[Tim Wilde]

I’m going to start a new post about my pleasant surprise upon trying Vegas’ “full” version. We can stop this thread because the difference between it and Movie Studio is significant.

[Tim Wilde]

Cool! This must be an advantage of the full Vegas over the cheaper Movie Studio version. I’ll have to look into this more deeply. Thanks.

BTW, does the full version of Vegas allow you to put the preview window on a second monitor for a larger, more accurate view?

[Tim Wilde]

But can you definitely set the size to 1920×1080? Please try that and see if it lets you actually use it.

[Tim Wilde]

Thank you for responding. I realize the original footage is 1440×1080, but here’s the catch: I want the resulting WMV files to be able to play on a hardware player, in this case an Avel LinkPlayer.

I rendered to a test WMV file in Vegas Movie Studio at 1440/1.333 and another test WMV file from Premier 2’s Media Encoder, which allowed me to specify an image size of 1920×1080 with square pixels. Both WMV files look fine in Windows Media Player. But when I burn them to a CD and play these files in the LinkPlayer, the Premier one at 1920×1080 fills my HDTV’s screen perfectly. But the Vegas 1440×1080 version plays with black bars on each side and is squashed horizontally just like you get when you play a widescreen video on a standard 4:3 TV.

As a side note, both Premier 1.5 and 2.0 offer much more control over the WMV file than Vegas does, which is sad because I’d hoped to apply the settings learned in Premier 2 to Vegas.