[John Rofrano]

In the good ole days of tape I would have told you to simply capture that section again from your video tape. ???? In the new world of digital, if you are editing original footage without a backup you are playing with fire.

I use Final Cut Pro X but you can do something similar in your Vegas Pro workflow. After a shoot, I immediately copy my camera cards to a Camera Card Archive which FCP X can create with the press of a button (great feature). This goes into the Archive folder of my RAID5 array which is backed up to an external drive. I don’t erase the camera card until this second copy has been made. Then when its time to edit, I have FCP X copy the clips from the Camera Card Archive to my FCP X Library that contains all of my media for the project. There is always 2 copies of my original footage and while I’m editing the project there is actually 3 copies.

Without tape backup, you need to have at least 2 copies somewhere in case one hard drive fails or, as in your case, a file gets deleted or corrupt. Never edit with the original copy of the media. BTW, when you remove a clip and send it to the trash in FCP X it really does go to the macOS trash where it can be recovered. That is the expected behavior and you might consider Vegas Pro’s behavior a bug (although it has always been that way).

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Shunichi Daido] “…you could replace the English/German text with the relevant Japanese text at the time of creation of the final render media (whether DVD/Blu-ray or YouTube) because you already have the relevant CC file with the correct timings.”

Are you talking about the Scenarist Closed Caption (.scc) file that Vegas Pro generates? There is no text in there to replace. It’s an encoded file that looks something like this:
Scenarist_SCC V1.0

01:02:53:14 94ae 94ae 9420 9420 947a 947a 97a2 97a2 a820 68ef f26e 2068 ef6e 6be9 6e67 2029 942c 942c 8080 8080 942f 942f

01:02:55:14 942c 942c

01:03:27:29 94ae 94ae 9420 9420 94f2 94f2 c845 d92c 2054 c845 5245 ae80 942c 942c 8080 8080 942f 942fGood luck trying to convert that from English into Japanese. It simply can’t be done. I’m pretty sure that analog CEA-608 only supports singe byte characters so even after Vegas Pro wraps it in a digital CEA-708 container, it still only supports single byte languages.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Gibrall] “Vegas Pro supports CEA608 captions and CEA708 containers containing CEA608 captions.”

Read this carefully. What its saying is that they don’t support CEA708 captions natively. What they do is wrap CEA608 captions in a CEA708 container. That means no support for Japanese. Vegas Pro only supports the same languages as CEA608 does.

[Michael Gibrall] “When I went to render, I found XDCAM HD but no reference to HD422.”

HD422 is under Sony MXF. This format will embed the captions in the media.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Stefano Neri] “Now I have to pair the selected Jpgs to the corresponding Raw. They’ve the same name (es . IMG4813.cr2 and IMG4813.jpg) and are located in two different folders. Is there a way to automatically match them,so I could easily the files I don’t need?”

Sure. You can do this from a terminal windows with one command:

I assume that your client sent you a folder with just the files that they want. Otherwise, how have they selected them? So you have two different folders. One contains just the files that the customer has selected. The other contains all of the raw files. What this command will do is copy raw files from the second folder with the same name as in the first folder to a third folder. That will leave you with a new folder that has just the raw files that the customer has selected.

Open a terminal window (i.e., Launchpad | Other | Terminal). In the following example below, the raw files with the .cr2 extension are in a folder called “cr2_folder”. You must change this to be the name of your folder that contains the raw files. Then make a new folder to hold just the cr2 files that are in the first. Again, in the below command I called this “new_folder”. Finally change into the first folder and issue this command:

for file in *.jpg; do cp "../raw_folder/${file%.jpg}.cr2" "../new_folder/"; done

This will find all of the files in the current folder with an extension of .jpg and copy files with the same name but with an extension of .cr2 to a third folder.

Note: You must substitute the name “raw_folder” for the real name of the folder that has the raw files. Since you are issuing this command from within the first folder, I use “..” to go up a folder before specifying the second folder. You must also substitute the name “new_folder” for the real name of the folder that you created. Once again, this command is being executed from inside the folder that has the jpeg files. Leave the quotes “” in the command. The quotes are needed in case your folders have spaces in the names.

You are probably going to want to test to make sure that you have the correct paths so you can substitute the ‘cp’ for ‘echo cp’ just to print out the names. For example:

for file in *.jpg; do echo cp "../raw_folder/${file%.jpg}.cr2" "../new_folder/"; done

Will print the command that would have been executed had the ‘echo’ not been there.

