[Kell Hymer]

Awesome info Nigel. Thank you! I am googling some of these shots now to learn about them. Unfortunately I am going to have to stick with the GoPro audio as I have no audio gear yet. I may buy a mic after the trip and do a number of test videos to learn to be proficient using the GoPro and mic quickly and effectively.

[Kell Hymer]

Thanks for the replies. It looks like there is no solid answer yet. Maybe Sony and Nvidia or AMD will get together and make a card suited for Vegas someday.

[Kell Hymer]

Thanks Steve. I am beginning to feel the same way after reading everything. There are a number of great posts and benchmarks but it seems to me that they is no distinct card that performs “best” in Vegas.

[Kell Hymer]

Thanks for the info. I actually have the Quadro 4000 and my GTX460 seems to out perform it but it looks like much of it depends onthe codec I use according to the reading I have done here. I don’t use Main Concept too much so I might try to see if my GTX660ti will work out.

[Kell Hymer]

Thanks! I am looking the book up now.

Update: just bought the book and it seems like a great practical guide. So far it has quantified the things that keeps a video interesting that would otherwise be hard to pick up on just by watching films/TV.

[Kell Hymer]

Thanks for the reply. Ok, so I will be filming various things such as scenery, inside and outside of the ancient Cambodian Angkor temples, the street markets and sights in Ho Chi Minh City (day and night), and from a boat in Ha Long bay. I will also snorkel in Ha Long and will get some underwater footage. I just don’t want everything to be POV and typical vacation footage where I follow everyone around and give a monologue about where we are and what we are doing. I want the filming to tell the story so to speak. For example, I have seen where someone places a camera at ground level and films just people feet as they walk by or simply filming the street signs or street lights changing. These otherwise boring shots break up the footage and make it more interesting when added to the film to break up scenes. These are the kind of tips and tricks I am looking for or anything else that would add variance to the video to keep it interesting.

[Kell Hymer]

Are you viewing the GoPro footage as is/without any Fx added? If so, it sounds like a possible hardware issue. If you are adding Fx or any other adjustments, try lowering the preview quality or pre-render to RAM first. On another note, I have noticed that high fps is taxing and many players have a hard time with it. For example, Quicktime has a very hard time playing 720p @ 120fps, but Windows Media Player handles it just fine.

[Kell Hymer]

Any thoughts?

[Kell Hymer]

Thanks a ton. By way of an update, I burned my project to Blu-Ray using 60i AVC. The animations look MUCH smoother. I notice the picture is subtly not as sharp or clear as the progressive (24p), but it certainly flows nicer.

I initially took the 30fps progressive animations and rendered to 24p which was omitting 6 frames a second which was the cause of the judder or skipping effect. If, for example, the source animations were in 24p and I rendered to 24p, this effect would be significantly reduced. However, reading online it appears that 24p is known for not being as smooth as interlaced and it presents certain leaning artifacts. Interlaced has it’s limitations as well. With the 30fps progressive source material I would really like to get the smoothest picture possible with the sharpness and clarity of progressive images. However, to do this, I would have to render to 30p which is not supported by Blu-Ray. Why in the world is 30fps, progressive not supported on Blue-ray? I don’t see it boosting the data rate to unmanageable levels so what’s the deal?

I will Google this topic some more, but it would certainly be nice for more options on Blu-Ray.

[Kell Hymer]

Thank you! My final video project contains a number of these animations. Each animation was rendered as a separate Vegas project and then placed into the final video. To maintain quality, I am re-building each of the animations in 60i.

This has been an enlightening experience for me as I only edit home videos for fun and decided to take my videos to the next level. As I have no formal training, I previously never paid any attention nor knew anything about frame rates. The source animations are 29.97p. To match my final project, I changed the animations to 60i. I thought I was losing my mind or something was wrong with Vegas or Digital Juice. After I made the change to 60i I noticed occasional flashes/glitches. For example, some of the text flashed. I slowed it down and viewed it frame by frame and the text was actually flipping horizontally for a single frame!

I opened the track motion (keyframe) editor and after nearly 2 hours of staring at it, figured out this was only happening when an animation was rotating over the 360 or 180 degree point on any axis. My mind was blown until I correlated that the interlacing caused this effect when I changed the video from progressive to 60i. I know that interlacing shows only half of the data onto each frame. Apparently one frame had rotated beyond 360 degrees while the next one still had not caught up, which caused the issue. To fix it, I had to go to the frame where the error was present and then edit the axis rotation point on the subsequent frame to reflect the same degree on the axis as the prior frame. This completely fixed the issue and the video looks great now.

Wow…what a learning process and a ton of work for my wedding video that I have been working on for say…eh…5 years! however, I completely enjoy this. The forums here have been a great help. Thanks!