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Mixing different sizes footage

REW

REW

I am editing footage from a few concerts that took place at the community center in our neighborhood.

The audio was recorded on a Zoom H4N straight from the mixing console output. A Panasonic SDR-H80 on a tripod shot a wide view of the whole stage, and a Canon FS200 was used to shoot closeups and different angles of the performers.

My problem is that the footage from the 2 cameras are different: the one from the Canon is 720x480 interlaced at 29.97fps, while the Canon shot 704x576 at 25fps.

What is the correct workflow to combine these two media sizes if the required output format is a DVD? Should I process the footage first, to convert and crop it to the same size and fps (I use ffmpeg). If yes, what is the resolution that I should crop/resize to, and what is the fps?

Not only this, but I also need some audio from one of the cameras with the sound of the audience. The recordings are also different, 44100 vs 48000.

And another minor issue. Both cameras output a .MOD file format, which all the software that I have (all free software) recognize as MOV. Does the .MOD format have something special in it or it can be manipulated as regular MOV without losing anything important?

Thanks
 
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REW said:
I have Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10, which I got as a gift, but as I am a free software user, I would prefer to use only free software. I have OpenShot (http://www.openshot.org/), PiTiVi (http://www.pitivi.org/) and Kino (http://www.kinodv.org/). They don't have as many features as Sony Vegas, but it's enough for basic editing.
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Dude, use Vegas! That's a solid piece of software. And since it was a gift, you can still say you're a user of free software. It's getting kind of late for me, especially since I have to wake up for work in a few hours. If nobody else gives a detailed answer, I'll check back on this thread tomorrow.

I have the same version of Vegas as you, but I rarely use it, so I'd have to take a look to give a better answer. Anyway, off the top of my head, I don't think you even need to worry about the frame-rate. I think you'd be just fine importing both of these videos into either a 25p or 24p project. And as for workflow, I'd just import footage and edit away, and you can crop footage whenever you damn-well please. As I see it, the only decision that needs to be made in advance is what you want the final output to be (and thus, what the project settings should be).
 
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Using Vegas is what I tried for the first time, but, in a clip of about 10 minutes, the video of one of the cameras gets horribly out of sync near the end. One of the audio tracks also gets screwed up, toward the end, there is a very noticeable flange/reverb effect.
 
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REW said:
Using Vegas is what I tried for the first time, but, in a clip of about 10 minutes, the video of one of the cameras gets horribly out of sync near the end. One of the audio tracks also gets screwed up, toward the end, there is a very noticeable flange/reverb effect.
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Hmm. That's strange. I don't know how to explain that. I was under the impression that in Vegas 10 you were able to use either PAL or NTSC in both PAL and NTSC projects.

You're in Israel, so would my assumption be correct that you want your final project to be PAL? Is the video that gets out-of-sync the NTSC footage? And you're talking about the audio being out of sync with the video, right?

If that's the case, does it really matter? The audio from the camera is just the scratch track, so it'd be a pain to not have it for reference, but I'm sure you could get around that. Besides, presumably, you're going to edit this, right? You're not going to have any 10-minute long shots in the edit, are you?

One other thing, I've never actually heard of the .mod file you're referenced earlier. So I had to do some googling, and I can't help but wonder if this is the root cause of the problems. It looks like .mod is some form of mpeg2, so hypothetically, you might just be able to rename the file, from .mod to .mpg. If that doesn't help, you might try converting the footage first. To answer your question, your cameras should have come with free software that you'd be able to use to convert the footage to mpeg2. Try renaming it first. That's actually worked for me before.
 
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