How to crop entire output?

Reppy wrote on 4/24/2005, 2:50 AM

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here... I have looked in the mannual, but...

I've converted a lot of my Hi-8 work to DV (via a TRV480e Digital8 camcorder). The trouble is, threre's some distortion/warping on the bottom few lines of the image (I assume this is usually outside of the viewing area) and a green tinted strip down the right hand side. I believe the defects are common with analogue tapes?

How do I crop (?) these out for the entire duration of my rendered output?

Also, is there a filter I can use to fix the green tint strip, rather than cropping it out of view?

Comments

mel58i wrote on 4/24/2005, 3:18 AM

I've seen these problems myself on analogue transfers.
The lines at the bottom are where the heads switch on anal tape. Don't know about the green stripe.
You'll find that these effects don't show on a tv as the tv picture overscans.
I'm using Vegas 4 and I don't think there is any way to crop the entire output (much to the pity). If any cropping has to be done this has got to be on a event basis, ok if only one event but can be a swine if multiple events.

DelCallo wrote on 4/24/2005, 3:41 AM

BillyBoy has a tutorial on color correction in which he mentions the following which, although he is referring to color correction/color curves FX should apply to your situation:

FX applied to the track header will affect the entire track.
FX applied to the preview window will affect the entire project.
FX applied to an event will affect the event.

I do a lot of Hi8 to DV using Vegas, and others on this board echo the response given you as to the source of this edge distortion.

I usually import my footage, then crop and render it prior to any editing to eliminate the edge distortion. I then pull the rendered avi to the timeline and perform additional edits to the rendered file rather than the originally imported avi file.

If you have a lot of time invested in editing your project and need to eliminate edge distortion across many events, you could follow the info given by BillyBoy. You could also simply render your edited project to an avi file, drag that new file to the Vegas timeline, crop and render it one more time.

My guess is that you will not be able to detect any loss in quality - ah, such wonderful times we live in!!!

Good luck.

Caruso

Chienworks wrote on 4/24/2005, 3:50 AM

You could create a mask in any handy photo editor. Make a new image completely white at 654x480 (if you're in NTSC-land). Draw black bars on the edges of this image where you want to crop them out. Place this image on a new track above the video, stretch it out as long as your entire project, and set it's compositing mode to Multiply (Mask). Vegas will now black out the frame wherever there is black in the image.

rique wrote on 4/24/2005, 4:22 AM

If you want to crop everything you can create a new empty track at the top to use as a parent control track. Then select all tracks beneath it and click the "make compositing child" button to indent them all beneath the parent control track. On the top track use the Parent Motion button on the left to resize/move the entire output.

I think this is only possible with V5 and above.

Reppy wrote on 4/24/2005, 4:28 PM

Excellent! Thanks gents... It looks like there are several ways of achieving this. I really appreciate your help.