Home Movies and Integrity

I ended up using Sony Vegas. I used Premier for ages, and I tried Avid both are good, but the Vegas experience is soo much better, with instant rendering preview.
I guess that they perfected the audio GUI and then just copied the experience to video too.

I also added the excellent Noise Reduction Plugin, with this you can sample a ‘quiet’ segment and it will automatically clean that noise from the whole track! Just this boosted the quality of my clips.

The biggest problem was configuring the MPEG encoder, I had to make sure that the input and output rates and size are the same as the raw data, and that the compression looked ok at the end. I converted the footage from interlaced to progressive so that it looks good when playing it on the PC.

Now the process is:

• Capture Video – With Automatic DV scene selection. This puts ~20 clips in the media pool.
• Now I want to render each clip (with noise reduction and progressive).  To do this for each clip:

• I have to clear the time-line and add the clip. The Noise Reduction filter was added to the Master Volume so nothing to do there and I saved the Mpeg setting as a template. So I just have to render it and put in the correct name.

This can be annoying for all the clips so I wrote a script to render all the movies in the media pool.Here is a copy of the script.

import System.Windows.Forms;
import System.IO;
import Sony.Vegas;

var outputDirectory = "G:/Movies";
// regular expressions used to match renderer file type names and template names.
var rendererRegexp = /MainConcept MPEG-2/;
var templateRegexp = /Eli MPeg/;

try
{
AssertDirectoryExists(outputDirectory);

var renderer = FindRenderer(rendererRegexp);
var renderTemplate = FindRenderTemplate(renderer, templateRegexp);
var newExtension = renderer.FileExtension.substring(1);

var videoTrack =Vegas.Project.Tracks[0];
var audioTrack =Vegas.Project.Tracks[1];

for (var media in Vegas.Project.MediaPool) {
ClearAllTracks();
AddMediaToTimeLine(media,videoTrack,audioTrack);

var outputPath = Path.Combine(outputDirectory, Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(media.FilePath) + newExtension);
if (CanWriteToFile(outputPath))
{
var status = Vegas.Render(outputPath, renderTemplate);
if (status == RenderStatus.Canceled) {
break;
} else if (status != RenderStatus.Complete) {
throw "Failed on input file: " + media.FilePath;
}
}
}
} catch (errorMsg) {
MessageBox.Show(errorMsg, "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation);
}


function AddMediaToTimeLine(media: Media, videoTrack : Track, audioTrack: Track): void {
var videoStream = media.Streams.GetItemByMediaType(MediaType.Video, 0);
var audioStream = media.Streams.GetItemByMediaType(MediaType.Audio, 0);

// if needed, add a video event and associate video stream
if (null != videoStream) {
var videoLength = videoStream.Length;
var videoEvent = new VideoEvent(new Timecode(), videoLength);
videoTrack.Events.Add(videoEvent);
var videoTake = new Take(videoStream);
videoEvent.Takes.Add(videoTake);
}

// if needed, add a audio event and associate audio stream
if (null != audioStream) {
var audioLength = audioStream.Length;
var audioEvent = new AudioEvent(new Timecode(), audioLength);
audioTrack.Events.Add(audioEvent);
var audioTake = new Take(audioStream);
audioEvent.Takes.Add(audioTake);
}
}

function ClearAllTracks(): void {
// step through all tracks:
for (var track in Vegas.Project.Tracks) {
track.Events.Clear();
}
}
function AssertDirectoryExists(dirStr : String):void {
if (!Directory.Exists(dirStr))
{
throw "The directory ("+dirStr+") does not exist.\nPlease edit the script to specify an existing directory.";
}
}

function FindRenderer(rendererRegExp : RegExp) : Renderer {
for (var renderer in Vegas.Renderers) {
if (null != renderer.FileTypeName.match(rendererRegExp)) {
return renderer;
}
}
throw "Failed to find renderer";
}

function FindRenderTemplate(renderer : Renderer, templateRegExp : RegExp) : RenderTemplate {
for (var renderTemplate in renderer.Templates) {
if (null != renderTemplate.Name.match(templateRegExp)) {
return renderTemplate;
}
}
throw "Failed to find render template";
}

function CanWriteToFile(fileName) : Boolean {
// make sure the file does not already exist
if (File.Exists(fileName)) {
if (MessageBox.Show("Overwrite file: " + fileName, "Exists", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo) !=  System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.Yes)
{
return false;
}
}
return true;
}