Issue with 720x486 being distorted

GDUBS wrote on 10/22/2003, 10:40 AM
I have been having trouble with Mixing 720X486 files and 720x480 in my composition. I have my project settings at 720x486 but when I bring in a clip capured from my matrox digisuite it cropps like 20 pixels on the top and bottom but the DV footage is stretched 100% I've worked in vegas for about a half year and I am fairly fimiluar with the interface but this prob is stumping me.

Any help would be much appreciated
Greg

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 10/22/2003, 8:16 PM
That seems pretty odd. The usual vegas behavior is to scale things until one of the dimensions fits. It doesn't normally crop media.

Given your project size it ought to fit perfectly. I'd hunt through this site for mention of Digisuite. If I was going to make a guess I'd start with codecs (If the digisuite is even using one-DV should be a straight data dump but if you're digitizing from an analog source then a codec is involved.

Seems like I'd seen Huffyuv codec do this.

Others will have better ideas here.

Rob Mack
RBartlett wrote on 10/23/2003, 3:05 AM
The source file aspect ratio maybe exaggerating the rescale.
Remember that Sony/SoFo accurately describe AR, but others only copy their competitors and get the wrong figure into their projects and file headers.

Just a thought.
SonyEPM wrote on 10/23/2003, 9:28 AM
Hop over to the Vegas forum at www.creativecow.net and repost- one of the Vegas hosts there (Timothy Duncan) uses a digisuite all the time and I'm sure he can help you out.
John_Cline wrote on 10/23/2003, 10:08 AM
I have a DigiSuite and I also use a lot of footage (or would that be, "inchage"?) from Avid Media Composer. Both of these are 720x486.

I sometimes need to convert these formats to 720x480 DV. I have the Matrox and Avid codecs installed (both available for free) and use Virtual Dub (also free) to crop the bottom six lines off the video and compress it to DV. I pull the "inchage" into Virtual Dub and apply the "null filter" then click on the "cropping" button and remove the bottom six lines. (You can't take three of the top and three off the bottom, because that would mess up the field dominance.) I set the audio interleave to "0" preload and 250 ms interleave and save the file as a new DV AVI for subsequent editing in Vegas. While I've got the video in Virtual Dub, I will occasionally apply some other Virtual Dub filters depending on what the video looks like.

The only possible problem with this is if you don't have a third-party DV codec installed on your machine, since the Vegas DV codec is only available within Vegas itself. However, I seem to remember that when I installed the DigiSuite codec package, it came with a DV codec as well, although I replaced it with the Main Concept DV codec.

Going the Virtual Dub route may be a "longer route to India" but it works well and I can set up a batch render in Virtual Dub in case I have a lot of video clips to convert.

John
rmack350 wrote on 10/23/2003, 10:36 AM
Hi John,

Sometimes I work with still frames provided from our Media 100s. I usually crop 4 from the top and 2 from the bottom. Field dominance isn't an issue for me with stills but wouldn't this work for you?

It seems to me that gdubs should be able to put 720x486 media into a 720x486 project without cropping ahead of time.

Rob Mack
John_Cline wrote on 10/23/2003, 11:04 AM
Rob,

4 from the top and 2 from the bottom works too, as long as you crop an even (but not necessarily equal) number of lines from the top or bottom.

I just chose to take 6 off the bottom because there are occasionally some "head switching" artifacts on the bottom of the frame in the original analog footage and, if it's there, taking 6 off the bottom will deal with it. The problem gdubs was/is having is 720x486 media in a 720x480 DV project. 720x486 is not a "legal" size for DV. Of course, if I'm doing 720x486 and going back to Media Composer or the DigiSuite, I just set the project in Vegas to be 720x486 and render using either the Avid or Matrox codecs and it's not an issue.

John