Bob, OP is shooting HDV on the FX1, not SD.
The previous confusion was about 1440 ana ->1920 DAR, not the slight diff between SD and HD 16:9. I "think" we got that one cleared up.

....Certainly saw the camera chip requirements in PBS' most current specs, and expect to cross that bridge in a bit. It may or may not kill the project ultimately, as there are certainly programs hitting air that use lots of material that is older than current standards, but I will accept whatever happens as we get there.

.....I do not claim, as clearly stated, to be a seriously experienced video editor (though my claims on the audio front are quite serious), but, having worked in and on countless media productions for a very long time, I do not think the idea of allowing others with greater expertise to work on my projects is exactly a foreign concept for any pro. I appreciate the concern expressed, but you have to realize that I am not a youngster and was working on serious projects at the national level.....for broadcast....20 years ago....., and was running very large crews for live broadcasts in television for years on end...Not tooting my horn here, since I know I don't know anything like everything about everything, just letting you know that I understand my strengths and weaknesses and what it takes, and how many different people it takes, to make a project come together at times, and how one team member can wear multiple hats.......Like I say, thanks for the concerns.

I think the last flurry of posts rounds out a nice basis on which to test and set up my workflow here. Thank you very much, folks.

I have to go out of town tomorrow, so will likely not get to the full tests until Friday. I will report back in.....and pose more questions if they arise.

Musicvid said:

[I]"Bob, OP is shooting HDV on the FX1, not SD."[/I]
I know, that's why I quoted the PBS requirements for HD content delivery.


[I]"The previous confusion was about 1440 ana ->1920 DAR, not the slight diff between SD and HD 16:9. I "think" we got that one cleared up. "[/I]
I hope so too but this thread is all over the place and the OP hasn't acknowledged that plus at one point he was talking about delivery on Digital Betacam.

Bob.

....Just to be clear, my comment about DigiBeta was in reference to the real call in PBS specs for delivery of anamorphous versions, which might possibly be speced to deliver on DigiBeta, as that was a standard def way to deliver a 16:9 "squeezed" picture. I don't remember at the moment whether DigiBeta is the speced format for that, but it is a possibility, and the decks are still in circulation and use in the PBS system.

I hope my "all over the place" comments aren't confusing anyone, but you should realize that the current spate of formats, even staying in hi def, is "all over the place", and having to deal with this is at the heart of my set of questions and should be of concern to all.

More as I find out more.

Mudsmith,
I know plenty of people in the same situation as yourself.
Don't try to dive in too deep at the get go or you'll drown. Most of what you're worrying about doesn't really matter until the end of the edit. Get the camera issue sorted first. If that's not a show stopper get vision locked, get sound done and then worry about delivery.

In the 10 years I've been in this game I've only read of one instance of someone having to redo the edit of a feature and that was because of confusion over 23.976 fps and 24.000 fps. If that guy had Vegas he could have fixed even that with a few clicks of the mouse but instead he had to go back and redo every edit.

Bob.

Bob: . . but instead he had to go back and redo every edit.

That is too awful . . . . .

- g

Although I appreciate the concern expressed, I have to admit that I find it surprising that all these concerns are being raised about me essentially asking some fairly direct questions about workflow and delivery techniques....even when I am getting different answers from different folks who have had to deal with the same issues on multiple occasions, which means that there are multiple takes and opinions on the issue.

We would all be wasting a lot less bandwidth if folks stopped assuming I am an amateur or in over my head, and concentrate on the core workflow and quality issues I am asking to be informed about.....pretty specific stuff, really.

The ultimate set of responses I have gotten have been helpful. I will put them to good use. As a 65 year old with 40 plus years in the business and 20 years in television-specific national broadcast situations, I assure you that I can navigate the waters I find myself in.

