[Peter Wright]

To add to Gary’s wise words, as a former Premiere user …

Firstly, I don’t think it’s worthwhile simply comparing WHAT each program can do, because whilst there may be a desired feature one has over another, a far more important issue is HOW each program allows users to use its various functions.

In my opinion, the ease and fluidity of Vegas is simply fantastic. As an example, you can drag the mouse to set up a playback loop on the timeline, and Vegas will continuously play back this loop uninterrupted whilst you apply almost any changes or effects, video or audio, track motion, pan/crop, colour correction, add new track and superimpose title, etc, etc, and you can see or hear the results of everything you do the moment you change any settings.

In many other respects, the design of the Vegas workspace puts so many tools just there where you need them, rather than hiding them through a series of menus.

There are many other great things, including:

Takes (a wonderful feature for both video and audio),
Velocity Envelopes
Dragging Tracks up/down to change precedence and Unlimited Resizing of tracks
Supersampling
3D Track Motion
multiple instances
and … Scripting (another incredibly powerful feature)

.. and lastly but not leastly, the various Vegas Forums – Vegas has an extremely responsive and helpful fraternity/sorority of users on this and several other forums.

Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au

[Peter Wright]

Yes Pan/Crop will do the job best.

You can simply crop down to the centre of the 16:9 frame, but there may be times when you want a different part of the frame, so you can keyframe to select the best output composition.

[Peter Wright]

That would be much easier Ted, in fact if you mean a video DVD you may not even need to convert it, since most PAL DVD players will play NTSC.

If you mean sending data on a DVD, i.e. a PAL DV avi, then this is possible, but you’ll only get around 20 mins per disc.

[Peter Wright]

First. set you project properties to include the fps you require.

Now, the still sequence needs to be numbered appropriately, e.g. Cars 001, Cars 002, etc.

Now File > Import Media > Check Open Still Image sequence
.

[Peter Wright]

Sounds like you rendered as DV avi, which is the right format for going back out to tape, but not for internet use.

To make a smaller file, Render As has a drop down choice of about a dozen formats – try WMV, which itself has a drop down list of Templates – maybe start with 250 kbps and see how the file size/quality turns out.

To zoom in and around an event, click on the Pan/Crop icon – white square on the timeline event – and watch the preview as you play with the rectangle. (Making the rectangle smaller zooms IN, then drag to selected part of the frame. These zooms and pans can be keyframed so you can move around the viseo or still pic.

[Peter Wright]

Mmmm – hard to track these down sometimes. May be related to LP footage …

Since you say it looks ok connected to the other camera, have you tried capturing it via that camera ? (disable device control first). You could try firewire to the other camera, or analog to other cam if the first way doesn’t work.

Good luck …

[Peter Wright]

… just in case it makes a difference, try capturing without preview on screen – “smart preview” will do this. If resources are stretched for whatever reason, removing preview may release enough to get a good capture. (Use cam for preview.)

[Peter Wright]

In that case Carlo, you could try checking the firewire cable and/or connections at either end. If you can see dropouts on preview it sounds like something between the cam & PC.

[Peter Wright]

First suspect would be the hard drive being used for capture – does it need fragmenting?

[Peter Wright]

Make sure you are completing the “Prepare” process fully.

This renders all your menu authoring decisions into files, ready for burning (Prepare), or can also do the burning, if requested (Prepare and Burn).