[Josh Meredith]

I also tell clients about the problems they may experience with burned DVD’s. I’ve had various problems with every brand of blank DVD they sell in places like Staples and Best Buy.

However, all of that changed when I tried Taiyo Yuden blanks. I think I heard about them on this board, and they’ve been very reliable, both in my junky (and old) DVD player, and in my clients’ machines. I went through a stack of 100 with no bad experiences on my equipment, and no complaints from clients.

[Josh Meredith]

Gary, should I notice no difference between editing SD AVI files and HDV M2t files with Vegas 7d?

Neither computer is top of the line, and I’m sure both could use upgrading. The laptop is a 1.8 AMD with 768MB of RAM and 128MB video card, and the desktop is a P4 2.8HT with 1 gig of RAM and a 128 MB video card. Should either of these be able to handle HDV without being slow? Both handle SD projects, even long ones, without any issues whatsoever. On the other hand, both are somewhat jerky when dealing with HDV files on the timeline. Hence my interest in intermediates (at least until I can buy more RAM).

Thanks again.

[Josh Meredith]

I put your second screen cap into Vegas, using 16:9 project settings, then went into pan/crop, selected the 16:9 preset, turned off “Maintain aspect ratio”, and manually zoomed in until the white background of your image filled my entire preview window. Doing this would surely result in lost resolution, and loss of the extreme left & right of the frame, at the least. Not an ideal solution, but it might work alright.

[Josh Meredith]

I’m using Cool Edit Pro 2.0, so I’m not sure what the exact difference between “Hiss Removal” & “Noise Reduction” is on your version. In fact, I’ve never really used Hiss Reduction, since Noise Reduction almost always works for me.

It looks like the difference is that Hiss Reduction is more automatic, and Noise Reduction requires you to show it what you consider to be noise, then you tell it what percentage of the noise you want to remain. If you tell it to eliminate 100% of the noise, you will certainly notice the audio artifacts of the noise reduction. I usually start with a setting of 70%, which tends to remove enough noise to get the job done, without making too many of the swirly “bad mp3” noises that 100% can result in.

Here’s my workflow:

-Highlight a brief moment of noise in the audio track (less than 1 second, containing NOTHING but the noise)

-Go to “Noise Reduction”, select “Get noise from selection” or something like that, and it will quickly analyze the noise you’ve selected

-Exit Noise Reduction

-Select the entire audio track

-Hit F2 (or navigate your way back to the Noise Reduction screen)

-Select 70%, and hit “OK”, then wait for it to finish, and see how it worked

Sorry if this is the same workflow you’ve already tried. If it isn’t, give it a try!

-Josh

[Josh Meredith]

You say you’ve tried “hiss removal” with Cool Edit, but does your version of CE have “Noise Reduction”, in which you highlight a sample of the noise by itself, and then eliminate that noise from the rest of the file? I’ve done that in Cool Edit Pro many times, with very good results.

[Josh Meredith]

Alright, I’m ordering a stack of printable Taiyo-Yuden premium line 8X DVD-R’s as we speak.

Thanks for the tips!

[Josh Meredith]

I haven’t tried (or heard of) Tayo Yuden blanks, but I’ll search some out and give them a try.

For what it’s worth, the best I’ve used so far (still problematic, but less so) have been Memorex ink-jet printable DVD-R’s. These have proven to be far superior to HP and Maxell DVD-R’s I’ve used, but in the last couple weeks I’ve had two clients who couldn’t even play the Memorex DVD-R’s.

[Josh Meredith]

I have done this with good results using the color corrector plug-in. Apply the color correction to the track you want to change, but have the timeline cursor over the track you want to match so that it displays in the preview window. Then use the eyedropper tools in the color correction plug-in for lows, mids, and highs to sample the corresponding tones on the good looking scene. I can’t really give you more details than that, because I just messed around with it to figure this out. I didn’t really know what I was doing. But it worked for me. I was able to match two scenes shot in the same place at the same angle, but at different times of day (differing amount of sunlight coming through the windows).

[Josh Meredith]

I seem to have had good luck by reducing the size and/or resolution of problematic photos & graphics. I recently did a TV commercial in which the client supplied huge, print ready logos. Some of them looked horrible on screen, until I made them smaller in Photoshop. It seems counter intuitive to reduce the quality of an image in order to fix your problem, but it’s worked for me.

I’ve also used very slight blur to reduce flicker.

[Josh Meredith]

I only have a VX2100, but I recently shot two scenes in the same location, and sloppiness with lighting resulted in vastly different coloring between the two scenes. I was able to use the Sony Color Correction plug-in to fix the scene that didn’t look right. All I did was place the cursor on the good looking scene so that it would show in the preview screen, apply color correction to the bad looking scene, and used the eye-droppers to sample “mids”, “lows” and “highs”, on the decent looking scene. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but I was very pleased with how effectively it made the two scenes match.