Vegas Video discussions from 2006 (Q1Q2)

[Jamie Moeller]

Three questions.
First, how do I make Vegas 6.0c transform my movie (World of Warcraft footage) into a sort of letterbox format, where there is a black thick stripe at the top and bottom, like the old Western movies and so? :)

Secondly, how do I compress my movie the best? I use VirtualDub to make it into DivX 4.12 codec, which makes the file size very low, but it also makes the video quality on footage in motion very poor. Tearing up and all.

What is the best way to compress a movie, when you want the file size to be lowered, but still don't want the quality to be all that bad?
You may suggest what compressing program and codec you feel is the best for me! Thanks :)

... and what does DV mean? That was all! :)

[Rob Lohman]

Letterboxing is the proper term. Unless you want to make a widescreen (native)
dvd movie. Then the proper term is 16:9 anamorphic widescreen.

If you want to do letterboxing see my letterbox calculator and downloadable
masks (get the 16:9 NTSC or PAL mask) from this page:

http://www.visuar.com/letterbox/calc.htm

Unfortunately my calculator only supports Internet Explorer, still need to fix
that. Of course these masks are for SD (DVD) resolution, not HD

In Vegas add a new video track above all other tracks. Drag the mask to this
new track and stretch it out to the full length of your movie. Right-click on
the mask and select properties. Go to the media tab and make sure Pixel
aspect ratio is set to the same as your project (is normally "0.9091 (NTSC DV)
or 1.0926 (PAL DV)". Then change the compositing mode (little green square
on the left of the track with CC in it) to multiply.

That should get you started. Another option is to go in to pan and crop and
select the 16:9 preset. However, you will need to do this to every media
file on the timeline (or render out your final movie, start a new project, load
that file and apply the crop).

Good luck.

[Rob Lohman]

Jamie: please don't cross-post (posting the same question to multiple forums).
I've removed your other thread.

DV stands for Digital Video. However, when most people say DV they mean
three things:

1) a MiniDV recording camera

2) the MiniDV tape and encoding on that tape

3) the DV compression algorithm (a bit similar to JPEG only then for movies)

HDV is simply a higher resolution version of DV.

Encoding a movie is an artform all together and can take many tries to get
right. DiVX is a good format and you can encode to that straight from Vegas,
check the manual.

With all (most) codecs you can setup how much bandwidth they are allowed
to use. The less the smaller the files and the more information is thrown away.
The higher the larger the files and the less information that is thrown away.

Usually you want to output to a lower resolution (for example 50%) and perhaps
a lower framerate to make the files smaller without sacrificing too much quality.

The best thing you can do is experiment with that a lot and check what happens
when you change the advanced settings when encoding.

[Jamie Moeller]

Thank you for the replies, Rob. About the cross-posting, it really wasn't intentional. First after a few visits, did I notice I entered different forums (As the topics I visited earlier, wasn't there on other visits).
I failed to find the delete button for my first topic and as that was in the HDV, which I thought was something about High Definition Video of some sort, I felt I was in the wrong place. My bad...

I will try to do as you told, to make it work. Will come back if there are further problems :) ...

[Jamie Moeller]

I tried the Mask thing, but wasn't quite sure what it was. My native language is not English, so that makes things a little harder. I tried studying the Content and Index help to see if that could tell me how to create a "Mask", and I ended up finding out there was an icon called Compositing Mode to the left of the track.

When pressing there, it shows Add, Subtract, Multiply (Mask) and so on. Is that the wrong place? Even when choosing "Add" there, I still couldn't press the empty new Video Track I placed at the top and get the option to go to Properties.

I then tried the Pan & Crop for all my scenes. That gave the right look, but at every scene change it starts in normal screen and then the letterbox "grows forth" from the top and bottom, until it is where it should be.
Then scene change a few seconds later, and again it goes from normal screen to the 16:9.
Can I force it to just stay there and not have to redo the move from normal to 16:9 view every time a new scene comes?

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Jamie,
You're seeing the letterbox "grow" because you've inserted keyframes rather than just having one keyframe.
In the pan/crop tool, you should have only one keyframe per event (or scene in your case). If you have more, you need to delete one of the two, probably the first one. They look like diamonds on the keyframe timeline.
Second, once you've got a "scene" looking the way you want it, you can easily just copy that "scene" (called an 'event' or 'clip' in Vegas) then select all other events, right click, and choose "Paste Event Attributes." This will apply the crop/letterbox to all of your events.

[Steve Shilson]

OK, Vegas. . .It only let's me speed up the playback rate 4x. . .is their any other way to make increase the speed of a video!? It seems like it's such a basic feature, thanks guys.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Right click the event, choose "Insert Envelope" and choose Velocity envelope. Coupled with the 4x speed you've already discovered, this gives you up to 12x speeds. If you need more, there is also the TimeBandit found in Peach Rock software or in Excalibur's toolset.

[Mark Burlingame]

Excellent thanks! I just set up my gigabit home network so I am ready to fly! Mark

[Steve Shilson]

Awesome, thanks very much! I knew it would be something ridiculously simple like that. haha

[Plamen Petrov]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

What you are seeing is normal. If you want one upper and one lower, they have to be two completely separate files. Just copy the file and then put each on separate tracks.

Ok, thank you, Edward! I tried it, it works fine. But I have a project which consists of approx. 80 clips mixed, transitioned, with some parts cut and speed changed. So, if I put all the copied files on video track 2, how to copy ALL the settings made on track 1 to track 2. It would be a nightmare to do every setting manualy for every copied clip exactly as on the clips of the above track 1. Any suggestions?

[Yi Fong Yu]

i know that i can break the clips up (s) and then adjust the levels up or down depending on which segment of the project. is there a way to do so on one entire clip uncut? it seems i can only do fade in and then the clip gets louder until it reaches its peak or do a fade out in which the clip gets softer until the sound is no more.

in another words, how do you adjust the sound levels at each interval of the entire project full of long and short clips?

[Don Bloom]

Insert >VOLUME ENVELOPE
You can then ad points to adjust volume up or down OR set the AUTOMATION CONTROLS and use the TRACK HEADER SLIDER to adjust on the fly.

Don

[Andy Gordon]

I'm slowing interlaced clips (GS400 PAL 25fps) to 50% with a velocity envelope to make two frames from the two fields for smooth progressive slomo without any blending (deinterlace set to interpolate, resample set to "smart resample", rendering as a progressive avi), and I notice the footage often looks flickery.

When I look at the preview as "Best (Full)" it looks like every second frame is a little blurred. Is this something to do with the camera and it's capturing lower res on one field compared to another, or is it something that can be remedied in vegas?

Is there a way to get higher res on progressive slomo from interlaced using Mike Crash's smart deinterlacer?

Thanks
Andy

[Peter Jefferson]

email me bro....