[Nigel O’neill]

Jim

Don’t know if this is possible in your situation, but a technique I sometimes apply in crowded interview situations where there is background chatter/noise is to add a music track or audio loop and play it at low volume, not enough to drown out the speaker, but enough to mask the chatter, like they do on MTV. The same can be applied to mask humming.

It is possible to use a free tool called Audicity to invert the sound wave, effectively cancelling out the hum, but the side effect of such an action can be tinny sounding audio that remains.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

No. It affects quality.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

Danny have you tried powering up the camera without the battery using the mains adapter?

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

What version of Vegas are you using?

What operating system are you running? Is it 64 bit?

Is you C: drive getting full?

What are your RAM preview settings in Vegas?

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

1.) Is it really any different than shooting on SD? Do I need to frame things differently, watch out for certain pitfalls etc? If you are in the wedding business, you know that you get one shot at most events during a shoot, so I need to know what to look for.

Your framing should not change, although HD/HDV is unforgiving when your focus is off. It stands out like a sore thumb. SD is more forgiving.

Mixing cameras is going to be an issue, so choose carefully. I recently did a wedding shoot with HD (EX1) and HDV (HC3+FX1+Z1P), and cannot match the gamma of the HD camera to the HDV camera’s. If I get the blue looking right, the reds go off. If I got the skin tones right, whites became yellow. It was not a white balance issue, but a gamma issue.

HD and HDV cameras seem to handle shiny skin/silky fabrics visually differently. Whilst I found the violet bridemaids dresses to be silky and shiny in HDV, on the HD camera the dress colours were flat and seemed to be a bit ‘off’, tending to be more burgundy. The videographer colour corrected his footage for me, but side by side there was still an obvious visual difference. As his shots were only cutaways, I did not delve into what was happening. Other than that, I would personally avoid mixing HD and HDV cameras in future.

2.) Again, bear with my ignorance, but my understanding is that most cameras save to an internal hard drive and an SD card. Is any one format better to use with Vegas? I am looking for reliability, quality, and ease of use. Is that asking for too much?

Recording to card is beneficial in that lots of time is saved in not having to transfer footage. I have heard of edits done off the SD card (when in a pinch). Some camera’s have a dual card recording system (record in parallel or series), and some operators invest in a firestore drive in addition to the cards just in case the cards get corrupted/lost/damaged/over written.

3.) Once I have it recorded, what are my options for inputting it into the Vegas system? Does the system have to have an SD card slot? I have seen USB 2.0 mentioned on a few of the Sony cams for input into an NLE. Is that using a USB cable from the cam to the computer? If so, how fast is the transfer? Am I looking at real time in that scenario?

Most cameras would support USB 2.0. You would be looking at about 30 mb/s transfer rates in the real world. If you have a card reader in your PC, it may be possible to transfer files off the card, but that depends on the card/format.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

Don

There was a time when Pioneer was the ‘Bees Knees’ of DVD burners, and the Pioneer 106 was a real work horse, as you have discovered. 1,000 DVD’s is excellent mileage from any burner nowadays. I have 3 burners in 1 machine now, all different brands (LG, Asus and TSSCorp). They each differ in that the LG can burn Blu-ray, the TSSCorp is light scribe capable and the Asus is just a plain old DVD burner, but is capable of 20x burn speeds when the media becomes available. I seldom burn over 12X, and tend to stick to 8X burn speeds for reasons Stephen has already pointed out.

If you are recording in HD or HDV, and editing in HD/HDV, and want best quality possible, Blu-ray is something you could consider. If you have the right home entertainment (blu-ray, flat screen HD TV and digital sound system), be prepared to be amazed!

Burning crisp video is not a function of the burner, but rather the editing process you take to get the video to the stage where it is ready for burning. A high burn speed is not always good as some DVD players will struggle to play such discs.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

As Stephen suggested, there is a firmware update for this particular burner, up to 1.08 I think, but I was not going to suggest it mainly due to the factor of the age of the burner.

You could try different brands of media as suggested, as some burners handle others better. My old Pioneer preferred Sony’s and Verbatim, for instance, but had problems with TDK’s.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

The maximum rated speed for burning DVD’s for your drive is 4x, and 16x for CDR according to the manufacturers website. You could try lowering it to 2x.

Your drive is getting long in the tooth. 7 years is an exceptionally l-o-n-g and good service life! Given the cost of new DVD burners is around 50 bucks, you might want to consider a replacement that will allow you to burn reliably at 4x, 8x, 12x etc.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

Glenn,

Unfortunately Danny is right. I break up my long projects into smaller projects and then import the separately rendered files in DVDA and relink them using playlists. If I have to make changes, I rerender in SVP and then bring the file back into DVDA, thus it then only affects a smaller portion of my overall project.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Nigel O’neill]

Mike

PAL DVDA, rendered to m2t. I changed the quality slider to 31 (default was 15) and project settings to best (default was good).

Original project is 1080/50i. Customer may request bluray output, hence I edited in HDV.

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6