Matt Crowley
Forum Replies Created
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AVI and MOV are “container” formats – they are not a specific codec, but a way of packaging the data from various codecs (video compression schemes) into a file. An AVI file might contain MPEG4 video, and would be equivalent to a MOV file that contains MPEG4 video. AVI files can just as easily contain uncompressed video or DV format video.
It is likely that your MOV files contain MPEG4 format video, and this is difficult to edit with because it is complex to decode – you PC spends a lot of effort doing the decoding, and then struggles with the effects and transitions during playback.
When you render a Vegas project, the output video file should always play smoothly. You will not see the hiccups that you get when previewing your project in Vegas.
You can make things easier for your PC during editing by converting the MOV videos to a format that is easier to decode/edit, such as Cineform (an additional purchase) or HDV (MPEG2) or similar. MPEG4, AVC, WMV, DIVX and the like are generally harder to work with.
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The RAM shouldn’t continuously fill up with preview data unless you have set the Dynamic RAM Preview Size to something very high. Reduce the setting to something sensible (depends on your system RAM, OS etc) and you should find that Vegas doesn’t hog RAM for the preview.
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If you just drop the 4:3 file into a 16:9 project, it will be pillarboxed (black bars at sides).
You can easily crop the top and bottom off the 4:3 video using pan/crop – right-click the 4:3 event(s) and click pan/crop, then right-click on the video frame in the pan/crop window and select “Match output aspect”. That’ll exactly crop to match the project format.
Cropping like this may cut off useful parts of the video though. You can adjust the position of the crop up or down to optimize the cropping, and even add keyframes to adjust the crop position over time.
If you can’t afford to lose any of the original frame, then you’ll have to live with some sort of pillarboxing – maybe you can disguise it with some overlay graphics to fill in the edges.
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This happens in Movie Studio 10 too, and I also find it annoying. There doesn’t seem to be any way to prevent this.
You just have to delete the “template” tracks if you don’t want them as the basis of your project. Just click on the first track header, shift-click the last track header, then hit delete.
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Vegas will resample the frame rate to match the project settings, so the video from the DSLR will play back at normal speed, but reduced to 24fps – effectively Vegas is dropping some frames to match the project frame rate. This way, you can drop any video onto the timeline and it will play back at the normal (ie real time) speed.
If you want the input video to be played back proportionally slower (ie 24/60 of the “real-time” rate), you do need to adjust the video event’s playback rate. If you can get the correct rate, then each input frame maps to one output frame with none of the normal clever resampling.
It might also be possible to alter the frame rate value for the original files so that they will be treated as 24fps and will always play back in slow motion. I don’t know of any utilities that do this, though.
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You may have been hit with a glitch where it’s possible to move the track motion window (and other dockable windows) underneath the Windows taskbar… and then you can’t reach it to get it back.
The solution is to set the taskbar to autohide, so that it collapses to a thin bar at the bottom of your screen. Then you should be able to see the top edge of the track motion window and drag it back up where it belongs.
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I have Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0, and it has Mainconcept MPEG2 presets for NTSC DVD Widescreen 24p (with appropriate pulldown etc).
Being in a PAL country I’ve never tried 24p DVD. It could also be that DVDA doesn’t correctly interpret the 24p files – unlikely though since it’s a companion product to Movie Studio…
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The Sony AVC codec doesn’t let you render 1080p in an AVCHD format (M2TS), but you can use Sony AVC to render 1080p AVC in an MP4 container. This is what the Internet 1080p presets use.
As I understand it, AVCHD does not officially support 1080p although some cameras can produce 1080p.
In any case, setting the Deinterlace Method to Blend has no effect if the output format is interlaced (as in the case of AVCHD 1920×1080). Vegas uses the deinterlace setting only if rendering to progressive.
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Even though cellphones have long gone digital, it isn’t quite a case of “all or nothing” as far as voice call quality goes. The call quality does degrade as signal strength falls. Fewer bits of data get through intact as the signal gets weaker, but the codecs are designed to allow for a certain amount of audio degradation depending on the error rate.
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To get the poor audio quality, you can apply a mild distortion effect to get some crackle and snip a few bits to cause dropouts (or use envelopes). Then render the audio event as a WAV file and customise the codec settings to very low bitrate MP3 (8kbps 8kHz) or, if you have the codec, GSM 6. Then replace the original audio with the mangled WAV file. This will give you an approximation to the fuzzy warbly sound associated with poor phone connections.