For my first shoot (a handbell choir) the client desires to use some footage as web promotion. They probably don't know exactly what they want, and frankly, neither do I. Bad business, I know, but it was a last minute gig I accepted via text message while in Germany. I simply agreed to deliver the result on an SD card, but no specific format was discussed. I'd like to deliver a high fidelity version and something more web-happy. That said, the footage is a continuous 60 minute program, so clearly they'll need to pare it down for the web. They might ask me to do a "highlights reel"... tbd.

For the second shoot, a community band, I'll need to master a DVD.

Thanks for your quick response... eager to hear more of your thoughts.

And by high fidelity, I don't mean 4K. HD is fine.

At least with 4K footage, you have the ability to digital zoom the source in case needed.

Thanks, set. Yeah, that's my plan. Now that Nick has answered my main question, what I need to know now is whether I have to set the project to 4K in order to get the benefit of the 4K footage. Unfortunately I relied on autofocus for the unattended 4K camera, and it's less than great. (Note to self... ALWAYS check and lock the focus before leaving a camera unmanned!).

The Canon XA-10 shoots 1920x1080, not 1440x1080 (which is an HDV spec). For your purposes here it shoots at 29.97fps, either interlaced as 59.94 fields per second (= 29.97 frames per second) or 29.97p (actually progressive segmented frames (PsF)) per second. Your conundrum is that progressive 29.97p is better for web/file delivery. Interlaced 29.97i is better for disc delivery. (Note that the XA-10 specs online confusingly talk about "60i", but they really mean 29.97i if we're dealing in frames, not fields, per second).

If you want the 4k benefits of the AG-UX90, you can only shoot that res at max 29.97p, which is fine for web/file delivery, and that would mix nicely with the XA-10's 29.97p. But if you want to deliver a DVD (interlaced) then you'll have to effectively up-sample the 29.97p to 29.97i in post production, which is doable but not ideal. You could shoot 59.94p at 1920x1080 and not have to up-sample anything, but then you couldn't do your panning and cropping. Tricky. Anyway...

Should I set the project resolution to 4K for editing?

No.

Or will I get the benefit of 4K even if the project setting is HD? 

You will. Match your project settings to your lower-resolution footage and set your full-resolution rendering quality to "best". Be careful with the field order and frame rate settings to make sure that the 29.97PsF footage displays properly in Vegas as 29.97p. I have no experience of that but many here on the forum do.

Should I rendered to 1440x1080, or full 1920x1080? 

1920x1080-29.97p AVC for the web/file delivery.

720x480-29.97i for the DVD.

Should I render to interlaced or progressive? 

Progressive for the web/file.

Interlaced for the DVD.

Finally, is it crazy to attempt a 2-camera shoot alone?

A little. I would try and find someone, anyone, to at least keep an eye on the 2nd camera.

Thanks for the excellent information, Nick.

I'm still puzzled about one thing, though.

I've attached a screenshot of my Vegas Pro layout.

You can see that when I view the properties of the selected file (00126.MTS) which was copied dierctly from the XA-10's SD card, the "Video stream" shows to be 1440x1080x12. Should it say 1920x1080? Could it be that a conversion occurred when I imported the file into VP? (Btw, does the x12 have something to do with color depth?).

Oops.. forgot to attach...

I've avoided cameras with non-square pixels but my son has one. Here's how I would mix 1440x1080-29.97i interlaced media with 3840x2160-29.97p for Internet delivery:

Thanks, John. That was impressive... feel like I've just had a master class.

Digging into the manual I found that the XA-10 has both 1920x1080 and 1440x1080 modes:

MODE RES DATA RATE (Mb/s)

MXP 1920x1080 24

FXP 1920x1080 17

XP+ 1440x1080 12

SP 1440x1080 7 <= Where my camera was set. Epic fail.

LP 1440x1080 5

This explains why (1) the image wasn't as good as I expected, and (2) the file size was smaller than I expected. Live and learn.

Many thanks to all repliers.

Apologies, I didn't spot any reference to 1440x1080 in the XA-10 specs I looked at online. But yes, set it to 1920x1080.

According to the online help, the "x12" is the color depth, which confuses me as I would have thought it should say "x8". I've never really noticed this figure. John's clip says x32, which is presumably 8-bits per channel plus alpha channel.

Further to John's excellent video, if your XA-10 footage is true interlaced (not PsF), have a read of section 5 of this: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-can-i-improve-the-quality-of-my-avc-h-264-renders--104642/ Worth a read of the whole article anyway if you're interested in maximising quality.

Thanks, Nick, I'll read the article. I am so impressed with the generosity of you and the posters. Thank you all for the great information!

What's a good workflow for a 2-camera shoot like this? The program is about an hour long, and I'm not looking to do anything non-linear, that is, I don't want to do any time shifting at all. I want the final product to be the same as real time, so I want everything sync'ed together... all video and all audio.

But, of course I want to use both cameras, so I'll have alternate shots from cam1 and cam2.

So far I've imported all the media, copied it to tracks, sync'ed the tracks using audio, and locked the tracks.

Each track is one hour-long event. Ok, I'm lying. The Canon XA-10 chopped its footage into four 2GB files which I've grouped together so it's like a 1 hour event.

