Widescreen 24p footage
 

I have just shot a short film on an XL2 at 16:9 at 24p. I want to know what is the best way to upload, and render my footage as. The reason for this is that I have used this camera and these settings in the past and the resolution always seemed to be less than when I hooked the camera directly up to the TV. Also, when I go to render a a clip or whatever it may be, and I hit the "Custom" button to change settings, it doesn't do anything. What is going on? Thanks for the help!

To clarify this more, the 16:9 video uploads as a squished 4:3 ratio when I view it in media player unrendered. And when I render it as an MPEG-2 I click on the 'Custom' button on the render screen and nothing comes up. Then when I render it as MPEG-2 the video on playback on my computer is all jaggy and looks nothing like it does directly from the camcorder to the TV. Please help! I need some solutions!

This really depends on what you want it for. There's a huge difference between throwing it up on Google video or MyTube and say, something more professional.

If you render it QT lossless I think it's like 3 Gig a minute. Who wants to download that?

If you click the "Custom" button and nothing happens I think, I'm not sure but just to try and help you out, that means you don't have the codec installed. Some formats require you to get a seperate license before you can use them.

Quicktime is very popular and I like the Sorenson it uses. Windows video (wmv) gives pretty good results.

What matters most is what size file do you want to end up with? Something easy to download or is bandwidth not an issue?

Interlaced is for broadcasting. If your movie is never going to leave a computer format then keep it progressive. At least that's what I've been told.

This is for sending out to film festivals and making DVD copies. I want to maintain the quality I get when I plug the camera into the TV and watch the footage.

Are you refering to the 'Media Player' that comes with MS Windows or the preview in Vegas?

Then I would say you do not have an mpeg2 codec on the machine you're rendering with. There are free ones available on the web. I'm sorry, I don't know which ones (if any) are good. You can try here now, http://www.afterdawn.com/software/vi...s_and_filters/ or wait till someone who knows more about it chimes in.

Try either Media Player classic at http://www.afterdawn.com/software/vi...er_classic.cfm or VLC at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Both do a decent job.

I have registered my MPEG-2 codec with Sony on both Vegas 5 and 6 and have used the custom button in the past, but now it won't work. What is going on with this?

Is the custom button greyed out? If it is, you need DVD Architect installed on your PC in order to use this function. I'm not a big fan of Sony MPEG encoder (MainConcept). I like TMPGENC and it's cheap.

I'll second that TMPGEnc advice.

Here's one possibility:

Look in your registry, and make sure it only has these entries, and nothing else.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Sony Media Software\MC MPEG Plug-In\1.0\License]
"CurrentKey"="XX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX"
"InstFlags"=dword:00000010

(you shoud see letters and digits instead of the Xs here...)


If it is not "CurrentKey" or "InstFlags", get rid of it.

dumb question but where do I go for the registry?

If you don't know where the registry is, PLEASE ask someone who does to do this for you.

I just skimmed the other posts and it didn't seem like anyone addressed this...

I'm shooting with the exact setup you are (XL2, 16:9, 24p), and it should capture in widescreen, not stretched in 4:3. If you're capturing it 4:3 and than 'making it widescreen again' in Vegas, something's very wrong and you know your loss of resolution.

Am I missing something, anyone?

My editing pc isn't on right at the moment (so I can't look at my capture settings), but you should absolutely see it 16:9 during capture and watching the raw footage.

Justin, group,

I have gotten started capturing direct-to-disk, via Microsoft's capture application, which is what I believe Vegas uses unless the user changes the capture application.

But even when I capture from tape now, I use the Microsoft capture program.

It shows up 4:3 in the capture window but when I play the video, it is 16:9.

Going direct to MS-capture may be a work-a-round for the problem.

BTW, I capture in AVI, DV mode and it always works as it should.