Will check back in after doing testing tomorrow.

same sort of background as mudsmith....

i use hdv straight from camera on tl. i do nearly* everything within vegas, incl cc'ing, etc.,

frankly, (and not wishing to appear contrary or belittling to the many very professional users here), i find all the talk about intermediaries, proxies, etc., (in reference solely to hdv) rather obtuse - having tried numerous workflows suggested in this forum, (intermeds, proxies, frameserving, etc.,) the end result simply wasn't worth the time, effort, cost - my clients were just as happy with an edit from hdv as they were from say, mxf...

what is important is CONTENT - i see an awful lot of beautifully shot, exquisitely graded material everywhere nowadays. most of it is just that, beautiful pictures with nothing to say - all surface, no depth ' all froth, no beer.

anyway, back to the point (is there one?) - i'm not talking about heavy duty compositing, nor grading to cinema release quality or the like, but producing regular, commercial quality productions (that make a profit for me and my clients).

*i do some bells and whistles stuff (openers, closers, bumpers, etc.,) but usually in ae.

**i am seriously looking at bm pocket camera simply because i love the 13 stops latitude and the ability to use resolve for grading - but this is more for MY value adding rather than client expectations.

***i've found hdv shot under controlled lighting to be simply astounding

Just to follow on from what Leslie has said;
mudmsith said:
[I]"concentrate on the core workflow and quality issues I am asking to be informed about.....pretty specific stuff, really."[/I]

There's no one core workflow that everyone uses, there are many ways to skin a cat with Vegas. Even more to the point if you find you've gone down a path that isn't working for you it isn't a dead end, it's very easy to change paths. Let's say I had simply captured 50 hours of tape and started cutting it all in the one project and then realised I should have split it up into scenes or reels, this is simple to do using copy and paste between projects.

The same goes for any quality issues. I'm with Leslie here however if you want to try what others do, again it's easy enough to change your mind once you've finished the edit or half way through. Scripts and various tools make doing any repetitive task in Vegas very easy. I really cannot even imagine a way with Vegas you can start off on the wrong foot and get yourself into a lot of grief.

This is why there's so many varied answers, none are wrong and it's really up to you to find which works best for you. There's only one word of caution I'd offer is the above only applies until you've locked vision, before you start laying in music.

Bob.

""

+1

Often, just getting there is the greatest accomplishment . . .

just to add....

i have seen a ever growing trend over the last few years to try and, shall we say, reach for absolute pixel perfection, to squeeze every last drop of resolution from the source footage, even (impossible as it is) to improve the originals quality...

whilst i applaud the professionals stance that the client deserves the best possible outcome for his investment, it should be tempered with a degree of practicality (time vs cost vs quality*), and the awareness that we are no longer talking about the difference between vhs and betacam, which even ones grandmother would notice, but of subtle differences more than likely only discernible to the profession within the field, and certainly not to your average client / consumer.

i suppose it, as ever, comes down to the professionals knowledge of making the most of his tools, and realizing that though hdv IS NOT 35mm, with judicious lighting, good camera work, smooth editing, and of course a good script, ones client would never know ;-)

*funny, the speed / cost / quality paradigm is still 100% as true as it ever was ;-)

Pixel-peep syndrome (coined by Nick Hope), is most often the domain of overenthusiastic, but underexperienced hobbyists; otoh those who rely on editing for a portion of their incomes soon realize that time is money, and spending hours or days chasing some theoretical advantage will only hurt the producer / client relationship, not improve it. It's door-to-door time that impresses clients, not microscopic comparisons.

It's worth noting that x264 encoding presets are named in order of the time they take, not quality , for instance Superfast, Medium, Slow, VerySlow, etc. (the slower encodes produce bigger files and supposedly better quality).

Some initial test results and conclusions about apect ratio, followed by some other commentary:

After a considerable bit of testing and some serious scanning of the manual while referring back to all the advice and data given here, I think I have some fairly solid conclusions about rendering to 1920x1080 from a Vegas project utilizing HDV video clips.

If you bear with me, I will try to lay out what I think were the logical problems facing me, wrap that and a couple of other things up, then exit this discussion and come back if I have any thing significant to say about "proxies" or "intermediates" (I have to admit that I was intrigued by the comment above that Cineform avis edited "like butter", but may not need this so much now that I am using the much more powerful computer in my arsenal, so......)

To begin with, if you recall from the top, my dilemma was that I felt my rendered files were playing back with pillars on the HDV material. The BluRay I burnt seemed to play just fine on one of my primary LCD monitors, but seeing that I can stretch SD broadcasts on that monitor to fill the screen, the waters are muddied considerably in figuring out whether I have really produced an unpillared 1920x1080......Likewise, simply determining the aspect ratio of the file produced will not assure me that pillars do not exist within it, and are simply filling up the frame to match that aspect ratio.

