Mixed Footage

OhMyGosh wrote on 1/4/2010, 8:17 AM

For Christmas I received a Sony DSC-W290 point and shoot with video capabilities. It shoots 1280x720x24, 29.97Progressive MPEG-4 PAR 1.000 QuickTime. 95% of my projects are done with 1140x1080x32, 29.97Interlaced .m2t PAR 1.333 UFF with the final destination being DVD.
1. Can I put interlaced and progressive into the same project directly?
2. What happens by having two different PARs and frame sizes?
3. What should my project settings be. Should I set them to whichever video is used the most in the project?
4. What setting would I want to use for Rendering?
5. Anything else I should know about doing this?
Also, VMSP cannot preview these clips worth a damn, it looks like a train wreck! I have set the view to Draft>Quarter, and there is no difference. They play perfect in QuickTime Movie Player, in Windows Media Player the video is good, but no audio. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. Cin
Edit: Typo 1440, not 1140

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/4/2010, 12:30 PM

1 - Yes, especially if it's interlaced output. Generally progressive footage looks fine when converted to interlaced. It's when you go the other way that things get nasty.

2 - What happens is that Vegas takes care of all of the details for you. You should be able to ignore the issue completely. It's only when the camera doesn't include the PAR value in the file correctly that you have issues.

3 - If, and only if, your primary goal is fluid preview, you should set your project properties to match the source that gives you the most trouble. Aside from this one case you should be setting your project properties to match the output, in your case 720x480 29.97i for DVD.

4 - Whatever matches your DVD output, presumably 720x480 29.97i. I assume you're doing widescreen? In any case, choose the appropriate DVD Architect template when rendering MPEG2.

5 - Not much. If the preview problem really gets you down you could try transcoding to AVI. I believe the "pro" version of the QuickTime player will let you output in AVI rather quickly. After that Vegas won't have to use the QuickTime plugin to process the material and that should speed up the preview quite a bit.

OhMyGosh wrote on 1/5/2010, 7:54 AM

Thank you Kelly for the detailed explanation. I appreciate it as always. I will start messing with it in the next few weeks when I get caught up, and I'm sure I will have a few more questions, but that will clearly get the ball rolling :) Thanks again. Cin

OhMyGosh wrote on 1/10/2010, 11:37 PM

Confussed again (I know........didn't take long!). For my first project I am only going to use the footage from the Sony camera, so I matched the project properties to the media which gives me 1280x720x32, 29.97p. When I go to render and I select mpeg-2, I get the template 'HDV 720-p' with the description 'Audio: 384 Kbps, 48,000 Hz, Layer 2
Video: 29.97 fps, 1280x720
Use this setting to create an HDV 720-30p MPEG-2 file with .m2t extension.' I have never worked with Progressive footage before. If I leave it that way and burn my DVD (for TV only) will that work? Doesn't TV convert Interlaced to Progressive anyway, so maybe it will give the TV less to do? The other option would be to use the 'DVDA NTSC Widescreen Video Stream' with description 'Use this setting to create an NTSC Widescreen video-only MPEG-2 file compatible with DVD Architect.' Could someone please help point me in the right direction as to how to do this the best way possible? Thanks. Cin