16:9 to 4:3 crop in Vegas
 

I searched the forum but couldn't find reference to this issue. Lots of talk about going the other way.

I want to shoot HDV so I need to shoot 16:9, but the final view dimensions will be 4:3. (15 and 30 second spots on TV listings channel, they have the TV listings and a 4:3 box, so it will definitely be 4:3).

I know I can find this out through trial and error, but I'm pressed for time so I thought I'd see if anyone knows. If a crop is easy, I'm assuming I'll just lose it on the sides?

I could shoot SD 4:3 and save some grief (and for easy workflow), but I thought I'd check and see if any has done it as if it's a simple step because I'd prefer HDV masters for future consideration.

Thanks.

Change project settings to 4:3/standard NTSC, and then pan/crop using a script or pan/crop one, and copy/paste attributes to all pieces of media

Thanks Spot,

BTW, I did buy your Vegas training DVD's and HDV book. great stuff. Just thought I'd post the Q to try to save some time.

Adding to it...
 

To add to Doug's comment, keyframe the transition to control when it starts and reverses on itself.

jason

no need to upgrade, just grab urself a PCI VGA card.. any card will do... Vegas doesnt use the HW of the GFX card anyway..
if uve already got Nvidia, stick to it..

Too Much Information?
 

specs:

p4 3.2 ghz
xp pro sp2
4 gigs dual-channel 667mhz ddr2 ram
not sure about video or sound processor

My projects involve taking many small clips (wmv format, 640x480, about 14 megs per minute of footage, typical file size about 30 megs), editing and batch processing them all at once with green screen, logo overlay, and various other colour-correction, colour level effects. I read in previous posts that sometimes large picture files can make the system crash, but mine are small png and jpgs, and there are only 3 of them (although they're multiplied on the timeline a whole lot).

Anyway. Vegas has started crashing on me. No pop-up, error, anything, just quickly shuts down. Usually happens just from navigating through the videos. I can watch it happen when I zoom out and it tries to load all the previews for all the clips. It hasn't done this to me before, but this latest project is much bigger than my previous ones (130 30 meg approx. clips with above effects). I've changed my video ram in options to 16mb, 64mb, 300mb, 1024mb, with the same problem every time. I've monitored what it does to my system with task manager, but the memory usage never gets above 900 mb. I've re-installed Vegas, but that didn't work.

So far I've been able to get around this somewhat by disabling the waveform and frame previews in the view menu, but this is extremely inconvenient as I need to monitor these things constantly.

I'm thinking maybe Vegas isn't designed to do this type of processing? Does everyone else just have one huge avi file that they split up into all their clips in vegas afterwards instead of importing lots of smaller files? I could do this, but it would mean re-recording all of my footage (4 hours worth...)

Any suggestions would be appreciated :) Thanks!

Scratch the better with disabling waveform/event frame display point. :( Doesn't seem to make a difference, even after cutting the project size down to 60 clips. I hope this doesn't get worse, hah.

Just a hunch, but maybe it's because you're editing with .wmv's. Any particular reason why you're not capturing to .avi?

Just found them to be good quality and decent compression. Plus can be easily distributed among computers that might not have all the right codecs and stuff. And they don't lag when I play them back (probably a video/sound card problem though i'd imagine). What do you think the disadvantages of wmv's are over other formats?

If quality isn't an issue, and for web delivery-only, there is nothing to take issue with.
wmv is highly compressed, can't be used for compositing, and severely degrades after processing any aspect of the image. It can't be scaled well, and is intended (currently) as a delivery format only.
But if it works for you....none of the above matters.

Any way to get rid of pink (unsynchonize indicator) if you slip the audio on purpose?
 

I have a concert that I'm working on and I'm blending some direct recording with some room from where the camera was... oviously there is a time delay from what I see and what I hear... I have fixed this delay but now Vegas thinks it's out of sync... I regrouped everything and it's fine... I just want to tell Vegas that this is now the "correct" sync so if something is accidentally slipped I will see it.

Or is this a rare occurence and there is no real sollution other than deal with it?

Holy s**t you guys are sure right. I did an extreme stress test with avis instead of wmvs (13 hours worth instead of 4!!) on multiple track layers and it went extremely smoothly and even rendered faster. So yeah. I'm dumb. It all turned out nicely in the end though with wmv->wmv but if it's not made to do this kinda stuff I'm definately going back to avis.

Thanks people. I was scared there for a minute :)

Figure with WMV's you have a lot more algorithms and such going on decompressing them for playback than with a lower more effecient codec such as DV... so it will be faster even when rendering because it's not having to uncompress as much before recompressing. *jargon jargon jargon, blah blah blah* ;)

Color Isolation
 

Not sure what else to call this....bride with flowers walking down a path, bunch of red roses, 1 yellow one in the middle. I want everything black and white, but the yellow rose in color. In Premiere there is a simple preset effect that lets you basically grab a slider and leave only whatever color you want....how do I do this in Vegas 6d? I've searched everywhere and I'm getting these complex create a mask type stuff??

It's called "Color Pass" because you're inhibiting every color excepting one.
You can pass single or multiple colors, the Secondary Color Corrector is awesome for this. Multiple colors require some compositing, but secondary is a single process.
There is a tutorial on color pass at both the VASST site and JetDV's website