Mixing progressive and interlaced

[Yousef Sheikh]

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
Richmond Fontaine - 1968, Manchester 15 Sept 2011 - YouTube
Richmond Fontaine - Post to Wire, Manchester 15 Sept 2011 - YouTube

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

[David Jimerson]

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.

[Yousef Sheikh]

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.

[Jerry Amende]

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 as a Media FX
5) Render the project to the MainConcept "Internet HD 720p" template.

The video is here: Mixed720p1080i.mp4 - YouTube

However, the telling result is in the attached image.

...Jerry

[Yousef Sheikh]

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