The video was shot by someone else. however he uses a camera like mine and I have edited his stuff before and have never seen the black bars. I asked him about it, but he said he had no idea - that he didn't do anything different. He uses FCP, so he didn't know if it was something to do with Vegas or not.

I hope I'll be able to pan/crop the entire video at once, but I'll look that up in the manual - I can't imagine having to do each event individually!

Thanks for your help.

lili

To do each event, start by doing one, then copy it, then select all other events that need this treatment, right click the first selected event, and choose "Paste Attributes"

That will save me tons of time!
Merci beaucoup!

lili

Before you go off cropping bits off I'd look at this in a bit more detail, perhaps nothings broke yet but fiddling with it could break it!
How big are these bars?
Is your project set to standard or widescreen and how about the media properties?
Sorry to ask so many questions but I've wasted a fair bit of time in the past fixing that which wasn't broke and oftenly breaking it in the process.
Bob.

Thanks Farss, I'll check out some of the settings and see what happens - will let you know if something else brings it back to normal.

lili

farss to the rescue! I checked my project settings in the project with the bars and I had changed to square pixels, instead of the standard. Reset it and voila, black bars disappeared.
thanks again :-)
lili

Dude... I've got Black Bars on the sides of a DVCam tape given to me. i see them in my capture preview and on my captured file. I'd rather not Pan/Crop after capture because I will lose resolution.

Am I overlooking something?

Does any of the above information in this old thread apply to you? If so... which bits? (how big are the balck bars etc etc)

Can you give us any info about the DVCAM tape footage... was it transferred from something else?

Black Bars:
4-6 pixels on Left & Right (not Top or Bottom)
Black Bars show up in VidCap & the Captured file
DVCam is Print to Tape from Avid Media Composer (supposedly full frame 720x480)
Tape plays back with NO Black Bars in Avid Media Composer

Vegas6b:
file>properties= NTSC DV (720x480, 29.970 fps)

VidCap6b:
options>preferences>preview= PixelAspectRatio (Automatic)
Base DV decoding resolution on Preview Window size

________________________________________

-They are telling me that their Full Frame export to tape is 720x480. Could it be that Media Composer is exporting Full Frame as a differnt size and Vegas is taking it in as 720x480?

I get that with any tape that comes from an original source format of Beta-SP (or some other broadcast camera). It's nothing to worry about. It is way outside the safe areas of a TV set.

In what way is this a problem for you?

It only really becomes of minor significance if your finished video will be shown on a PC (either as a DVD or as a some other format like WMV)... as then then small black bars will be visible.

The solution is possibly to put a mask over your entire project so that it adds black-bars on everything. That's likely going to be better than re-sizing the clips to remove the black-bars.

Could it be that Media Composer is exporting Full Frame as a differnt size ...

I just spoke to a buddy at a post house who has Media Composer and he tells me that it exports at 720 x 486.

Mike

This may not be at all relevant, but:

I do know that if you import a 4x3 aspect ratio still into Vegas, you'll get narrow black bars on the sides. That's because DV is actually a bit wider than a 4x3 aspect ratio.

So, I was wondering if you were trying to show video that was shot in a 4:3 format...

Here's the URL to the Avid forum where I asked the same question:
Black Bars on Sides of Final Video


In searching the Avid forums I also found these but did not help:
Quicktime Export Black Bars
titles and black bars in xpress hd

...still trying to find an answer.