[Mike Kujbida]

Patrick, I’ve shot school musicals as long as 2.5 hr., burned them to a single layer DVD and found the quality acceptable.
To my benefit, I was shooting with a good 3 chip camera and the stage was well lit.
Starting with good quality footage definitely makes my job much easier 🙂

I ran your time through the bitrate calculator I use and here are the numbers I got.

Max: 8,688,000
Avg: 4,960,000
Min: 2,976,000

This assumes an AC-3 rate of 192.
Render in BEST mode and do it as 2-pass render for maximum quality.

I make a few changes to the default settings for that bitrate calculator and they are as follows.
Click the Settings button (lower left corner), set 1 kilobit=1000 bits, set Audio encoding type and Bitrate to 192 Kb/s – Dolby 1.0 (the AC-3 default in Vegas) and the Safety Margin to 5% (default is 1% and I like to have more margin than that).
Good luck!!

[Mike Kujbida]

You’re welcome Eric. Glad that I could help.

[Mike Kujbida]

Since it came from a DVD, you must have converted it as a DVD file is MPEG-2, not mp4.
To keep it in its original format, rename the original file from VOB to MPG and drag that into Vegas for processing.
If there is more than one VOB file and you want everything on the DVD, here’s a trick I learned some time ago that works great.

Click File / Open, then navigate to your VIDEO_TS sub directory and enter *.IFO in the File name input field.
For a regular DVD you will see a VIDEO_TS.IFO, and a VTS_01_0.IFO. Select the VTS_01_0.IFO file and click on Open.

Keep in mind that MPEG-2 is a lossy format and anything you do to change it is going to result in a loss of quality.
To minimize quality loss, I would render using the DV-AVI template, regular or widescreen. Make sure you use BEST mode for your render.

[Mike Kujbida]

Eric, where did it come from and what size was the original file? i.e. was it HD or SD?

[Mike Kujbida]

Shawn, try Raylight Ultra from dvfilm.com and see if it helps. It’s $150 but there is a free trial. Good luck!!

[Mike Kujbida]

Very strange. The only thing I can suggest is to post your veg file and let us try to see if we can replicate your problem.

[Mike Kujbida]

Sorry but I went right from Pro 10 to Pro 12.
Are you using the latest build? A browse of the release notes shows a few issues with the Pan/Crop tool that were fixed at various times. The most recent one was in build 700/701.

Notable fixes/changes in version 11.0 (Build 700/701)

Fixed a hang that could occur when rendering when a pan/crop rectangle is moved completely off an image.

[Mike Kujbida]

Joao, what version of Vegas are you using? I just tried a 4 channel zoom out using Pan/Crop on stills and everything worked as expected.
edit: this was using Pro 12

[Mike Kujbida]

Options – Preferences – Video
Change Thumbnails to show in video events to All.

[Mike Kujbida]

You’re welcome Pam. Glad I could help.