My plan was to create a new track 1, called Sequence, and fill it with shots (video only) copied from the locked camera tracks. The idea of keeping the source tracks locked is that I can't accidentally lose sync (which I've found is easy to do with unlocked material). The problem is that I haven't found a way to copy a clip from a locked track. I had hoped I could select a time range and a camera, and copy that piece, and paste it into the sequence preserving timecode. Is there a way to do this? Or am I fighting the tool, and there's a better way?

(Here's Christmas Fudge: I probably will do some non-linear editing at the end to add some B-roll here and there, but it's a minor thing. MOST of the project will be NON-nonlinear.)

Maybe you should use Vegas' multicam functionality. Search the online help or manual for "multicamera". I have never used that funtionality myself.

Thanks, Nick.

I actually viewed a great tutorial on multicam in Vegas, but the author defined multicam as "more than 2 cameras", and the demo was a 6-camera shoot. It looks amazingly powerful, and I'd like to learn it eventually, but the learning curve is steep. I'm under the gun to deliver this project today so I can get out of town for Christmas with family.

Do you see anything wrong with my general approach? Is there a way to select and copy a clip from a locked track? If not, I guess I'll unlock it and use splits to form events. Is that the usual way?

Thanks

Do you see anything wrong with my general approach? Is there a way to select and copy a clip from a locked track? If not, I guess I'll unlock it and use splits to form events. Is that the usual way?

Do you mean a locked event, rather than a locked track? I've never used either and can't find a "lock track" funcition. But I've just tried locking an event and I can still hold <CTRL> and copy it to another track by dragging it.

Not sure that locking events is the right thing here. Make sure you explore and understand the 3 different options under the ripple dropdown (i.e. "Affected tracks" etc.). Then if it was me I would be doing cutting using a combination of dragging the ends of events, or hitting "S" to split followed by DELETE to remove the part of the event I don't want. It all depends on the situation. There are so many ways to do this sort of thing and there's no right or wrong.

If you have the budget, the Pluraleyes plugin may help with syncing if the video or audio from the 2 cameras goes out of sync, or to get them in sync in the first place. I have never used it.

Multicam editing isn't difficult and I even use it for two cameras too. In fact, it is much easier than what you are attempting. Just keep in mind that all effects and pan/crop, event and track level are lost when you do a multicam track. But, Media FXs will be retained.

Thanks, Nick. Yes, I meant event rather than track. The track only contains one hour-long event, so they're kind of the same in this case. Yes, I can copy a locked event to another track, but I was hoping to copy just a part of an event... a time selection. I'll take a closer look at ripple... on first glance it didn't look like what I needed. But I'm here to learn, and I appreciate all the input. I'll also look at Pluraleyes. Btw, I did actually find a "cheat" by experimentation. Consider this sequence:

• Mark a time selection of a piece of a track you want to copy using the loop markers
• split the source track at the start and end of the loop
• copy the resulting carved-out event
• The clipboard now contains the desired clip
• Do two consecutive Undo's. This skips over the copy action, and undoes the two track spilts
• The clipboard still contains the desired clip, so simply paste it into the new track

In the end the source track is back where it started, unsplit, which is what I wanted.

I'm probably going to a lot of extra work due to paranoia about losing sync, but I'll get over it. Meanwhile, I made a lot of progress on my project, and got more comfortable with moving clips around. I'm almost ready to trust that I can rely on Snap.

Takeaways from my experience so far:

1. Three recorders running for an hour are going to exhibit some drift, no matter how good the gear. Only a wired sync during the shoot is going to solve that. So I'd might as well accept that I'll have to do some resync'ing, and not get too carried away with long events.
2. I need a more powerful computer. The 4K source material is pushing my box to the limits in every aspect... main memory, storage, and especially CPU power..
3. Vegas Pro 13 is a fantastic tool.

Thanks, OldSmoke. It's good too get your insight. I'm glad to hear that multicam is effective for a 2-camera shoot. I'll dig deeper into it.

Can you elaborate on pan/crop? I use it extensively as a virtual cinematographer for my unmanned 4K camera. I'd hate to lose pan/crop.

"Can you elaborate on pan/crop? I use it extensively as a virtual cinematographer for my unmanned 4K camera. I'd hate to lose pan/crop"

When you switch to Multicam editing, any effects you have applied at the track or event level will be removed. When using multicam, your effects need to be added after the editing process.

I'd hate to lose pan/crop.

You don't lose it, you just have to reapply/apply it on every event you need it. If you need to correct a tilt over the whole media, it will be easier to apply the pan/crop before you make the multicam track, render it to a new file and then do your multicam edit.

1. Three recorders running for an hour are going to exhibit some drift, no matter how good the gear. Only a wired sync during the shoot is going to solve that. So I'd might as well accept that I'll have to do some resync'ing, and not get too carried away with long events.

Aud2Vid, most of the material I shoot is like yours (long concerts, etc.), where I'm running a camera and one to three audio recorders, upwards of 25 audio tracks. When I can limit channel count to 8 or less, my favorite recorder is a Tascam HS-P82, and it loses just 1/2 frame of sync with video over about 1.5h. That's almost not worth re-syncing, depending on the material (e.g., close-ups of singers or musicians might reveal the drift). But, yes, you are correct: drift is inevitable.

Nice thread, BTW, as I've considered adding another (4k) cam to my stable to improve the video production side of my recordings.

I'd hate to lose pan/crop.

If you have to remove a bunch of pan/crop settings but want to use them again later, you can temporarily save Pan/Crop presets. I do this a lot for FX and usually name them "zzzsomething". It's fast. I use them almost like copy and paste.