What I needed to determine was whether the file would play back on my computer or,say, YouTube, without pillars.

Backtracking through all the suggested settings, I found that I had been using these to begin with. I did make a couple of additional adjustments based on things implied in the manual, but am not convinced that these had any effect on the essential pixel layout horizontally and vertically.

After doing a few test runs and viewing the resultant files with Windows Media Player on one of my better LCD monitors with native 1920x1080, I believe I have determined that my concerns before were based solely on the Windows mechanism of first displaying the file at less than full screen size, with the option of displaying full screen.

I was always wary of this full scree option because of the ability of these monitors (and your computer) to "stretch to fit", and with 1440 being a much more subtle stretch to 1920 than some other formats, I was concerned that I would not be sure that there was a stretch going on.

However, after some careful observations about the relationship of top, bottom and sides to edge of picture content, and careful observation of the way the picture expands to full screen, that the full screen version is neither stretching nor losing anything.

I think what had thrown me initially was that Windows was using the top and bottom for menu bars in the reduced version, while seemingly having pillars at the sides.

I really don't know that I have any other way to test this. I did observe an online version of the original render of the trailer I did for the parent production company for the project, and it seems to be also at the correct ratio, as well....However, since the parent company is originally an LA based, Apple-Centric group and they have shuttled the thing through Quck Time and have compressed it yet again, the waters are more muddied there than I would like. When I looked at it before loading Quick Time (on this laptop), the quality was massively better, but the whole thing was displayed in an appropriately sized box inside a 4x3 frome. When I loaded Quick Time on this laptop, the quality really went south, but the picture was now in an appropriate letterbox inside the same 4x3 frame.........

All in all, the 1920x1080 renders.do seem to be working, and were working prior to this. That is good and I thank you all for your input again.

-------------------------------

SMART RENDERING: Reading the manual, there is an indication that Smart Rendering requires the project and destination settings (including aspect ratio/h and v pixels) to agree. This calls into a question a couple of things for me: Can you really rely on editing all the way through (including creating any rendered motion or stills and such) at 1440x1920 and expect to have the results you want?.....or perhaps the manual is misleading in this regard.....worth a thought.

----------------------------

PROXIES and/or INTERMEDIATES: As stated above, I don't really think I will have a lot to add at this point without some other serious, and lengthy, testing, and will start a new thread if I ever get there. It seems to me that there are two possible relevant issues, however, that might transcend, in some situations, the expedience factor: 1)The stated "edits like butter", but this may only apply to the less powerful systems. Hard to say. 2)Cineform's ability to withstand more processing without degradation. Again, I am sure this is in the eye of the beholder to some extent, but it got my attention. Will let you know if I ever get a chance to make inroads into answering these two questions.

---------------------------------

Content over whiz bang, per the comment a few posts above. Let me waste a bit of bandwidth in responding:

I couldn't agree more. A few years ago, I was playing a National Symphony recording I had made, and one of my siblings was waxing eloquent about what a great recording it was, I suddenly felt very embarrassed by this, and the whole situation changed me. The reason I was embarrassed was that what was great was the music, not particularly anything I had done.....and I also knew that my work was not all that special.

I am certainly experienced in the audio world, and capable of great sophistication in the manipulation in the sonic realm, but I realized that anything I did beside just letting the music come out was almost BS. This altered my whole approach to everything I did in my professional work, and undercut my ever again getting a swelled head about my audio skills, and just increased my admiration for the skill of others.....while diminishing both these when compared to the skill of the musicians and composers.

The same is certainly true of any storytelling with picture. All we can really do is let the story get out, let the art get out. All the fluff on top is meaningless. Even if titilating and exciting, all the technique in the world will never bring more heft to a thin story or bad music......and too much fluff can get seriously in the way.

Let us all hope we can see the forest rather than the trees......not always easy, but it is possible.

.

