[John Rofrano]

[Matt Ungermah] “…often receive digital content that is pretty pixelated. Is there any way to enhance the footage?”

Neat Video makes a really nice noise reduction plug-in that works with FCP X. Boris FX also has a Noise Reduction plug-in in their restoration tools in Boris Continuum Complete for FCP X.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Francis] “My cameras shoot in 35Mbps, so I was going with that. Do you think the 50mpbs is worth it?”

Nope. You can’t make something out of nothing. If your sources is 35Mbps then that’s all you need to use.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Russ Sturgeon] “Please address the 708 captions issue. Vegas has a wonderful interface for captioning, but does not create valid 708 data.”

+1

That’s a big one for working in broadcast. In the past, broadcasters have let it slide and fixed it on their end but lately they are rejecting submission that don’t have proper 708 data and this is becoming a problem for Vegas Pro editors.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Francis] “Right now I am using Sony MXF files for 1080p or 720p depending on if I do a lot of zooms/pans in keyframing. “

Sony MXF is fine for this. For greater quality use one of the Sony MXF HD422 1920×1080 50Mbps templates.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Maybe he should try iMovie?

I don’t understand why people who just want to upload videos to YouTube think they need Final Cut Pro 7 or X. iMovie is quite a capable little program for cranking out simple videos for YouTube consumption.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Francis] “any way we can let them know what we would appreciate in future versions of software? Like a specific forum/etc?”

They are currently determining what to do about forums. SCS has given MAGIX a copy of the current Sony forums and user information. I guess it’s up to MAGIX to figure out what to do with that now. There is already a thread on the internal SCS forums about feature request. Feel free to start one here. The MAGIX development team reads these forums on the COW so you have their ear right here.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Jeff Boller] “Any idea on what the Hollywood studios generally do when converting their 24 FPS films onto blu-ray?”

I believe they slow them down to 23.976 but many movies are shot digitally so they start out as 23.976.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Ethan Olson] “I’ve been rendering videos to m2ts using the Sony AVC/MVC template AVCHD 1920×1080-60i. Recently, after changing the Field Order in the project properties to avoid interlacing on my videos, I noticed that everything looked fine until I started rendering and I would see interlacing in the video preview during rendering.”

I’m really confused by your statements. AVCHD 1920×1080-60i is interlaced. Why wouldn’t you set your project to handle interlaced video? It sounds like your settings might be causing this problem.

Can you post a screen shot of your Project Properties window and your Render Properties window so that we can see what settings you are using.

Also what is your source? You said you were rendering to AVCHD 1920×1080-60i but what are you starting with?

BTW, if you want to avoid interlacing your videos, stop rendering to an interlaced format like AVCHD. What is it you are trying to accomplish?

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

That will definitely fix the dropped frame problem. Hopefully next time you’ll know to use 23.976 from the start. 24.0 fps is only for video captured from physical film or video being printed back out to film. All other references to 24p are really the video standard 23.976.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Connor] “I wonder if the new owners are considering a Mac version”

That would be interesting indeed.

Here is the problem: Two years ago Sony Creative Software started down a new path with the Catalyst Suite lineup. There is Catalyst Browse, Catalyst Prepare, and Catalyst Edit. All of them run on both Mac and PC. So we all thought that this would be the Mac re-write of Vegas Pro because Vegas Pro hasn’t been updated in two years while this was going on. But SCS continues to deny this and holds fast to the statement that Catalyst is not a replacement for Vegas Pro. Now they have sold Vegas Pro but kept Catalyst Suite. Also Catalyst Suite just adopted a subscription model quite like Adobe. They chose the ransomware model. You stop paying… the software stops working. The Vegas Pro community would have none of that because that model doesn’t work for hobbyists which make up a fair share the community. There are also a lot of editors using outdated versions who don’t feel that there are any new features that they need and won’t pay for upgrades. This is a big problem when software matures.

As it stands now, Vegas Pro is a poster child for Microsoft technology. They are deeply intrenched in Video for Windows (VFW), DirectShow, .Net Framework, C#, MS-SQL Express for media management. I mean you name a proprietary Microsoft technology and they have built on top of it. That doesn’t speak well for a port to Mac. Had they chose more “open” technologies it might have been feasible. One good thing they did recently was move away from Direct X onto OpenFX and OpenCL. But a Mac version would need to be a complete re-write using more open technology. It will be interesting to see what MAGIX does with this codebase. Who knows, maybe they will re-write it for both Mac and PC.

~jr

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