Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum is elongating slides

[jan]

1. I have determined that my Photoshop slides are being elongated (made taller) when I have Vegas render or Make A Movie.
2. Even though I have all Properties, Preview Preferences, Rendering, Make Movie details for everything that says it will make it into a Widescreen, I am still geting letterboxing. In fact, the Photoshop pictures which take up the full slide immediately appear with letterboxing in the preview box AROUND the entire slide!
(I have things set for: NTSC Widescreen 720x480, stretch video to fill output frame size use widescreen DVD format everywhere. Yes, I hit apply.) I have traced the problem back to Vegas rather than Archetiect or my TV.

Could any of these be a problem?
1. Preferences --> Preview Device --> NTSC DV Widescreen --> Only when project does not match DV format? Should it be on always?
2. Did the tallness occur due to being Recompressed? I had already spent time compressing the harddrive to speed things up; so, maybe it is getting 2 compressions?

[Paul LS]

Do you use Pan/Crop to adjust your photos to fill the frame?

Not sure what you mean by compressing the hard drive to speed things up! Is this a Windows thing?... if so it will slow down your access time. Or are you refering to rendering the clip?

[jan]

Do you use Pan/Crop to adjust your photos to fill the frame?

Not sure what you mean by compressing the hard drive to speed things up! Is this a Windows thing?... if so it will slow down your access time. Or are you refering to rendering the clip?

Hello Paul,
1. I did all my Pan/Cropping in Photoshop. Thus I did all Slideshow visuals on Photoshop so I would not have to do any in Vegas; this left only audio to insert in Vegas. I only expected Photoshop to change the view to Widescreen visually.
2. Yes, I have periodically done virus checks and then defragment.

[Paul LS]

Hi Jan, when I said use Pan/Crop in Vegas I meant use the Vegas Pan/Crop tool to fill the frame to avoid the black borders. See this video tutorial, at around 3:20 the Pan/Crop tool options are shown and he uses them to match the output aspect ratio of the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLle6dbnf88

Is this the issue or is it that the photos are being squished horizontally to make them un-naturally taller? If this is the issue then it is probably a pixel aspect ratio (PAR) issue. Photo uses square pixels and video oblong pixels. Are you using a standard PAR=1 preset in Photoshop?

[jan]

Hi Jan, when I said use Pan/Crop in Vegas I meant use the Vegas Pan/Crop tool to fill the frame to avoid the black borders. See this video tutorial, at around 3:20 the Pan/Crop tool options are shown and he uses them to match the output aspect ratio of the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLle6dbnf88

Is this the issue or is it that the photos are being squished horizontally to make them un-naturally taller? If this is the issue then it is probably a pixel aspect ratio (PAR) issue. Photo uses square pixels and video oblong pixels. Are you using a standard PAR=1 preset in Photoshop?

Paul, thanks for the good education lead. I hope I have my last questions now.
What I did. I brought up a Vegas rendered slideshow (I can not possible bring in individual slides from Photoshop or its wvm as I would lose all my audio work.) There was ONE crop icon at the end and when used it showed (a) a preset of "untitled" for some reason, (b) no yes or no options as shown when I had check the HELP section for cropping, (c) an "F" on the slide which appeared stretched. So, I selected Widescreen and the "F" switched to a more normal appearance, but letterboxing remained. I closed the slideshow w/o saving and brought it back up so as to see if I needed to do each slide individually like through Tools --> Video --> Crop event method. I got the same nice change to an unstretched photo but 1 second downstream the "F" appeared a differnet size.

1. I presume the switch to Widescreen by using the ONE crop icon at the end of the slideshow will fix ALL the slides of the slideshow symmetrically?
2. Is it necessary to Select Widescreen via Pan/Crop icon (in addition to the Widescreen selections in Properties, Preview Device..) to make my slideshow have normal looking photo?
3. To resolve the letterboxing, I figure I should just give up on Widescreen and go with regular TV.
a. Would that do anything to the letterboxing?
b. Would I choose NTSC DV or NTSC Standard?
c. Would the Pan/Crop, Properties, Preview Device, all need to be changed as well?

Sincerely,
Jan

[Paul LS]

Hi Jan, I am not too sure I understand. Vegas is much more convoluted when it comes to adjusting Pan and Crop then compared say to Premiere Elements.

Anyway, did you put a rendered video clip of your slideshow on a track? The Pan/Crop effect only works at the event level... ie on a single clip/photo. If you have imported a complete slideshow video it would be a single event. If you imported multiple photos or video clips these would be individual events and you would have to apply the Pan/Crop effect to all of them. However there is also Track Motion at the track level where you can resize and position for the whole track.

If you are using a widescreen project then 4:3 photos will have black bars down the sides unless you have resized them in Photoshop to meet the widescreen frame size OR by appling the "Match Output Aspect", by right clicking on the photo when the Pan/Crop window is open.

The letterboxing you are refering to... do you mean the photos/clips have black bars above and below them?

Sony Vegas has two presets for NTSC... NTSC DV [720 x 480] and NTSC Standard [720 x 486], I would go with the NTSC DV preset. The Pan/Crop settings may need changing dependent on what settings you have applied.