If image quality is a consideration, here's an interesting test a visitor dropped on the Vegas COW forum a while back:

The center image is the original image uncompressed.

The surrounding 8 images are compressed and recompressed ten times using the indicated codecs.

The outermost 8 images are the results of a difference-filter applied between the original and the re-compressed images. The resulting images indicate the degredation due to compression.

Each image is a link to the full screen version:

http://195.2.110.74/~daliv/video/codec_compare.html

Sorry, english version is no longer available.


Cheers, MPH

You can also pan and zoom your stills with Vegas Video for some interesting effects.
Vegas does not burn DVD discs directly. It does render to the needed MPEG-2 file type for either PAL or NTSC. If you plan to add chapters you'll need some DVD editor package also. If you're on a budget take a look at Ulead's DVD Movie Factory or one of the other applications others have suggested in other threads.

If you project is going to be rather extensive and you have Photoshop or some similar image enhancement software I would suggest you do any color correction in that application prior to dropping them on the timeline. Other threads tell how to change the duration between images and add a whole range of files at once to the timeline. etc..

<<<< I would like an editor I can "grow into" vs. one I'll be continually upgrading. I am not a professional like many of you, >>>>

You can definatly grow into Vegas! I've been using it for a few months now, and the possibilities seem endless.

I'm not a professional either, this is just my new hobby.

Thanks for all the help. I've ordered the new "bundled" version of VV3 and am really looking forward to getting started. I have several LE additions of different video editors including; Power Director Pro, Video Wave and a few others. All were fine, but I immediately found that I needed the full version to do what I need. That's when the search began. I've been using Photoshop for many years as well as the Buzz Board installed in my old computer for analog video and audio capture. All projects were sent back out to VHS and they turned out good. I've been reading one of the other threads regarding a picture Montage. He mentions that he has better results by scanning pictures into VV3 while in VV3? Is that correct? Most of my picture scans are .jpgs and are archived in in various sizes but most are greater than the 640x480 dpi mentioned. I have no problem resizing them, but do I need to before I import them into VV3's library for a project? My output for my first project will be a DVD played on a TV. Thanks, sorry for what was probably a stupid question.

I have yet to see a scanned image that probably couldn't be "improved" by processing it through Photoshop or GIMP. That's just me, being a knob twister and nitpicker. If you're comfortable with Photoshop and routinely use levels, curves, adjustment layers, etc., you probably can rapidly move though a series of still images that way faster than applying similar filters in Vegas.

I don't see any problem using images larger then the suggested size as source files. In fact if you're going to do any panning or zooming, you'll be better off. You can introduce some minor problems using source files smaller than suggested, so I would avoid that. If need be use Photoshop on smaller images to 'blow them up' to the miminal size as a preprocessing step while maintaining aspec ratio.

"If need be use Photoshop on smaller images to 'blow them up' to the miminal size as a preprocessing step while maintaining aspec ratio"

What is the minimum size, is it the 640x480?

See the video montage thread where there's a discussion that the best size is 655x480 unless you're doing pan and zoom in which case higher resolution works better because of the movement involved the extra bits should keep things smoother and less pixelated.

This is a little confusing to me also. Most of the images I've used were substationally larger then either 640x480 or 655x480 and using those I saw no distortion and was perfectly happy with the results. The difference between these two really deals with 'square' pixels and keeping proper aspect ratios to avoid distortion.

Now to just muddy the waters try this. Load a 1024x768 image into Photoshop. Be sure constrain proportions is checked then use image size to change the width to 640. The height gets changed automatically to 480. A 4/3 aspect ratio just as you would expect.

I understand the math as Sonic Foundry explained it in the other thread as to what happens inside Vegas Video. Now here is where I'm confused. If as suggested you start out with 655x480 does not doing so distort the source image or is the suggestion not to simply resize, rather CROP to those dimensions using a larger source file to begin with?

Confused? Me too! So I am asking is this really the proper thing to do, that is start off with a aspect ratio that isn't perfectly 4/3 which unless I'm missing something will distort the source file ever so slightly. Would it not be better to start out with larger source images that mantain 4/3 ratio and just let Vegas Video do its thing?

That's what I would think, but it "seems" from the montage thead that this isn't the best output. Is there an option to actually scan an image into VV3 as mentioned in the Montage thread?

>>>If as suggested you start out with 655x480 does not doing so distort the source image or is the suggestion not to simply resize, rather CROP to those dimensions using a larger source file to begin with?

the suggested method *is* in fact to CROP to 655x480. it is easiest for me to think of it as making people fatter or skinnier in your pictures. when you crop your image to 655x480 in photoshop, the people in the picture will not be any fatter or skinnier than they should be since we aren't distorting the image in any way.

but when you drop that 655x480 image into Vegas, the idea is it will stretch horizontally to fill the 720x480 preview window (assuming we are talking NTSC DV).

unless you have "Square Pixels" turned on (which I don't recommend because performance will be affected if you are editing DV video) the people in your picture should look fatter than normal since the pic is stretched 65 pixels horizontally.

when the project is viewed on an NTSC screen, the people will look normal.