[Tim Neighbors]

HD video is 1920×1080 pixels in size, so the graphic should be at least that big to begin with (unless it is going to be small in the frame of course). Make sure your video preview window is set to ‘Best’ before you render, unless you know that your render template is set to ‘best’ quality. Some render templates are set to render at whatever the render quality of the video preview window is set at.

Hope that helps.

Tim Neighbors
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[Tim Neighbors]

Thanks for snooping :). I checked out your stuff too and I like it as well. I’ve been shooting with a Sony A7s + Shogun 4K recorder and a DJI Osmo. I’ve been hurting for an upgrade for quite some time, but haven’t quite been moved to pull the trigger. The C200 has me pretty interested though.

[Tim Neighbors]

Thanks for the response Todd. I suspect we work on different types of productions. If I were making movies or commercials, I would definitely get some primes and I would probably have zero interest in AF. But as a run & gun, mostly documentary style and event videography shooter, I need to have a versatile and quick zoom lens. And I would love for these lenses to be faster, but at the same time, when you don’t know what your subject is going to do next, having too shallow of a DOF can make things pretty difficult.

[Tim Neighbors]

Yeah, it seems that pretty much every canon video shooter I know is using L-series lenses, which are still photography lenses. I love the look and ergonomics of canon cameras and their AF is so good I might actually use it, but lenses are the obstacle for me.

Answering my own question, this lens may be the best option if wanting both AF and manual focusing:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1246187-REG/canon_1714c002_cn_e_18_80mm_t4_4_compact_servo.html

…but it leaves much to be desired.

I suppose I could adapt this lens and forget about the AF:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1280873-REG/sony_selp18110g_e_mount_lens.html

[Tim Neighbors]

Jeff,
thanks for the tips/info.
Sounds like good advice to try to learn the native keystrokes. I’ll take something to calm my nerves and try to get used to them. 😉

[Tim Neighbors]

[Andy Neil] “5) Here’s what I do. “

Andy,
thanks so much for taking the time to share this piece of your workflow. This will save me a ton of time and help me to decide if FCPX is for me. Thanks for answering the questions too!

[Tim Neighbors]

I may be stating the obvious here, but just want to make sure that you are not shooting at too slow of a shutter speed as well. Typical rule of thumb is that the shutter should be around double the frame rate to avoid motion blur. So if you’re shooting at 25p, the shutter should be at 1/50th; if you’re shooting at 50i -that is still 25 fps but broken into 2 interlaced fields per frame, so you would set shutter to 1/50th. Shooting at 50p -set the shutter to 1/100th. Of course this is just a very general rule of thumb but for simplicity, you might want to stick to that. As Laszlo mentioned, shooting at a higher framerate allows you the ability to do smooth slow motion as well. However, (as he also mentioned) it will require more hard drive space …or it will not look as clean (because of trying to squeeze double the picture data into less than double the file size). Also, as I mentioned, the faster the framerate, the faster you should have your shutter, and that means you’ll need more light to shoot, so your video won’t be as clean in low-light situations. If you know you won’t be doing any slow motion, just shoot at 25p.

If you shoot progressive (20p, 30p, 50p, etc.), you don’t need to worry about upper/lower field first, because you are recording/playing back both upper and lower fields at the same time -one full frame at a time. Interlaced video (50i, 60i, etc.) means that each frame is broken up into 2 fields: odd scanlines & even scanlines. HD video is upper field first, SD is lower field first (usually). Interlacing was started because of hardware shortcomings in the early days of video. One could argue that it’s still useful for capturing smoother video, but in my opinion, it’s just an old way of capturing video that doesn’t look as good as progressive because you are never really seeing a whole frame at any one moment in time. Also, if you grab a still from interlaced video, it’ll have horizontal lines through it, or have less clarity (if you use deinterlacing).

Basically, just shoot progressive and don’t worry about deinterlacing, upper/lower fields, etc. Of course, if you already have a lot of footage already shot and it’s interlaced, you will need to treat it accordingly.

As for your motion blur issue, if you have a screen grab of the issue, I might (emphasis on “might”) have a better idea of what is going on. Interlace issues are pretty obvious.

I believe “Parity” typically refers to error-detection. It’s just a way to check to make sure there were no errors in the file you just rendered/recorded/etc. It’s used in a lot of different applications, but usually takes a little more time to verify that all the bits are as they should be before you consider your video render (or capture) successful.

Hope this helps. If you want to learn more about video, there are lots of good educational sources out there. One I remember seeing is https://www.videouniversity.com, though there are probably better sources out there. You could also sign up for a course on udemy.com or linda.com. Get a public library card and linda.com is free. ☺

[Tim Neighbors]

John, thanks for the info. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I was planning to switch to Premiere, but after your post, I’m downloading a trial of FCPX to try it out.
It’s hard for me to imagine editing without tracks – Layering multiple composite layers and mixing multiple audio sources, etc. But I guess I’ll understand a bit better after checking out the trial.
Thanks again, and thanks for all of the Vegas help over the years.

Maybe I’ll end up following you to the Mac/FCP world. We’ll see.

[Tim Neighbors]

I read through quickly so forgive me if I missed something, but are we sure this is a render issue and not a playback issue? Have you tried playing back the rendered files in different players (VLC player, Windows Media Player)?

I recommend shooting in progressive mode -25p. When shooting in progressive mode, there is no interlacing in the picture, so there is no need to deinterlace anything.

Here are some good render settings for upload to youtube, vimeo, etc. and a generally very compatible format:

When choosing your render format, select “Sony AVC/MVC”, and choose the preset “Internet 1920x 1080-30p”. Then, choose to customize the template and do the following:
-On the “Video” tab: Change the Frame Rate to 25.000 (PAL)
-Leave ‘field order’ set to “None (progressive scan)”
-Bit rate is fine at 16,000,000, but if you want a little more quality, you can boost this. no need to go above 25,000,000
-On ‘Project’ tab: set Video rendering quality to “Best”.
-everything else stays as it was
-Save this as your default rendering template

This will render as an H.264 with .mp4 wrapper.

I can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t expect shooting in progressive to use more battery than interlaced.

[Tim Neighbors]

John,

Sorry to lose you. ????
If you don’t mind, I’m curious to hear from a long-time Vegas expert who has switched to FCP, how was that transition? Do you recommend others make the switch? I’ve only dabbled in FCP, but wanted to pull my hair out with how slow it seemed to be, though in all fairness, that was FCP7 and I probably just needed to get used to it. Not being able to tweak things on the timeline without stopping playback would slow me down a lot.