I'm very stumped and I'm thinking that I'm either just doing something wrong or I'm not understanding the situation, so I need your help.
I'm a web designer, so I understand pixels and resolution and such. I'm also an amateur videographer once in awhile. I own Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9, and I was having no problems with it until I got my new camera.
I've always shot and edited in 4:3 before, and I recently noticed that YouTube has switched to widescreen. The black bars on the sides of my videos kinda drive me nuts, so I decided that my next camera would have to shoot in widescreen and have an external microphone jack, but be cheap and shoot in standard definition. With these parameters in mind, I finally settled on the Canon FS200, and I like the camera and the way it shoots and functions. However, when I started to try to edit the footage, I began to run into issues.
First of all, the files the camera makes are .MOD files. Windows Media Player can play them, but it plays them in 4:3 and everything looks skinny. After doing a bunch of research, I found a simple little executable called SDcopy that would batch convert them to .MPG files and "set the widescreen flag", whatever that means. After processing the files with SDcopy, now they are widescreen when I run them through Windows Media Player. Excellent, I think to myself, it's now time to edit.
The editing seems to go fine. I set my project to be the preset that's 720x480 because the Media Explorer in Vegas tells me that my files are that size. I do some quick editing and go to render. I tell it to render in 720x480, and I notice that the final .WMV that I make has letterboxing on the top and bottom of the file. This doesn't makes sense to me, as the source files are 720x480 and so is my final rendered file. I poke around with some other settings, but every render I make has the same letterboxing on the top and bottom. Then my web designer PhotoShop brain kicks in and I start checking actual sizes.
I open one of the clips in Windows Media Player and pause it. I take a screen shot and open that in Photoshop. I use the box tool to measure the actual viewable image of the video and it's 853x480, not 720x480, even though Vegas tells me the the clips are 720x480. In the final rendered file, the overall file is 720x480, but the viewable video area is only 720x396. It's very confusing.
So does anybody know what my problems are here? If there's some tutorials I should be looking at online to learn more about widescreen resolutions, I'd be glad to do so. If there's some special setting I should be tweaking in Vegas that I'm not used to since I only used to shoot in 4:3, then please let me know that, too. Whatever I can do to fix this issue, I'll do.
I'm a web designer, so I understand pixels and resolution and such. I'm also an amateur videographer once in awhile. I own Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9, and I was having no problems with it until I got my new camera.
I've always shot and edited in 4:3 before, and I recently noticed that YouTube has switched to widescreen. The black bars on the sides of my videos kinda drive me nuts, so I decided that my next camera would have to shoot in widescreen and have an external microphone jack, but be cheap and shoot in standard definition. With these parameters in mind, I finally settled on the Canon FS200, and I like the camera and the way it shoots and functions. However, when I started to try to edit the footage, I began to run into issues.
First of all, the files the camera makes are .MOD files. Windows Media Player can play them, but it plays them in 4:3 and everything looks skinny. After doing a bunch of research, I found a simple little executable called SDcopy that would batch convert them to .MPG files and "set the widescreen flag", whatever that means. After processing the files with SDcopy, now they are widescreen when I run them through Windows Media Player. Excellent, I think to myself, it's now time to edit.
The editing seems to go fine. I set my project to be the preset that's 720x480 because the Media Explorer in Vegas tells me that my files are that size. I do some quick editing and go to render. I tell it to render in 720x480, and I notice that the final .WMV that I make has letterboxing on the top and bottom of the file. This doesn't makes sense to me, as the source files are 720x480 and so is my final rendered file. I poke around with some other settings, but every render I make has the same letterboxing on the top and bottom. Then my web designer PhotoShop brain kicks in and I start checking actual sizes.
I open one of the clips in Windows Media Player and pause it. I take a screen shot and open that in Photoshop. I use the box tool to measure the actual viewable image of the video and it's 853x480, not 720x480, even though Vegas tells me the the clips are 720x480. In the final rendered file, the overall file is 720x480, but the viewable video area is only 720x396. It's very confusing.
So does anybody know what my problems are here? If there's some tutorials I should be looking at online to learn more about widescreen resolutions, I'd be glad to do so. If there's some special setting I should be tweaking in Vegas that I'm not used to since I only used to shoot in 4:3, then please let me know that, too. Whatever I can do to fix this issue, I'll do.