[Lewis Costin]

Glad that worked out for you : )

[Lewis Costin]

Hi Ciarán,

Unfortunately there is no easy fix – well, technically there is no “fix”. The bottom line is if you’re wanting something to look professional, shooting everything in the same (or compatible) frame rate at the beginning is one of the first things you should take care of.

There are a few ways of “fixing” your problem, depending on what you’re willing to change. You could conform the 29.97 footage to simply play back at the slower 25fps, giving you longer clips and audio that would also need to be slowed down or run out of sync. If you don’t need the audio from the camera or any kind of sync audio, I would recommend this method as it is the only way to avoid any artifacts that you may not be happy with.

You’ll probably have to conform your footage with an external tool because as far as I know Vegas annoyingly doesn’t have an “interpret footage” setting.

The other 2 ways are bleeding the frames (what Vegas is doing) or dropping the frames (which leads to jerkiness and I think can be done in the clip properties in Vegas – “disable resample?”).

There is some other method of doing the conversion that I have heard of but never tried. It involves converting from 29.97 to 23.976 first, then going to 25. Sounds complicated to me and I probably wouldn’t bother, but I have heard it nets decent results.

[Lewis Costin]

My first guess is that the mp4 export is clipping the color range to 16-235, whereas your original clip would be RGB 0-255.

I had a problem like this recently where my video was getting clipped and all the whites looked blown out. The only solution I was recommended to use was to put a Levels effect on the output before a render and bring the colour range to within 16-235 YUV.

I’m not sure if there is a way to get an illegal H264 video out of Vegas.

[Lewis Costin]

Hi Walter,

What I’m creating is not a reference movie but a QT wrapped TIFF .mov. You can make one of these in AE by selecting format: QuickTime, codec: TIFF.

In the codec settings I have it set at default – which is compression: packed bits (which I’m guessing is one of TIFF’s lossless compression methods).

The quality bar (which I have no idea if it makes a difference or not) is set at 100.

I assume it’s the same as exporting a TIFF sequence, but rather than having each frame as an individual file, they’re all packed into a QT file and can be played back (but obviously rather laggy) by a video player. I also find them easier to manage because I don’t have to import them anywhere “as an image sequence”. I just want to know if it’s the same deal or not.

[Lewis Costin]

I sometimes use the lower of the two, but not always. Using the lowest common demominator for consistancy. Basically so that your final project doesnt include some footage that has been upscaled, and instead all the footage matches.

[Lewis Costin]

Thanks guys. It was a very old USB recorder so that would make sense. I should be able to cut it up into sections and do my best to sync up each one.

[Lewis Costin]

Thanks for all of the advice so far. I’ve done a bit of testing with AME and I’ve come to learn that you are spot on Eric, encoders are incredibly inaccurate. I’ve done some test exports, as I said, and I’m a bit confused at this stage. Maybe someone can help me clear up what this all means:

As you can see, for this test the bitrate was set at 8.

And here, I set it at 1.5.

The audio tracks on both files were AC3.

I’m curious as to why the overall bitrate (and filesize) for the 1.5 version is higher than the clip at 8? Also, the overall bitrate stays more or less the same regardless of my settings.

EDIT: I think it has something to do with the way AME is muxing the files. In CBR mode it adds packets to maintain a constant bitrate. Is it an issue if the displayed overall bitrate is over the 10.08Mbs ceiling?

[Lewis Costin]

Thanks John. I find the subject of broadcast colour quite confusing. Out of curiousity, does broadcast safe only apply to broadcasting? Will simply viewing on a DVD or online (Youtube/Vimeo, etc) have any relevance on colours if there are illegal values in the picture (i.e. 0-255)?

[Lewis Costin]

Thanks for the info. But I can’t seem to figure out how to use the Smoother tool. Everything is greyed out in the window. Here’s what I get:

[Lewis Costin]

I’d love to recommend for you to switch back to pc as you’ll be able to get so much more bang for your buck, but if you’re not already proficient with OS maintenance and computer hardware, well, that’s what Mac’s are for, really.

That’s pretty much what it comes down to these days. If you know what you’re doing outside of your editing program, without a doubt, get a PC. Preferably build it yourself or at least choose the hardware yourself. If you have no idea about that stuff and aren’t interested in learning, stick with Apple. It will save you some hassles.