Help with Vegas and HD source.......

[fcat]

Im capturing my HC1 footage to a PAL M2t then converting to proxy media using Gearshift, editing, then gearshifting back then authoring to DVD in widescreen NTSC MPEG 2 at 8000CBR

Everyone that watching my footage then says why is it just widescreen and not anamorphic!

Is my film on the HC1 anamorphic ? if so how do i author in anamorphic as opposed to just widescreen which everyone says im cutting out over 30% of the picture!!

confused!

cheer
fcat

[redsox_mark]

fact,

Yes, it is anamoprphic. Anamorphic basically means that various shaped non-square pixels are used such that you achieve the full resolution regardless of the aspect ratio. You shot HDV, which is a native widescreen format (1440x1080 with a PAR of 1.333). (PAR=pixel aspect ratio). You then converted it to SD… now you said NTSC, did you mean that ? Assuming you did – you created a DVD which is the full NTSC resolution (720x480), with the NTSC Widescreen PAR of 1.2121. You’ve lost about 75% of the original HDV resolution of course, but you are getting full NTSC resolution.

The questions I have are:

1) Why NTSC?
2) What makes them think it is non-anamorphic?

Note that NTSC is lower resolution than PAL – so by going to NTSC you are losing about 17% of the resolution compared to PAL. Also, converting is not easy… as well as the lower resolution Vegas has to deal with converting the frame rate. This will all impact the quality.

So you have a double-whammy – NTSC isn’t a good as PAL, and the conversion itself makes it worse. It could be that this quality hit is what is making your audience think it must be non-anamorphic.

Now if NTSC was a typo and you meant PAL, then the question is still what makes them think it is non-anamorphic, and is there something in your workflow that impacted the quality? Here one thing to check is that when you render out to MPEG2 for DVD that you set the “video rendering quality” to “best”. This is independent of the bitrate used; it has to do with the altogithm used to rescale the video. If you are not changing the resolution (e.g. converting DV to DVD) then “good” is fine; but here as you are downscaling you need to set this to “best” for the best quality. (Even if you must create NTSC for some reason, you want to use this “best” setting).

[fcat]

cheers for the info mark

Yes i did mean NTSC, reason is this is veiwable all around the world which is where my productions are going. The video rendering quality was set to Good, ill make sure its set to Best on my next render.

heres what one person said about the footage on the dvd:

"Video wise its as good as to be expected, Clarity, colors, and the like look very nice. My only gripe is that the video is 4x3 Letterbox instead of 16x9 Anamorphic Widescreen which would of helped out a lot in terms of keeping the quality closer to the 1080i source . Plus it would also allow a better bitrate for the video itself as with a 4x3 Letterbox transfer 33% of the bitrate is being wasted on the black bars. A 16x9 Anamorphic Widescreen transfer would allow all the bitrate to be used for the actual video itself since the DVD player would generate the black bars on the fly for 4x3 sets."


cheers
fcat

[redsox_mark]

This shouldn’t be happening if everything is correctly configured to be widescreen. Did you author in DVD architect? Did you choose NTSC widescreen as the project type there? If you created the video as widescreen but had DVDA configured for 4:3 then you would get what is being described – it would take the widescreen video and letterbox it.

[fcat]

ive never used DVD architect, have alsways been a user of Soncs REEL dvd, i belive it does 16 automatically, theres no settings etc for it

(edit) damn ive just seen there is a setting for 16:9 in REEL and its set on 4:3 has benn all the time, damn,

[redsox_mark]

Hmm.. I'd look there for your problem. If you have your settings correct in Vegas it won't be putting letterboxing in (in fact you can check by playing the mpg file from your PC - if Vegas letterboxed it, you'd see the black areas there). "No settings" on your DVD app worries me... how can it know what you want to create? It may be defaulting to 4:3.

EDIT: Just saw your edit!!!

[fcat]

ok plot thickens!

If i select 16:9 in the dvd authoring app when i drag and drop a widescreen ntsc clip into the window and then view the properties the 16:9 window says 4:3 and is greyed out so i cant change it!

[redsox_mark]

Sorry can't help you there... don't know "REEL DVD".

[fcat]

Mark, if i want to create an NTSC video stream in NTSC (ie an M2V file) what setting do i use in Vegas ?
Ive tried using the DVD architect widescreen stream but thats not an M2v file.

i think where im going wrong is when i render to a file i have always used NTSC Video stream, but all the timeline etc is set to NTSC widescreen which obviously is overwridden by the render box, but i cant seam to be able to find a setting for a widescreen m2v!

[redsox_mark]

Ahh... I see....

I would think the DVD Architect Widescreen template would work - even though it uses a .mpg extention; it is an elementary stream (no audio).

But - to be sure... if the "DVD NTSC video stream" is working for you (apart from the aspect ratio), then I suggest you use that template and customise it. Pick that template and select the "custom" button. On the project tab, change the quality to "best" as discussed earlier. (This will increase render time, but is worth it). Now click on the video tab. Change the aspect ratio to 16:9. You can then save this as a new template to use in the future (change the template name at the top and click on the floppy icon to save it).

You are right that any render properties override what is in the project settings... so you've been rendering 4:3 video, which explains everything.

[fcat]

jeeez, cant believe it was a simple thing like that that was causing all the problems!!
thanks again mark, just done a test render, imported it into REEL and its showing as 6

cheers
fcat