I'm having a lot of fun with HD video. I'm hoping that others are seeing that HD video will be the standard for home video, but with that comes challenges. The hardest part is dealing with the tools we have for editing video; it's not a seamless environment yet. I can't take stuff I've captured in Sony Vegas and easily use it in Windows Movie Maker. Similarly, if I want to capture something in WMM, it doesn't come in seamlessly into Sony Vegas.For example, recently our family took a camping trip to Mammoth Lakes. I had set up our camera and filmed 40+ minutes of us setting up the tent. Obviously, I didn't want to have people watch a full 40 minutes, I wanted to speed it up but with variable speeds, slower at the beginning, faster in the middle, slower at the end.
Windows Movie Maker only has the ability to increase the speed by powers of 2 (double, quadruple, etc.) by applying the Speed Up, Double effect up to 6 times. Even with my custom effects for speed (that allow other speed rates), I couldn't get the effect I wanted. So I switched to Sony Vegas Pro 8. For some reason it didn't like the dvr.ms format that I captured in WMM. So I had to recapture it in Vegas. That was okay, but then I found that Sony Vegas doesn't let you speed up more than 4 times. Since I wanted to get our 40 minutes down to about 1 minute, it meant I would need multiple passes.
My plan was to do the first pass in Sony Vegas with variable speeds, then do an overall speed up using Movie Maker. Things were going fine... I did the first pass and saved the clip in a high-bitrate WMV format. Then I brought it into WMM and applied the speed effect to get it down to a minute. I published the movie.
What I discovered was that WMM took only the top, left corner of the video. So rather than thinking I had 1920x1080 video, it saw it as 720x480 and only took those pixels in the upper right. I'm thinking it must be related to the format that Sony exports in that it must not be *true* WMV format, or is otherwise causing WMM to get confused.
In the end, I had to do all the work in Sony Vegas with about 3 (or was it 4) passes there. The result is great, but it took a lot more time than I thought it should. I hope we get to the point where things will be seamless and all formats will be recognized. Will we get there? Who knows?
I have the same problem. Windows DVD Maker burned only the top corner of my captures as well. How do you get the whole HD image to be resized to the DVD resolution?
ReplyDeleteI have perfect HD video in WMM but when I publish it goes from wide back to squished into a box with black left and right side strips. I've done 16:9 and tried a lot of different options. Any ideas? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteActually, WMM and Sony Vegas can pass, but most of the time, it is the programming in the computer. Ever see someone render a video in WMM and they have half of the screen is green? That is b/c you have to reinstall the program due to the fact it doesn't COME with all of those extra codecs needed to compress videos like AVIs and WMVs down to what you need. The codec WMV COMES with the comp, but when you render in WMM, it runs through the pixels quickly and compresses them, whereas Vegas runs through the pixels one at a time, constantly running through each frame individually (which takes hours, but that's beyond the point), which leans seamless playback for your Media Player b/c the codec is uncompressed. While WMM doesn't know how to HANDLE uncompressed data and will either not respond or give you a picture you did not want. Because WMM is SETUP for home video playback, it is not up to the level of professional codec uncompression or even compression like Sony Vegas is. In truth, you could speed your video up once in WMM and do the rest in Sony Vegas. Or if you needed to, use a converter like WinFF and fix the codec for WMV all your own that way. I use FFDshow to render my codec of WMV and have no issues with the transition between them.
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