Example with Absolute Paths
Let me give you one more example with absolute folder names just to be clear:

• Let’s say the customer files are in: /Volumes/ADATA/ClientA/good/
• Let’s say the raw files are in: /Volumes/RAID5/ClientA/raw/
• Let’s say you created your new folder at: /Volumes/RAID5/ClientA/final/

The command to accomplish this would be:

cd /Volumes/ADATA/ClientA/good/
for file in *.jpg; do cp "/Volumes/RAID5/ClientA/raw/${file%.jpg}.cr2" "/Volumes/RAID5/ClientA/final/"; done

Hopefully that gives you enough information to accomplish this. If not, ask questions.

Good Luck.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Stephen Crye] “John, before you jump in, I hope you have changed your position on high-res, high-fps video on YT since 2015.”

Nope. In fact, more people are watching YouTube on their smart phone than a desktop these days so while I appreciate that content creators with their 4K monitors are very proud of the quality of their YouTube video… no one else notices or cares as they watch on their smart phone or tablet. (sorry)

Another thing providers like AT&T are doing is transcoding video for mobile devices. I recently got a notice that all video will be delivered over cellular at 480p unless I opt-out and I did NOT opt-out because 480p looks fine on my 4.6″ iPhone 6. People who are still using desktops need to realize that the Internet is mostly being consumed on mobile devices which makes everything look fantastic on really small screens. My kids use their MacBooks for writing term papers and that’s about it. Everything else they do, including email, is done on their iPhones. They will never appreciate your high resolution, high bitrate, high frame rate, video.

BTW, I just received an email from my cell phone carrier that I have exceeded my high speed limit for the month (thanks kids) and will be rate limited until the next billing cycle so the last thing that I want to watch is bandwidth hungry 60fps video on my iPhone. This is another consideration. Bandwidth is still quite expensive and I would rather watch a low bandwidth video that streams smoothly than a high bandwidth video that stutters and stops periodically to buffer, which ruins the viewing experience and needlessly consumes my limited bandwidth.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

It really depends on what else you will use the computer for. On my main Mac Pro I have about 58GB of music and 57GB of photos so right there is about 115GB. If I had a 256GB drive I’d be down to 141GB without any apps. If you don’t have a large music or photo library you should be fine with 256GB.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Justin Vingoe] “The film came out of two ideas, one being BIG titles, nearly touching the edge of the screen.”

Well… BIG is “relative” and the “edge of the screen” is the Action Safe area. So making your titles fill the Action Safe area will make them bigger than normal and guaranteed to be completely seen on all TV’s.

[Justin Vingoe] “I’m tempted to go into a TV shop and try the film out on every make of TV. “

You will see a variety of results. Some worse than others. TV manufactures use varying degrees of overscan which is why editors are instructed to stay within the Action Safe areas.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

After reading your post, it sound like you want to be in control of where your data is placed (because you obviously have a Fusion drive and know how well it works) so I would recommend that you get a regular SSD.

I would not unlink the Fusion drive. The SSD isn’t very big in a Fusion drive so you might be disappointed with the size once you unlink them. I believe the 1 TB Fusion drive only has a 24GB SSD and the 2-3 TB Fusions use 128GB SSDs. The true SSDs are 256 GB, 512 GB & 1TB.

I always use external drives for all of my video assets. The argument about external vs internal drives made sense back in the day when external I/O was much slower than the internal Bus. With Thunderbolt 3 that is no longer the case so who cares where the physical storage is? It performs the same inside or out (ok, maybe the internal SSD is faster but you get the idea).

It sounds like you will only be happy with an SSD so that you can control where data is placed so just go for it. Buy a Thunderbolt external drive and place it behind the iMac and pretend that it’s really inside and be happy. 😀

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Williams] “If I want to send a large video file to a friend, I’ll use dropbox. “

That is absolutely the way to go. Never send physical videos in an email… always sent a link to the video on dropbox or somewhere. Actually the best place would be to upload it to YouTube or Vimeo as a private video and give them a link to view it. Their smart phones might not want to play video from dropbox but YouTube is always a safe bet.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I would use 25p. 😉

I just had a friend shoot a 2 hour talking head at 60p and boy did he regret it. The files were huge, playback skipped and he needed to deliver 29.97 and had all sorts of problems down-converting. It would have been much easier had he shot 30p.

So there isn’t one answer. You have to think about what you are shooting. Talking heads only needs 25p. In fact most video only needs 25p. I would only use 50p for motorcar races and other fast moving objects or for slow motion effects.

Then you need to think about how you will deliver these videos. If it’s for TV or DVD you might want to shoot 50i (interlaced). If it’s for web delivery you will want to shoot progressive. 50i will be smoother than 25p even thought they are both 25 frames per second. If you are delivering 25 fps then shoot 25 fps.

If you are looking for an overall go to setting, when in doubt, shoot on the AVCHD 1920×1080 25p 24Mbps setting. Make sure that your pans are very deliberate. You can’t swing a camera around at 25p like you could with 50i.

~jr

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