[Michael Leibson]

Sorry for the delay in replying, Paul!

>I don’t fully understand what your doing with the 4 video tracks and the masks

I’m creating a video to accompany a music composition (jazz/contemporary classical) online. The visual material for the video consists of abstract still images taken by a talented photographer, which I have manipulated in various ways to create composite animations of colour, form and texture — the idea is for the visuals to poetically convey the emotional trajectory of the music. The 4 video tracks each contain one small, textured, coloured, and ‘rippling’ rectangle, that moves in a very small, non-symmetrical path. Together, the 4 tracks create a ‘cluster’ of such rectangles. Importing the .veg (or MXF) of these allows me to then animate those 4 moving masks as a whole, so that they follow a path (in implied 3D space) across the screen. Importing multiple instances of that .veg will allow me to multiply and vary the positions of those masks, and save me a huge amount of time (because doing this without these imported .veg files would mean creating detailed movement of many more rectangles, across a larger space).

>I don’t really know for sure what Vegas does when you drop a saved .veg onto a new timeline, but my guess is that it is rendering it to a temp file somewhere. How else could it work?

Whatever Vegas is doing, it seems to be working: altho’ it takes forever, I have been able to render the new timeline (that includes the imported .veg file) without problem.

>MXF is not truely lossless. But I doubt you’ll see the difference as long as your MXF matches the original resolution. Just use the standard MXF template for your projects resolution. If every ounce of quality counts, then render to an uncompressed codec — but that creates huge files, takes a long time and may not be necessary in your case. . . What is your final output? Blu-Ray?

Sadly, I am pretty clued out about these things (I’m a music composer, and only a beginner at video)! A more experienced friend has advised that the final output be Blu-Ray, and I am also rendering sections to that format, as well, so that I can get an accurate idea of how things are appearing. Re. your advice the MXF and an uncompressed codec, I think I should run your comments by that same friend rather than waste your time by asking you to further explain these things to someone of my unskilled level!

Thanks so much for your help, Paul — I really appreciate it!

[Michael Leibson]

Thanks, Paul!

As you can probably tell, I’m a beginner at video editing, so please forgive my ignorance with these new questions . . .

1) I’ve been advised to render this project as a high resolution .m2t file, which itself takes a long time to create. Were I to save the .veg as an mxf file, would it later be renderable in .m2t format? Would it somehow lose any resolution quality?

2) I think I understand that this ‘importing .veg into a new .veg file’ technique works, in this case, because it preserves the original four tracks as positive masks, which then allows the underlying background image to appear wherever those masks do not appear. But would this still be the case were I to instead save the original file as an .mxf, and then import it to the new .veg — or would the imported .mxf be totally opaque?

Thanks, again, for your great help!

[Michael Leibson]

Oops, I wrote too soon! The technique does work, after all: my computer just needed a lot of time to process things to the point that the individual movements showed up in the video preview!

Thanks again, Paul! This will really help!

[Michael Leibson]

Hmmm. . . . The masks of the four tracks do show up as the one .veg file, after I save and import that .veg file, but their individual movements seem lost in the process — the masks do not exhibit any movement at all when imported.

Since I am able to then create a left-to-right pan on that imported .veg file, the problem would be solved if I could figure out why the original pan movements, of each mask, aren’t coming through.

Am I seeking the impossible, or somehow short-circuiting the operation?

Thanks again, for any insights!

[Michael Leibson]

Thank-you, Paul! I’ll give it a try!

[Michael Leibson]

Oops . . . Just figured it out: for BCC Pan and Zoom’s cropping feature to work, BCC’s Pan and Zoom must have 3D enabled!

(Sorry to trouble you! I was unable to figure out how to delete my post.)

[Michael Leibson]

[John Rofrano] “Yes, at some point. If you zoom in past the resolution of the original media then the picture will start to degrade but zooming a 1920×1080 picture in 100% (by 2x) will only require 3840×2160 of resolution which is still below the 4000×3000 of your image so there will be no loss in quality unless you zoom in above that resolution.”

Thank-you, John! Now I get it!

I’m actually zooming in way more than that (trying to do some animation of still images). I guess there’s no way around such a physical reality.

Thanks, again, for your help!

[Michael Leibson]

Thank-you, Peter!

[Michael Leibson]

Thank-you, John!

A closely related question (please forgive my beginner’s ignorance of these things!):

So, let’s say that I want to zoom in, and that I’ll use Pan & Crop. My source image’s aspect resolution is 4,000 x 3,000, and my project’s is 1980 x 1020, and – when I choose 16:9 as a “preset” for that image (in the Event Pan & Crop window) – the image is correspondingly cropped. If I understand you correctly, tho’, the cropped image still retains its original resolution, even tho’ its aspect ratio has been ‘forced’ by that crop.

However, if I zoom in a great deal, won’t I automatically obtain a less ‘crisp’ image, because – by zooming in – there will necessarily be fewer pixels per unit of area than without the zoom? (This seems to be what occurs.) If this is indeed the case, is there anything I can do to mitigate this?

Many thanks for your help!