I recently finished a 3.5 hour DVD from a 3-camera shoot. I learned a few things and in the spirit of community decided to compile my list to share with my fellow Vegas video editors. Some (mabe all) of the items have already appeared in this forum so please forgive any redundancy.
We shot with three Panasonic HMC-150's. I edited with Vegas 10e. I would have liked to do the project in my Vegas 11, but I don't yet have confidence in its stability on my PC. In over 50 hours of editing and countless hours of rendering over almost two weeks, I had exactly two Vegas crashes. Interestingly, the first was in the first hour of the first day of editing, the second was on the last day of editing. Good enough for me.
Here are things I learned:
Time code syncing Before the shoot I tested Vegas' ability to sync the footage based on synced time codes in the three cams. It didn't work - apparently because if can't sync if the first few frames don't contain the time code. Well that disappointed me. Why can't Vegas just read out to the 10th frame, for example, and use that as the sync point. I slated every scene and synced from that, no problem. I would have done this anyway as a fallback for syncing.
Multi-cam editing In general this worked really well in Vegas. Due to the nature of my project there was only one event that needed to be moved to another location. But there were quite of few places where we decided to rethink our cuts and this was quite easy in Vegas multi-cam. One minor annoyance and a workaround had to do with cropping. I had one stationary (unmanned) cam that needed a slight crop. I cropped it before invoking multi-cam but then realized my crops were lost in multi-cam. So I used this process to apply the desired crop to 100+ stationary cam events:
1. Cropped the first event.
2. Copied the crop.
3. Went to Edit Details, sorted by takes, selected all the stationary cam takes, right clicked one of these on the timeline, and pasted event attributes. This applied the crop to all the stationary cam events. One problem - Vegas doesn't support Windows multi-select in the Edit Details dialog so I had to repeat down arrow/space bar 100+ times to select my events.
HD to DVD. I've always shot progressive. Experts on the HMC-150 forums, recomend shooting 720p60 if you plan to resize for DVD. Enough people here suggest shooting 1080i that I decided to give it a try. Surprisingly, it worked well. I know that 1080 has more chroma info, and the conversion from 1080i to 480i looks as good as the conversion from 720p60 to 480p30. John Cline describes in these forums how Vegas handles the 1080i to 480i and I think he is right. When I get a chance I do want to try the Yadif plugin approach though.
DVDA and Dual layer 8.5GB discs I was unable to get DVDA 5.2 to correctly set the dual layer break point. I wanted it to break at a chapter point. Instead I prepared the project using DVDA 5.2 and then burned to Disc using ImgBurn. ImgBurn let me select and preview the chapter point as the layer break.
All in all I was pretty satisfied with the multi-cam editing experience. Feel free to add any of your multi-cam findings to this thread.
EDIT: Changed "Event Details" to "Edit Details"
/jerry
We shot with three Panasonic HMC-150's. I edited with Vegas 10e. I would have liked to do the project in my Vegas 11, but I don't yet have confidence in its stability on my PC. In over 50 hours of editing and countless hours of rendering over almost two weeks, I had exactly two Vegas crashes. Interestingly, the first was in the first hour of the first day of editing, the second was on the last day of editing. Good enough for me.
Here are things I learned:
Time code syncing Before the shoot I tested Vegas' ability to sync the footage based on synced time codes in the three cams. It didn't work - apparently because if can't sync if the first few frames don't contain the time code. Well that disappointed me. Why can't Vegas just read out to the 10th frame, for example, and use that as the sync point. I slated every scene and synced from that, no problem. I would have done this anyway as a fallback for syncing.
Multi-cam editing In general this worked really well in Vegas. Due to the nature of my project there was only one event that needed to be moved to another location. But there were quite of few places where we decided to rethink our cuts and this was quite easy in Vegas multi-cam. One minor annoyance and a workaround had to do with cropping. I had one stationary (unmanned) cam that needed a slight crop. I cropped it before invoking multi-cam but then realized my crops were lost in multi-cam. So I used this process to apply the desired crop to 100+ stationary cam events:
1. Cropped the first event.
2. Copied the crop.
3. Went to Edit Details, sorted by takes, selected all the stationary cam takes, right clicked one of these on the timeline, and pasted event attributes. This applied the crop to all the stationary cam events. One problem - Vegas doesn't support Windows multi-select in the Edit Details dialog so I had to repeat down arrow/space bar 100+ times to select my events.
HD to DVD. I've always shot progressive. Experts on the HMC-150 forums, recomend shooting 720p60 if you plan to resize for DVD. Enough people here suggest shooting 1080i that I decided to give it a try. Surprisingly, it worked well. I know that 1080 has more chroma info, and the conversion from 1080i to 480i looks as good as the conversion from 720p60 to 480p30. John Cline describes in these forums how Vegas handles the 1080i to 480i and I think he is right. When I get a chance I do want to try the Yadif plugin approach though.
DVDA and Dual layer 8.5GB discs I was unable to get DVDA 5.2 to correctly set the dual layer break point. I wanted it to break at a chapter point. Instead I prepared the project using DVDA 5.2 and then burned to Disc using ImgBurn. ImgBurn let me select and preview the chapter point as the layer break.
All in all I was pretty satisfied with the multi-cam editing experience. Feel free to add any of your multi-cam findings to this thread.
EDIT: Changed "Event Details" to "Edit Details"
/jerry