John Rofrano
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
Isn’t that wonderful that important files are in hidden folders. 😉 It also didn’t help that the forum removed all of the Slashes from my post. 🙁
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Yes. SD downconvert is an in-camera function, and I believe that all HDV cameras support this. What you do is tell the camera that you want to output SD/DV via firewire. You also want to use the DV capture utility in Vegas 7 and not the HDV capture utility.
The camera will also have an option for handling the fact that SD is 4:3 and HD is 16:9. On my Sony HVR-Z1U I have the option to squeeze the video, crop the video, or letterbox the video. I recommend that you squeeze the video. This will give you DV widescreen footage. You can then crop it to 4:3 in Vegas 7 after you capture. If you crop the video in-camera and the shooter wasn’t using 4:3 guides, you may crop an important part of the image so it’s best to crop in post.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Do you have an HD camera? If not, the short answer is No. There is no way to capture HD to SD with an SD camera. If you do have an HD camera, you had better hope it’s the same manufacturer of camera that shot the tape. Most of the time you can’t even capture HD to HD unless you have the original camera or a compatible camera from the same manufacturer.
I would find out what camera was used to shoot the tape and then look for someone with that camera or a compatible HDV camera. Otherwise, the tape is useless to you. Request whoever gave it to you to give you the files on a hard drive.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I’ve never had any sync issues with Quicktime renders but you could always throw the DV AVI file into Quicktime Pro. That should work.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I don’t have Vista but the XP ones are here:
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Sony\File Templates\[plug-in name]\[plug-in GUID].
Which means the Vista ones should be here:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Sony\File Templates\[plug-in name]\[plug-in GUID].
Like I said, I don’t have Vista so I can’t check but that should get you close.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
My first suggestion is to strictly adhere to the 10% action safety zone and 20% title safe zone. It is there for a purpose and you just experienced it. Any given TV may or may not display the outer 10% of the picture so don’t plan on putting anything important there.
As for the player issue, there is no encoding trick here. This is specific to how people have their DVD players set up. It sounds like your folks have their set up in Pan and Scan mode which crops 16:9 video to 4:3. Perhaps it was their choice because they don’t like black bars… perhaps it was the default for their player. There is nothing anyone who creates DVDs (including Hollywood) can do about that. You can certainly set up their DVD player to display the 16:9 correctly but it is a function of the player, not how you create the DVD.
If they want their player to display 16:9 with black bars you have to change the player settings for them.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Probably the easiest way to do this all within Vegas is use a piece of Solid Color generated media. Create the path using the Mask tool. This gives the most flexibility in revealing the path via keyframes. For a simple path, you can create the entire path using the mask tool and then just apply a Push transition to reveal it over time. This way doesn’t require any keyframes.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
More than likely your computer can’t keep up with storing the video as it’s coming off of the tape in real-time. Keeping your capture drive defragmented helps, having a separate capture drive also helps (i.e., do not capture to the C: drive), turning off all unnecessary programs including some anti-virus helps. You would be surprised how many programs load when you start your computer and can foul up a capture because they feel that chacking for the latest version of their software is clearly more important than anything you were planning to do with your computer. So eliminating all unnecessary programs at startup definitely helps.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
There is a tutorial on Difference Masking on the VASST web site. The problem you will have is that unless your track is motorized and guaranteed to give you the exact same motion frame-by-frame this isn’t going to work for you. You need repeatable frame accurate motion to do this.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
You need to have the correct codecs installed for the files you want to edit. You can check which codec the AVI file is using with a program called GSpot. You can check the mp4 files with the Quicktime Player’s Movie Inspector (Ctrl+I). Note that Vegas does not “officially” support DivX and definitely has problems with Xvid so you may need to convert the files to a more friendly codec with a tool like Super (c) or VirtualDub if the codec they use does not work with Vegas.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com