encoder is included due to licensing. I would render out to DV Widescreen AVI (use the Video for Windows type and the NTSC DV Widescreen template). Then look for a trial of a DVD authoring program. 😉 Maybe TMPGEnc? (good luck)

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Yea, neither Ultimate S Pro nor Excalibur will resize your images for you. That is best left to a graphics application. What Ultimate S Pro and Excalibur will do is create photo montages from the images with just a few clicks. Ultimate S Pro has a dedicated Photo Montage tool and Photo Motion tool for making montages. Excalibur has a collection of individual tools that can make photo montages quickly as well.

In the interest of “full disclosure” I am one of the authors of Ultimate S Pro so you should try the free trial of both tools and decide for yourself which one you prefer.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I wouldn’t assign more than half of your real memory to a virtual machine. So start at 1GB but don’t go over 1.5GB if all you have is 3GB total. Also, look at how much free memory is in your running system. For example on Windows, if the Task Manager says that there is only 800MB free, don’t assign 1GB because you will just thrash trying to allocate enough memory.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I run Vegas in VMware all the time and it works fine except that VMware doesn’t expose the firewire ports so you cannot capture or use a firewire audio interface. You can use firwire hard drives if they are mapped to the host first and then shared with the vm.

I have never used VirtualBox so I don’t know how well it would work. VMware is a very mature product and it performs really well.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Blank media is usually a missing codec issue. Open the files in the Quicktime Player and use the Movie Inspector (Ctrl+I) to see what video codec it uses. Then find a PC version of the codec and install it and try Vegas again.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

More than likely it is not the generated media that is too big but rather the stock video is too small. What format are you using to render? DV Widescreen and HD Widescreen do not match and so they can’t be mixed without cropping. Make sure you are rendering at the correct aspect.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Your comment in the image says that no effects are on but the image tells a different story. The Video FX icon above the preview window is green which indicates that you have added FX to the entire project on the main video bus. Check and see if these are affecting it.

~jr

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