[I]"SMART RENDERING: Reading the manual, there is an indication that Smart Rendering requires the project and destination settings (including aspect ratio/h and v pixels) to agree. This calls into a question a couple of things for me: Can you really rely on editing all the way through (including creating any rendered motion or stills and such) at 1440x1920 and expect to have the results you want?.....or perhaps the manual is misleading in this regard.....worth a thought."[/I]

Yes because for the most part with Vegas editing at 1440x1080 is one thing.
Rendering from that Timeline to 1920x1080 is quite another. Only one of your project setting matter and in any case you can change your project settings.

Now smart rendering requires not only what you've stated but also that the source and destination codec be the same. So one can render from HDV 1440x1920 to HDV 1440x1080 and apart from the incomplete GOPs and assuming no FXs are applied then Vegas is simply copying data from the source file(s) to the destination file.

You mentioned "rendered motion", perhaps from a 3rd party app. I would recommend some caution here, that is a valid concern.
Given that you seem settled on delivering 1920x1080 then make certain that your rendered motion matches that and the frame rate you intend to deliver e.g. 60i.

Bob.

By "rendering motion" I was referring, in this instance, to some zoom and pan motion we had placed on stills. We had in some cases pre-rendered this as a video to place on the timeline, other cases did not. We could have, and no doubt will in the future, also have created text motion in some way.

We pre-rendered in this instance because the motion was not playing back well in real time on the time line in the less powerful computer I was using, especially with all the audio and visual plugins we had piled on. We wanted to make sure we knew what we were seeing, and the stills were already heavily enhanced with the On One fractal enlargement software, so we felt comfortable with fixing the end results beforehand.

The concern was that any pre-rendered video like this should be, I would guess, in the eventual format to be rendered......since I don't know what the rendering would do to something in the 1440x1080 format created this way.

Likewise, the additional concern was to prep by cropping, panning and zooming to stills if they were processed in this way, even without motion, in the 1440X1080 format prior to rendering at 1920x1080.

The conclusion I had drawn, and still am leaning toward, was that it was therefore better to create the original project at 1920x1080 from the outset to avoid any of these issues. I am not entirely clear of the downsides to this when working with HDV, but others have recommended here doing the initial edit at 1440x1080, so I feel I need to pay attention to their advice.

Using what I would guess would best be called "intermediaries" with Cineform avis, of course, bypasses this issue entirely.

Thus the whole set of questions being raised......which I hope to be able to answer a little more deeply, at least for myself, in the next couple of weeks.

I am currently feeling pretty good about working with the straight, original HDV material in a 1920x1080 project, but will investigate the Cineform process more and start a new thread if I find anything out that seems worth sharing.....I will also try to pay some attention to the third party suggestions for aiding in the very extensive damage control we have to do for color and overall visuals in many of the interview and field segments that were taped.

As I said earlier, my partner, the overall director and producer of this project, has a much better eye than I do for the visuals, having been a commercial photographer for some time, and being fairly experienced in Photoshop.....We will stumble along together and see what we can come up with.

Even though there is no money flowing at the moment, we feel the project content and mission are worth the effort, and are currently feeling a bit more sanguine about more money coming in.

My process, with my avowed expertise in audio, may still seem backwards to some of you, but I am also quite good at editorial overview and critique, so it works out in the end as long as there are others around to help with fine tuning the picture......Also, Vegas' massive superiority for audio mixing, editing and processing makes some of the traditional workflow (i.e.- always lock picture prior to really mixing or fixing audio) not so necessary. Additionally, on this project, there are massive audio problems that make it very difficult to even look at a cuts-only edit, so my audio work has needed to be there very early on in the process......music will obviously still be the last addition, however.

The whole NLE thing has really change all this for most of us, when you think about. When I was mixing my first audio for documentaries for broadcast in the early to mid 90s, Avid was not able to output anything other than a horribly pixelated working cut with an EDL that would travel with all the original tapes to a post house for an online final edit.......The post houses we used in those days have now all shut their doors for good, but part of the handwriting was already on the wall back then because folks like me were taking the mix out of their hands with early DAW usage.

And the budgets keep getting smaller, and the workflow keeps changing to accommodate those budgets.

You can edit native 1440x1080 in a 1920x1080 project without affecting its state, resolution, or ability to smart render. It will preview more smoothly in native project format (with Simulate aspect "Off"), however.

