Vegas Video discussions from 2005 (Q3Q4)

[Mike Kujbida]

I'll repeat my reply to Mel in the "PAL to NTSC conversion" thread about 10 posts down. He never replied that it worked for him so hopefully it did.


Bob Grant from Australia (I know him & trust his responses) posted the following on the Sony forum a while ago.

***********************
Sure do it all the time.
Just ask Vegas to encode to mpeg-2 using the DVDA NTSC template, maybe adjust the bitrate as you would if doing a PAL DVD.

Render at Best and select Reduce Interlace Flicker for all the media.

Alternatively render to a new PAL AVI and encode from that to NTSC as it'll save you having to add the Reduce Interlace Flicker thing to lots of clips.

You should be able to play the resulting DVD in your existing DVD player if you've got a recent or el cheapo one.
***********************

Hope this helps.

Mike

[Rob Lohman]

See these URL's on how you can do 25 -> 24 fps:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=50279
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=39265
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=2108

Otherwise you can just set Vegas to an NTSC 29.97 (30 fps drop frame) project
and plunk in the PAL footage. Render out to DVD or whatever (in NTSC format)
and it should be okay.

[James Connors]

Cheers guys, so leaving my project settings as PAL DV then Blend Frames for the interlace, then just telling it to use an NTSC template will convert it all fine then? The 24p thing isn't so important, just thoght if its easy enough and it'll look better then hey.. why not :)

[Laurence Kingston]

One thing you should be aware of is that the latest version of Vegas, version 6, does a much better job of frame rate conversion than versions 5 and before did. I would go so far as to say that Vegas 6 even does a better job of PAL/NTSC conversions than do dedicated programs like DVFilm Atlantis.

[Keith McLeod]

I've just completed a project shot in 16:9 HDV with my FX-1. During the editing, I used pan/scan to zoom in on certain parts of a clip. However, when I rendered to DVD, everything correctly displays in letterbox (on a 4:3 set) except the clip that I pan/scaned. It was stretched to 4:3.

How do I make sure that the material I pan/scan remains in 16:9 format when rendered and transferred to DVD. I am using DVD Archtect to burn the DVD.

Thanks,

-- Keith

[Bill Binder]

I know there must be a way to do this, but I must be missing something. Let's say I basically wanted to create a pan/scan version of some widescreen footage (not really, but this illustrates my problem perfectly). This would require me to crop the widescreen footage to the size of the output resolution using cropping, then using keyframes to "move" my pan-scan around the widescreen image. I have no problems doing this for a single event, but is it possible to do this using cropping and keyframes for the entire timeline instead of event-by-event?

Any ideas? (Maybe I should be using a "bus" to do this?)

[Jim Ohair]

In Vegas 4 you can just use track motion which acts like a pan and crop
on the whole track.
In Vegas 6 movie studio track motion works differently.
Hope this helps

[Brian Kennedy]

I may be misunderstanding your question, but I assume you used the pan/crop tool in Vegas? If you import 16:9 into a 4:3 project and pan and zoom into it, you need to keep the "source aspect ratio" box checked (right click in the crop window) to keep it at 16:9 and letterboxed. If you instead have the "output aspect ratio" box checked, it will fill the frame when you zoom in.

[Don Bloom]

if you want the same effect thru out all of the events (clips) then does the 1st one the way you want it-right click on it copy it and then go down the line and right click to PASTE EVENT ATTRIBUTES to all the other clips.

HTHs
Don

[James Connors]

Yep, I've heard high praise for that... I need to do a few test encodes of various pieces of footage just to do direct comparisons between things like CCE SP, Procoder, and Vegas' MainConcept render to see if I can spot the difference in quality, difference in speed etc.

Typically I prepared all my footage, then ran out of time to render the entire lot... would've taken about a day, and I didn't have that.. so had to chop it down considerably. A shame, but thats what happens when working with next to no time until the deadline :) Its a gift anyway, so its not too awful, just slightly annoying I can't get a decent enough live set of a popular band into good hands with my website stamped on it.. never a bad thing that!

[Dave Largent]

Has anyone figured out anything about the
customizable settings and how they affect
the finished results?
Or, what settings are giving you good results?
Any settings to avoid?
I compared some frame grabs from Mike's
deinterlacer up against Vegas 5 blend and
interpolate fields and they were not as sharp
as Mike's, which appears to use interpolation,
but am not sure of this.

[Bill Binder]

Originally Posted by Don Bloom

if you want the same effect thru out all of the events (clips) then does the 1st one the way you want it-right click on it copy it and then go down the line and right click to PASTE EVENT ATTRIBUTES to all the other clips.

HTHs
Don

Thanks, but my goal is to do this pan/crop ACROSS EVENTS throughout the entire timeline. The pans/crops are not identical for every event, and they need to span across events in the timeline. Is there an easy way to do a pan/crop like this? Should I use "Track Motion" or "buses" for this? Or can I only do it one event at at time (paste attributes doesn't solve what I've trying to do).

[Edward Troxel]

Pan/Crop is event by event. What if you add another track to the top of your project and place a mask there? You could use a white generated media then then place the Pan/Crop on that generated media. Change the compositing mode of the track to Multiply (Mask) and you're done.

[Matt Hagest]

Does anyone know how to do the cribs intro? Im doing a little fun project and i need a way to make that intro but change it to "Rigs" instead of "Cribs"

thanks for anyones help!

[Dave Largent]

Any ideas how I could blur a background but keep
the subject in focus? I'm trying to create
the illusion of a shallow depth of field, similar
to a film camera.