Hello,

I was wondering if someone might be able to give me some pointers with something that's got me about to tear my hair out. I realize that I'm using an awkward mix of equipment here but it's all I've got at the moment and I'd like to think that I could get an acceptable final result with what I have. I'm much more of an audio person so please be gentle with me if I phrase things incorrectly here...

I've got some live music footage captured on two cameras:

-Sanyo Xacti HD200: MP4 - 1920x1080i - 29.97fps, upper field first
-Panasonic ZS-3 (point&shoot camera): m2ts - 1280x720p - 29.97fps

As I understand it, the ZS-3 incorrectly flags its output as 59.94fps. Another possibly confounding factor is that I'm in the UK with UK equipment but I don't seem to have had problems playing back NTSC stuff in the past.

I'm replacing the camera audio with a separate 48khz 24bit track. And I'm using Vegas Platinum v11.

I've synced up the footage and audio and have made my edits (by chopping out the bits of the ZS-3 footage that I don't want; the Sanyo footage is intact all along the timeline.)

I have a few questions:

-do the "project settings" have any influence at all, or do the render setting trump them?
-what do you think the best format and settings are for rendering this project to a blu ray disc, bearing in mind that I'd like to keep the audio as uncompressed as possible?
-is the ZS-3's faulty framerate flag going to cause problems here?
-should I keep everything NTSC or convert to PAL?

A slightly separate issue is that I wanted to make an SD version of these clips but every time I render to MPEG-2, I get blips in the video and audio. This doesn't seem to happen if I render to different formats. Weirdly, when I upped one of the clips to Youtube the glitch magically disappeared after a couple of days...

This is only really a "practice project" designed to reveal potential issues but I'd really like to salvage something reasonable from the footage I've got.

There are some Youtube clips here:
Richmond Fontaine - Moving Back Home #2, Manchester 15 Sept 2011 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qebObpHuqjA)
Richmond Fontaine - 1968, Manchester 15 Sept 2011 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlvzzxyPzGo)
Richmond Fontaine - Post to Wire, Manchester 15 Sept 2011 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOWEm-TgwU)

Any advice anyone might be able to offer, even if it's just pointers to tutorials or past posts.

Which do you have more of? About the same of each?

If I were going to make a blanket statement, I'd do it all (project and Blu-ray output) as 1080/60i.

Unless you want the 1080/60i motion to match the 720/30p motion, in which case I'd edit as 720/30p and render that way, then do a re-render as 1080 for Blu-ray.



-do the "project settings" have any influence at all, or do the render setting trump them?

Project settings have plenty of influence, but render settings will trump them.



-is the ZS-3's faulty framerate flag going to cause problems here?

Not likely.



-should I keep everything NTSC or convert to PAL?

I'd keep it NTSC; it will preserve the best quality.

Excellent - many thanks for that.

In terms of the balance of footage, the 720p is basically just close ups, probably accounting for less than 25% of the total running time.

Two final questions for you: am I right in thinking that the "Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 25 Mbps video stream" is the one I want, giving an .m2v file as the output?

And if so, how do I get the uncompressed audio in there? When I go to customise the template and click on the audio tab, it looks like I've only got compressed options. Do I need to render the audio separately?

Thanks again.

Assuming you plan to deliver your renders to the web (i.e. YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). Here's what I'd do. There may be better ways, but here's the test I just ran seems to work pretty well.

1) Create a Vegas Project using the "Match Media Settings" wizard to match the 720p source.
2) Add a 720p source clip to the timeline.
3) Add a 1080i souce clip to the timeline.
4) Add the yohng.com Yadif Deinterlace for Sony Vegas deinterlace FX (http://www.yohng.com/software/yadifvegas.html) as a Media FX
5) Render the project to the MainConcept "Internet HD 720p" template.

The video is here: Mixed720p1080i.mp4 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGm59DZ_EP4)

However, the telling result is in the attached image.

...Jerry

Many thanks for that - I've downloaded the filter and will give it a go.