I stated that in this thread several days ago. The rest of what you have talked about in subsequent posts, I do not understand, sorry.

musicvid10-

I am pretty sure I understood what you were saying in the earlier post.

There are so many issues about what effects smooth preview, and so many opinions about this and the whole process of achieving the best render, that I think this thread points out the density and confusion around these issues.

I know it certainly confuses me, and I can use all the input I can get as I try to make sense of assembling the right combination of hardware pieces, third party software and workflow process to end up with an efficient path to a relatively high quality end result.

Thanks again for your and everyone else's input.

i thought mudsmith was preparing digital assets for broadcast so why all this "testing" about the quirks of Windows Media Player and Quiktime .mov loss of holding aspect ratio. These are all well-known well tested issues of PC playback. I don't get the relevance to broadcasting.

How do you propose an absolute test of the visual properties of the file you prepare? That is the reason for the testing, and the reason for that portion of the questions.

With monitors and computers able to stretch and zoom an input file to fill any particular screen, how would I really know that my 1440x1080 product rendered to 1920x1080 would not have pillars?

I was looking for input on the subject from other experienced users. Using their input and suggestions, I ran tests in different ways on the same project which seemed to present itself with pillars last year in some situations.

I certainly cannot afford to have the file printed to HDCAM (primarily delivery mode speced for PBS) and have it come out pillared if there is any way around it. I can't determine if that will happen, frankly, without taking a file to our local dub and transfer facility and paying serious money to have them make the transfer. I also don't want the file to appear in any other distributed medium (and YouTube, Quicktime and WMP are certainly a medium for virtually everything that is distributed elsewhere) with pillars if it can be avoided......nor do I want to rely on someone else to reformat it if pillars exist in the file if the reformatting has any chance of degrading the picture.

So, the question involves some very real issues that I think were ultimately answered correctly by responders in this thread.........I would love to hear other suggestions for testing.....i.e., other ways to make sure that the file does not contain pillars, or other methods for insuring decent display for any end user.

As to how well tested and understood all of these translations are, I would question that.....Just try looking through the various considerations for the "best" way to submit to YouTube or some similar site is. Frankly, most of the time I ask these questions of folks who use such methods regularly, I get a blank stare back, so.....

I readily admit my ignorance, which is why I am asking questions here, and why I am trying to find ways to verify on my own. I am always trying to figure out what is going on under the hood with software before moving on into new territory. Maybe no one else is, but that is just my way of operating. I need to understand first.

I think the whole discussion also revealed some very real issues about 10 bit or 8 bit delivery (both just "digital assets" as would a 720p file be, or any file in a multitude of different codecs), about which there seems to be some disagreement, so I hope the whole thing is instructive for all in the end.

The number of different codecs and standards in our new hi def world are sort of mind boggling, frankly. I certainly need help navigating through the mess. I know that every broadcast outlet, and every remote TV truck/trailer are confronting these issues on a daily basis.

Indicated workflow, mudsmith has suggested? > get to HDCAM?(don't you mean to say HDCAM-SR?) for PBS Broadcast ?
Then HDV edited project from FX1 camera, limited app of efx, and limited color grading - send to rendered file of 1920 x 1080 pixel aspect 1.0 ,? soundtrack? - forward to HDCAM conversion and delivery to PBS affiliate?
Then check with local affiliate to be sure they will broadcast at the full aspect in the broadcast chain to their uplink?

you can find specs here:

http://www.pbs.org/producing/red-book/

having been involved in the production of numerous programs for a variety of broadcasters over the years all i can say is READ the specs CAREFULLY.

i know of NO broadcaster willing to take a program originated with ANY prosumer 3 x 1/3 chipped camera. i think the upper limit usage was maybe 25% within a program. mind you, i'm sure they'd make exceptions for unique footage - but even then, NOT a program entirely shot on it.

hdv was never to my knowledge an acceptable production format.

times might have changed....

Camera chip requirements aside, it looks like one could possibly satisfy the PBS delivery requirements in Vegas by:

1. Editing in Vegas' native RGB preview space (wysiwyg);
2. Slapping the Computer->Studio RGB filter on the output (hard-clamping waveform to 0-100%);
3. Rendering to 1080 4:2:2 DNxHD 145.

Hmm, where did I read something like that before? Could it really be that simple?