[Peyton Todd]

Now I have the opposite problem with a different video: it’s ‘letter-boxed’ with the black slivers on either side. (I think there’s a different term from this, since it doesn’t resemble looking through a mail slot, but I’ve forgotten what it is.)

Anyway, the source is 720 x 480 (4:3) 29.97 fps, DV (Sony) (NTSC) (DVCPRO) as before. I’ve been trying different pixel sizes and custom frame sizes as before, and they all have their effects (usually unexpected ones) on the black borders, but all I know at this point is just trial-and-error, which could go on forever.

Oddly, my first attempt was simply to increase the width, which I did from 480 to 490. This fixed the problem on the sides, but now it truly was letterboxed again (with the black borders only at the top)!

[Peyton Todd]

Unfortunately the source, project, and render frame rates are all already set at 29.97. And Disable Resample is already chosen.

I also tried ‘Best’ quality, in addition to ‘Preview’ and ‘Draft’ but they didn’t help either.

I thought DeInterlace method might make a difference so I tried the choices there, since the existing choice said ‘Blend’ and you mentioned blending. But the others didn’t help. ‘None’ made matters a lot worse since frames seemed to drop out – anyway a jerky result.

[Peyton Todd]

Thanks – that worked beautifully! But now there’s a different problem: a ‘ghost’ image of the main protagonist’s body. This is a weaker image appearing next to it, showing the outline of its edge that looks to be about 3 inches from the real body outline – or of course what would be 3 inches if the body were full size on the screen. It doesn’t appear in the original AVI file, although one can see a hint of it, barely noticeable, maybe a half inch from the edge of the body. I thought one of my earlier versions had appeared without that ‘ghost’, but perhaps I was mistaken – in any case I don’t remember the parameters used there.

What I was using till now was 15 fps (for no particular reason). I changed that to 29.97, which seemed to have no effect either way. Also my choice of Sorenson Video 3 was random, made out of ignorance. There are lots of other options available, none of which I understand…

[Peyton Todd]

Yep. That solution will work beautifully for the purposes I had in mind. So thanks again. But now that I know Vegas can do closed captioning I may want to do that at some future date. So far, though, what exploration I’ve done based on the Vegas Help info was not successful. No .scc file was ever built, and no captions showed up in the wmv file I made (I did have WMCaption selected).

Maybe the overlay method would work better anyway, though.

Peyton

[Peyton Todd]

Wow, thanks, it looks like that’s going to solve my problem: closed captioning on one track (blue markers), and regular labeled (orange) markers on the other. I’ll test it more carefully when I have time tonight and let you know. This capability was complete news to me since I don’t have a Vegas manual, and my only Vegas book – on Vegas 8, by Douglas Spotted Eagle – does not mention it, or at least I couldn’t find it there.

Regarding your question as to why I would translate the signing, the whole idea is that this is for people who are NOT fluent in signing, such as linguists who are analyzing its grammar, of which I am one.

Peyton

P.S. Although closed captioning (which I had no idea existed) may be a great boon when it comes to presenting the material, at this point I’ll be using it only for my own private analysis, to keep track of where I need to ask the conversation participants to translate for me the signs I don’t understand, and to help me understand the interpreter’s choices on the other tape (the audio portion is not crystal clear, and is always one to a few seconds earlier than the signing for obvious reasons).

[Peyton Todd]

Hi – This is just a quick note of thanks to both of you. Without your help, I might have made some serious mistakes.

Peyton

[Peyton Todd]

Many thanks, guys. The really important piece of information up front is the decision to go with 30p, since that determines which camcorder to buy, which now seems definitely to be the Canon Vixia HV30. Thanks, too, for alerting me to the shutter speed and focus issues, which I would otherwise have been ignorant of. Fortunately the shutter speed question is one I should be able to experiment with by recording my own signing before I record my native signers.

But are still two issues I’m wondering about:

1. Do I need to buy more sophisticated video editing software to convert from 16:9 to 4:3 without letterboxing? I just rendered an approximaely square-shaped crop from one of my 4:3 videos, both on my ancient Vegas Video 3.0 and on the Vegas Movie Studio 9.0 Platinum which I just purchased, hoping to get off cheap. Unfortunately, in both cases the result came out letterboxed, and I can find no option in the latter (including in its skimpy manual) for telling it not to letterbox.

2. For embedding clips in PDFs and sharing them over the internet, I will usually want to convert them to small files in a 4:3 ratio using codecs most people with have – such as mpg or mov (although suggestions are welcome). It will not be much of a problem that these are lossy, since I can always ship the original HD versions to anyone who doubts my coding decisions. But is there anything relevant to that issue that I need to know now, before I buy the camcorder?

Thanks again,
Peyton