Stephen Mann
Forum Replies Created
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Check this forum for some recent discussion about “data recovery” software. Your disk is going south.
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
Yes, render to AVI will make a new file. I do this when I want to trim my work file. My preference is to “render to a new track” so that I don’t have to leave the project.
Be sure to delete the old tracks and hit the “remove unused media” from the project media window before you delete the old files from your hard-disk.
Also, when you finish the project, you can do a “save as” and check the box to copy the media. Do this to a new directory and you will have the veg file and media in that new directory. It’s a good way to clean up a project directory.
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
” they 4:3 progressive, but how do they good nice colors in like “hollywood movies”, Im not going to go out and buy and hardware and equipement lol but it would be nice to keep a sharper image.”
Hollywood does two things that make the images look better. It’s not hardware or software as much as it is technique and knowing what goes on during the encoding.
First, if it’s a title screen, they use pure colors. This way there’s no room for the MPEG encoder to make estimations. Your “reds” are C60000h, which is, by definition, a washed out red. Pure red would be FF0000h (255,0,0). But we want to avoid completely saturated colors in video because most TV’s and displays handle them badly. I like to limit colors to 250, so my pure red would be FA0000h (250,0,0).
Next, Hollywood avoids long diagonal lines of high contrast. They “jaggie” badly when encoded into MPG. When they do, there’s usually a similar color in the background to reduce the effect of the “unsharpen” process during encoding. Like a light pink background for a red line. You may not even notice the pink tint, but where the encoder is making edge decisions, it looks nicer when the transition is from two levels of the same color. (There’s no other color there to get mixed into the encoded line).
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
“I’m just wondering if there is a way to save the new movie without having to re-render the whole thing? Won’t I lose video quality every time I re-render?”
No. Vegas is non-destructive, meaning that the original video data is unaltered, no matter what you do to it on the timeline.
There’s a few ways to make a new AVI file that is a subset of the original, and unless you have done something in the timeline such as fades, effects, color corrections, etc, you won’t see any gen losses (and rendering is fast since you are basically making a copy). You can split and delete or make a region then render to a new track.
(And, 20-minutes of video is not a lot. My projects can have as much as 100Gb of video data represented on the timeline. I wouldn’t bother since 20-minutes is only 4 Gb.)
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
I think that what you are seeing as “desaturated” is an illusion because the MPEG encoding has softened the edges a bit as a result of the aliasing of the diagonal lines. I brought both images into Photoshop and cut a piece of the red at the same place on both images then placed them adjacent to each other. If there were any difference in the color or saturation, I should have been able to see a line where the two samples joined.
The granularity that you see is clearly the nature of MPEG encoding. There’s not enough color samples in the image to maintain smooth lines, especially diagonals.
What is the destination display mode? If it’s a normal interlaced NTSC display, then the softening of the MPEG image is actually good. Sharp color edges are a real pain in the butt for monitors, especially red.
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
I suspect that you are looking at differences in the colorspace. Uncompressed, if I recall, uncompressed colorspace is 4:4:4 and MPEG2 is 4:2:0
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
You cannot use an LCD for accurate color and brightness information.
An LCD cannot be calibrated – there is no hue and saturation (phase or chroma) controls on an LCD monitor. White depends on the color of the backlight and black is only an illusion because no LCD can go completely opaque. (Display a black screen and turn off the room lights, and you will see a dark gray). Contrast is highly dependent on viewing angle.
Sony makes a pro LCD production monitor, but it costs many thousands of dollars.
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
Make sure that you have turned off the Windows indexing service.
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
Maybe it made sense when the blank media was $5 per disc. Like you, I have no idea what is accomplished.
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA -
For what it’s worth, I doubt that you’ll need to spend $60K. But, what you purchase will depend on what kind of projects you plan to shoot. (Wait – if you’re ready to spend 60K, hire me.)
Seriously, before we can advise, we would need to know what kind of projects, how many (determines if you need more than one editing workstation) and how big is your studio space? I’m sure there will be more questions.
I’ve got one – why HDV? (It’s a rhetorical question because I would buy HDV cameras for a new studio, but curious minds want to know why you specified HDV?)
Stephen Mann
MannMade Digital Video
San Jose, CA