Vegas Video discussions from 2004 (Q3Q4)

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Chris, it was indeed a pleasure having you be the first non-beta tester to see Ultimate S. It was an even larger pleasure to watch about 15 mins of your mustang video before hitting bed this morning. You and Kelli did an amazing job!
You know that if you go the Vegas route you'll be stuck with this motley crew of users, dontcha? :-)
We'd love to have you on board.
Thanks for the extremely good time at dinner last night. The Sony and Canon guys got along, and I think everyone had a great time.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

1. Lock down cam/tripod, mark imaginary line to never cross.
2. Shoot left "you"
3. Shoot right "you"
4. put both on separate tracks in Vegas, use Bezier masking to divide the picture to reveal both sides of room. If you have tripod locked down, all furniture, lighting, objects will perfectly match.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Marcia,
There are several 1K tones at various levels on the VASST site, couple those with one of the half dozen custom countdowns...
you'll be good to go.

[Graham Bernard]

. . . Chris, see yah over on the veggie Forum! . . . Make the leap . . we are waiting . . promise!

Graham Bernard

[Brian Mitchell Warshawsky]

Prior to my purchase of a DVX100, I spent a inordinate amount of time trying to find a way to make the JVC HD cams work for me. I could not.

However, I had an opportunity to view the work of some talented ad agency personnel who produced a faux commercial with the HD10u and worked through some of the limitations, and the result to my eyes was stunning.

My interest lies in finding ways to create full length features on a zero budget, using digital as a low cost alternative to film. There are always going to be losses from the codec, the minidv format, the lenses, etc., but the potential....

I am just looking to confirm that the approach I described is workable.

Brian

[Glen Elliott]

<<<-- Originally posted by Chris Hurd : I was lucky enough to have this shown to me by DSE himself -- and it looks great! I think I'm gonna jump ship and switch to Vegas! -->>>

C'mon Chris- join the brotherhood....

[Marcia Janine Galles]

I realize that a VHS output, when compared to DVD, is going to look disappointing in comparison, but some festivals won't take DVD screeners. That said, does anybody want to offer any sugestions for a step by step to insure a Vegas to VHS layoff that will give me the best picture possible?

What I'm currently doing (that looks like crap, IMO):

Vegas/PC (Print to tape from timeline) to Dazzle bridge (via firewire) to VHS recorder (via... ughh... composite or S-Video)

But I'm wondering if it's possible to rig up my external Pioneer DVD recorder to record from DVD into the VHS player, bypassing the stupid Dazzle converter which seems to make for such a poor layoff. Not sure I can or even if it will make any difference, though.

Or should I punt and just take a DVD to a pro facility? Would they have the tools to make it look better, or is any VHS layoff just gonna look this bad?

It's just so sad to see it look like this. Even after compressing the mpeg (4.2) to fit the project onto a DVD (wish I didn't have to... but DVDA was reading 5.6 gigs) the 24pA footage looks so much better than I expected... and now so horrid now on VHS.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Marcia

[Imran Zaidi]

C'mon Chris... Everyone's doing it, you should too... ;)

Also, I just got the email yesterday about Ultimate S, and I'd like to be the first to go on record and say... VASST Rocks!

[Edward Troxel]

Have you tried a different convertor? Or maybe your camera?

[Ralph Morris]

Marcia,
You don't say what Piioneer you have, but most would have the ability to output composite and s-video. If you have a VCR that can take and s-video input, use it; if not feeding your VCR from the composite video oputput should still give a pretty good output.

I have used my Pioneer Elite 7000 to make VHS dubs and they are pretty good. It also hads the ability to make some adjustments to the video output.

[Russell Newquist]

You may want to look into getting an S-VHS VCR. Yes, I know, you only want to record VHS, but my experience has been that S-VHS VCRs record far, far better VHS tapes than regular VHS VCRs do. A large part of this, however, is that S-VHS decks almost always have an S-Video input, whereas VHS decks almost always don't. The better signal coming in in the first place means you get a better signal to noise ratio, even though you're still recording on the same (cruddy) VHS medium.

Also, if you're using a standard consumer level VHS VCR, you definitely will get a better picture quality from a different deck. Almost all of the consumer decks have gone to smaller recording heads. This is because of differences in how a tape is recorded at SP vs. SLP speeds. At SP speeds, a larger portion of the tape is used for each "frame" of the signal. So, for instance, your tape would have something like this:

|-----|-----|-----|-----|

(where each "|" is a division between "frames")

On an SLP recording, however, the same information is recorded using a much smaller percentage of the tape, so that more "frames" can be recorded, and hence the tape can record a longer program. So the same space on the tape may look like this:

|----|----|----|----|----|

Notice that the same amount of tape (20 -'s) now records five "frames" instead of four.

In the old days, the recording heads on VCRs were sized to match the SP tapes, for best quality. But when you record on SLP tapes, which most consumers do (they want to make their tapes last), the heads are bigger than the area of the tape they record to, so they bleed over onto adjacent "frames", distorting the signal. So modern consumer VCRs have heads sized to fit the smaller "frames" of SLP recordings. This prevents the bleedover, and results in higher quality SLP recordings. But now the heads are too small to do a full SP recording, so SP quality suffers. For most consumers, it doesn't matter - they use the SLP settings anyway. But if you're trying to master a professional tape at SP settings, it matters big time.

Oh yeah, and through all of this I've assumed that you're using SP settings on your VCR. If you're not, that should be the first thing you check. It will give you vastly superior results, even on a consumer VCR.

Most SVHS decks, on the other hand (even consumer level ones) use the larger heads, because anybody buying SVHS over VHS wants the quality. Frankly, only quality freaks like me buy SVHS (in the consumer arena) anyway.

Still, you can actually find a VHS deck that has both S-Video input and larger recording heads. I don't know if that will actually be cheaper than an SVHS deck or not, but you can look into it. Those two things will help you tremendously.

* Note: I'm fully aware that my use of the term "frame" is simplistic and, as it stands, technically wrong. It's just a simpler way to explain the concept without turning this post into a doctoral dissertation - it's long enough already.

[Glen Elliott]

"Yeah, c'mon Chris....make you feel GOOD...Good...good" *insert echo sound effect*

[Simon Wyndham]

Hmm, I'm not so sure about that THX test. I can't remember the link off hand, but I do remember that there was an article elsewhere on the web describing the limitations of that test. It would be better to set up your TV using the colour bars from your NLE or camera. That could be one reason you are getting a less than satisfactory result?

Colour adjustment is one hell of a pain in the backside, and a lot of people do watch on very badly adjusted screens. You will never satisfy all of the people all of the time.

Though I understand what you are saying about brightness. http://www.wideopenwest.com/~wvg/color%20bar.htm

If you are using Vegas it has all sorts of colour/test bar generators.

[Peter Koller]

Dumb question... what is a 1kHz sound used for?

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Gang, we're moving the VASST/Sundance sharing site to a new location with a bigger and better server, and the site will be down most of the night/morning. Just wanted to inform you so that you'll know what's going on.

Remember the VASST contest that's happening, there aren't too many entries yet, but the clock is ticking down...