Video quality on the timeline

svtdot wrote on 1/12/2010, 11:23 AM
I’m a Newbie to Vegas Movie Studio, but not to movie editing and have used both Pinnacle Studio and Ulead in the past.

Yesterday I loaded Platinum 8 onto my PC. I know it has been superseded but I bought it 18 months ago and serious illness has prevented me getting to grips with it until now. I did use a trial version first.

As a means of getting to know the software I have begun with a simple project. Target time 7 or 8 minutes prepared from about 30 minutes of standard definition video shot on my geriatric Panasonic NV-DS15.

Transfer of the DV went without a hitch. My usual technique then is to make a project of all the original material, get rid of all the really bad sections and then use it to navigate to find those shots I want to work on. The process has worked well for me in the past and the finished result seems fine as far as it went with the video quality on the timeline being as good as the original as far as I could see. I should add at this point that I use a second monitor to preview so that I can look for details that can be missed in the normal preview panel.

This all went well. I did it intuitively and didn’t bother with video settings and the like, for it was never my intention to render this project. I then started the real project in earnest. I used the wizard to set up the project for the end result: a PAL DVD.

As soon as I transferred the first stuff to the timeline it was obvious the video quality was much reduced in contrast to the quality of the clip in the trimmer. I have looked at the settings all seems OK. Reloading the unedited data project showed everything to be fine, clip and project data being identical.

I’m clearly doing something fundamentally wrong and I don’t want to spend hours on a project with a poor image quality. I’m sure it must have been reported before but searching the database has brought up nothing helpful.

Can some experienced person point me in the right direction?

SVT

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 1/12/2010, 1:22 PM
Use preview/auto on the preview dialog's settings, and make sure your project properties are correct. If your project properties are wrong, then things getting resized/changed in order to fit the wrong project profile.
svtdot wrote on 1/13/2010, 10:46 AM
Thanks Eugenia for your prompt reply.

It prompted a further investigation.

The following data is displayed below the Preview window for the unedited material.
Project 720x480x32 29.97i
Preview 360x240x32 29.97i
Display 327x240x32

With the project proper I have
Project 720x576x32 25.000i
Preview 180x144x32 25.000i
Display 262x192x32

In both cases the preview setting above the preview window is set to Best (Auto)

The dramatically lower figures for the project preview and display seem to supply a clue to what I am seeing.

Experimenting with Best (Full) gives the following:
Project 720x576x32 25.000i
Preview 720x576x32 25.000i
Display 787x576x32

The image quality on my preview monitor is notably better. I think I have solved it but it does conflict with your advice .about the preview dialog settings without I have misunderstood.

Any comment?

SVT
Eugenia wrote on 1/13/2010, 12:34 PM
Preview/auto allows for faster editing. Even if it drops some quality while editing, it will help you edit faster, and at the end you simply export in "Best" quality. So you lose nothing by using preview/auto while editing.
svtdot wrote on 1/14/2010, 6:45 AM
Thanks again for your reply.

Your comments make sense. Clearly Vegas Movie Studio is much sophisticated than I had realised, but then I chiefly bought it because of the ability to use another monitor to preview my work in progress, so this feature is right on the button for me.

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SVT