Capturing and burning questions

[MTD]

I'm using Sony Vegas 6 to record some footage. Does the program automatically record in DV-AVI format? I haven't found any options to change the format and I haven't found much on the net. I want to record in DV-AVI, so I want to make sure, because I want to get the best quality I can.

Also, the project will end up being over 3 hours. So that is a huge amount of gigs. DVDs can only hold 4.7 gigs, and I've heard about shrinking the file down using DVD Shrink or whatever. How does it do this, compression? Does it hurt the quality much?

So if my video will be about 3 hours and 20 minutes or so, how many discs would you break it up into?

[redwudz]

Are you transferring DV from a camera? DV is a little over 13GB/hour.

I wouldn't use Shrink at all. Just encode your DV to MPEG-2 with an encoder and make the bitrate low enough to fit everything on a DVD, approximately 4.37GB.

If you look in 'Tools' to the left you will find some bitrate calculators. Use one of them to determine the bitrate needed. 3 hours of video on a DVD won't be the best quality, though.

If you wanted to split the video, 2 DVDs would work fine.

[MTD]

Thanks, I think I will split the video into 2 discs. I'm transferring DV from a Sony camcorder, yeah. So lower the bitrate would utimately lower quality? The quality doesn't have to be top notch, I'm just making sure.

So I'm doing firewire from my camcorder to Vegas...I'll assume that is DV-AVI format?

[edDV]

I'm using Sony Vegas 6 to record some footage. Does the program automatically record in DV-AVI format? I haven't found any options to change the format and I haven't found much on the net. I want to record in DV-AVI, so I want to make sure, because I want to get the best quality I can.

File New

You are presented with supported project format choices. For Canada that would normally be NTSC DV 720x480 29.97 fps. You are given a choice to set this as your new file default.

MPeg2 encoding settings are found under "Render As".

[MTD]

Okay, figured as much, it just wasn't as obvious as Movie Maker.

Now I have a new problem...

I started my video, and it plays fine. I did a render of it to do a test. Basically the video is supposed to play, then there is a still image so the movie appears to "freeze" for a few seconds, then it carries on. But when I watch the rendered file the still images shake on two occasions (back and forth rapidly) and not much after on other occasions, if someone just moved their hand, then when the still image comes up, their hand is shaking like crazy.

I rendered it to Windows AVI, would rendering it to MPEG or something fix this?

[MTD]

This kind of relates to my last post. I've noticed horizontal lines and stuff on my video. It's noticeable to me and sort of bothers me. You mainly see when the camcorder moves. I think it's like this:

Why do I see "jaggies, artifacts, horizontal lines, or other strange lines" when I watch my video?
This is ALMOST always related to DV (interlaced) footage being displayed on a computer monitor. Computer monitors are progressive scan where one full frame of information is drawn at a time. Televisions are interlaced, and only drawn half a frame in two sequences at a time. Chances are, if you watch your video on a television, or if you burn a DVD for playback on television, you'll not see these artifacts.

It makes sense, but I'm not totally sure...

[edDV]

This kind of relates to my last post. I've noticed horizontal lines and stuff on my video. It's noticeable to me and sort of bothers me. You mainly see when the camcorder moves. I think it's like this:

Why do I see "jaggies, artifacts, horizontal lines, or other strange lines" when I watch my video?
This is ALMOST always related to DV (interlaced) footage being displayed on a computer monitor. Computer monitors are progressive scan where one full frame of information is drawn at a time. Televisions are interlaced, and only drawn half a frame in two sequences at a time. Chances are, if you watch your video on a television, or if you burn a DVD for playback on television, you'll not see these artifacts.

It makes sense, but I'm not totally sure...

That is what interlaced sources look like on a progressive display. You are seeing two fields offset in time 1/60 sec.

Vegas supports direct monitoring on a TV via your camcorder (or DV transcaoder) connected IEEE-1394. That way you see exactly what the interlaced video looks like.