[Pete Locascio]

I never considered the difference in the height of two formats. Your response makes perfect sense. I was able to compensate for the difference using the event pan and crop tool. Are there any other ways to fix the problem? Thanks!

[Pete Locascio]

I have Device Aspect Ratio enabled. I haven’t encountered the same problem with regular NTSC projects. This is the first time I’ve tried to convert an NTSC video to PAL, so I’m probably doing something else wrong. Thanks for your response!

[Pete Locascio]

I just did a wedding video using 2 cameras similar to yours. One camera was unmanned and I used a Sony ECM-HW1 wireless microphone on the person performing the ceremony. The audio was very clear with no echo. I used a Sony ECM-HST1 mini shot gun mic on the camera I was shooting with. I narrowed the setting to 90 degrees and the sound was good but not as good as the wireless. I noticed on one of my audio tracks that there was an echo. I opened the audio FX on that track and noticed that the reverb box was checked although I never even used it before. After unchecking the box the reverb was no longer there. I’m not one of the experts who normally answer these posts, but your problem seemed rather familiar. Hope this helps you.

[Pete Locascio]

Thanks for your suggestions. I had the Task Manager diplayed while trying to render the project again in BLU-RAY and noticed that the memory being used was about 2 gigs which left a good amount to go before maxing it out. I did notice,however,that the CPU usage was pegged at 100% when the rendering process stopped working and the program froze, even though I have a powerful quad core processor. I’m going to resize the pics and see what happens.
Also,I’m a little confused about the project poperty settings I should be using. I’ve been using NTSC widescreen and the size defaults to 720w x 480h. Should I be using another setting such as one of the many 1080 settings that are available in the drop down list?
Additionally, when I put the MPEG2 rendered version of the project in my BLU-RAY player it shows a 1080i format when I toggle the display button. The picture is very clear and defined and looks like high definition even though it was not rendered that way. I use a Sony HDR-SR7 camera which records in 1080i.
Am I doing something wrong? Thanks

[Pete Locascio]

Actually the pictures are 4 different sizes. 3072×2304, 2272×1704,
1439×1920,and 960×1280. I tried deleting all the pics and getting rid of the picture motion track and the project rendered up to 52% in BLU-RAY before locking up. So is there something else in addition to the pics that could be causing trouble? My Vista based machine has a huge hard
drive,4 gigs of RAM, and a powerful processor. I also rendered looped sections of the project with some success. The main thing I noticed is that there seems to be a lack of consistency as to when the program fails to complete the rendering process. I downloaded Pro 8c, but had the problem with 8b also. Any additional help owuld be appreciated. Thanks!

[Pete Locascio]

Jeremy,
Here’s some additional info on my Blu-Ray rendering problem.
The video files are AVCHD taken directly from the Sony picture motion browser. There are also some stills taken from a CD rom. The beginning of the timeline has some animations from Digital Hotcakes. I’m not using any FX, but I used track motion on a separate video track to resize and superimpose the stills. The rendering process got to 6% and then froze. The project settings were NTSC widescreen and 8 bit pixel format. I tried using HDV 60i but got the same results.
When I tried to burn a BLU-Ray disc, I used the following settings from the screen. I chose the render and burn option, video format- Sony AVC, Video template- BLU-RAY 1440x1080i 15mbps video stream, audio format- dolby digital AC3 Pro, and the default audio template which is the same as the Vegas instruction manual suggests. The rendering process gets past the animations in the beginning as well as the first superimposed still before it locks up. I did burn a short BLU-RAY video successfully prior to this project. I’m using a new Sony BWU 200s burner. The vegas manual suggests trying a slower burn rate if you have problems but 2x is the only option, the 1x option seems disabled just prior to initiating the rendering process. I would imagine if the settings were wrong it wouldn’t even begin the rendering process, but at this point I’m just stumped. I had no problem rendering and burning an MPEG 2 version of the same project. Hope this info helps. Thanks!

[Pete Locascio]

Platinum settings are: Template NTSC DV Widescreen 29.970 fps, best rendering quality,Field order lower first, output is NTSC DV widescreen.
Pro settings are: NTSC Widescreen, best rendering quality,
Lower field first, Output is DVD NTSC.
I’m not sure of the MPEG file settings. I just use whatever it defaults to. I’m not very knowledgeable in this area. What should they be, and where do I go to change them if necessary? After doing some more reading I suppose I should be outputting Pro in the DVD Architect NTSC video stream format. Is that true?
If so, how do I render the audio separately since I’ve never had to do that before.
I’m not using any custom settings. I’m using the XV color option on my camera, so should I be using 32 bit processing? Also should I be checking the stretch to fill frame box before rendering when using Pro? I don’t do that with Platinum and I get a nice 16:9 image with no letterboxing.
Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!