A Guide to Getting Footage From Your Canon HV20 Into Vegas and Burning a DVD

I want to assert that this site, the Canon Vixia Experiments, which I started as a love for my Canon HV20 is by no means meant to be a de facto authority on the subject of High Definition video nor of the vast amount of information that one must learn to handle everything from production techniques to capture and digitization to post. It is, in fact just a lab for learning – a place where I collect my thoughts and discoveries, ask questions (and get answers) about optimizing and perfecting the workflow for this series of cameras to maximize the value of my investment in the excellent camera.

I have owned my camera for a year and a half, I was certainly an early adopter. I purchased my HV20 for US$900 and even then considered it a steal at the time. Now the camera is available readily for a third that price.

Canon’s newer versions of the camera over that time have not changed things much and so anything that I write about here still applies to the HV30 and 40, respectively, except for the fact that the newer models can also shoot 30-frame progressive.

Since I have had my camera, I have learned a lot, but I have also found that there are questions that remain unanswered. In dealing with Canon’s way of storing data to tape (for example 24p inside of an interlaced 60i container) I have learned some rather Baroque techniques for converting the footage to true, non-interlaced (that is to say “progressive/full frame”) material, or that there is software (Cineform) and hardware-based capture cards (BlackMagic’s Intensity Pro, Matrox’s MX02 MINI) that can do this conversion on the fly.

I read an article yesterday at a blog by a very prolific and knowledgeable lover of the HV20 named Eugenia (her exhaustive and almost overwhelming blog is a must read for getting into the real nitty gritty) about making a 24p DVD with Vegas.

Some argue that it looks so much better to make a Progressive DVD, others say its overkill and something that you can’t really notice for all the trouble. New 1080p monitors may betray the non-progressive, interlaced NTSC version, or poorer HDTV monitors that don’t handle the de-interlacing as well as they should. But for the most part I want to share with you how to output your materials from Vegas for making a conventional DVD for HDTVs properly when you DON’T want to create a true, progressive 24p DVD. (Read Eugenia’s article “From Vegas Platinum to 24p DVDs” about how to do it, if that is what interests you.)

First things first – assuming you going to be digitizing your footage by capturing from a Canon HV20 camera into Sony’s Vegas non-linear editing (“NLE”) software via a firewire cable, you want to first create a session as follows:

Capturing and Editing Your Footage – Setting Things Up Correctly

If this is your first time capturing from your Canon camera this way, from the File menu, select “New” then from the Template dropdown menu select – HDV 1080-60i (1440×1080, 29.970 fps).  This is the native format coming our of the camera so you want the session to reflect that.

If this is not your first time, but you have gotten your settings mixed up in the past, then you can click the “Match Media Settings” icon at the top right of the New Project window – the icon looks like a folder.  Once you have clicked on it, it will prompt you to select a file – choose one of your previously captured .mt2 files and it should snap to those same settings.  

We’re not done yet – make sure to set “Full-resolution rendering quality” to “Best” and “De-interlace method” to “Interpolate fields.”  I also like to set “Pixel format” to “32-bit floating point” as opposed to 8-bit.  But make sure you do this all of this before you start editing on the timeline.

Now you can drag your clips onto the timeline.   Although it is the default, right click on the footage in the timeline, go to “Properties” (down at the bottom) and make sure it is set to “Smart resample”.

Now you can edit away.

Preparing the Video Stream For DVD

When you are done and you want to prepare your movie for DVD (this is assuming you have Sony’s DVD Architect, but should work with any proper DVD composition software) follow these steps:

Go to the “File” menu->”Render As“->”Save as type” and select “MainConcept MPEG-2 (*.mpg;*.m2v;*.m2t;*.mpa)”

(We are thus outputting in MPEG2 from Vegas for more control over our options). 

(If you are dealing with content that is over 90 minutes or you intend to include a lot of bonus material or features on your final DVD, read the ++ note at the end of this article).

From the Render As window, click the “Custom” button.  A second window comes up.  From the new Template dropdown menu at the top you have four choices depending on what you want/need:

In North America and Japan:

DVD Architect NTSC video stream
DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream
DVD Architect 24p NTSC video stream
DVD Architect 24p NTSC Widescreen video stream

additionally, if you are in a country that uses PAL, you can select

DVD Architect PAL Widescreen video stream
DVD Architect PAL Widescreen video stream

Hit “Okay” at the bottom and now name your file something relevant.  Make sure you remember, or copy the exact filename, because you are going to use it for a separate and identically named audio stream.

Hit the “Save” button, and Vegas will render out your video stream.

Preparing the Audio Stream

Now we are going to do all of this again for the audio stream.

Go to the “File” menu->”Render As“->”Save as type” and select “Dolby Digital AC-3 Studio (*.ac3)”

Hit “Save” and Vegas will render out the audio stream – this should go much more quickly.

You can now save your session, close Vegas and open up DVD Architect.

Assembling and Burning Your DVD with DVD Architect

To create a simple DVD for instant playback (no navigational menus) in DVD Architect, from the File menu, select “New” and then the “Single Movie” icon.

A window will open labelled Open Media.  Navigate to the video and audio streams you rendered from within Vegas and select the file for the video.  Then hit Open.

If you did things correctly, and saved both the video and audio streams with the identical file name, Vegas will automatically associate the audio file with the video and place them in perfect sync on the timeline.

To check it out, hit the “Preview” button at the top and you can watch a preview to make sure everything looks right.

Let’s get this finished!

Click the “Make DVD” button from the top toolbar, and then click the “Prepare” button.

From the Make DVD window, click the browse button and select or create a folder where you want to store your DVD prep files.  I recommend using a dedicated media drive for this; as a rule, it’s not ever a good idea to handle or store media files on your boot drive.

Click “Next“.

On the next page you can choose to click the “Optimize” button, particularly if your movie is long.  Otherwise, click ”Next“ again.

Click “Finish” on the next page and DVD Architect will prepare your DVD for burning.

Once that is completed, click the “Make DVD” button again, only this time, choose the “Burn” option.

Select “Current Project”  and then the ”Next” button twice.  

Enter a name in the “Volume” field.  This short title will help identify the DVD when placed in a reader.  

Your burning device should be identified automtically.  If not, select the corret drive.  (Make sure you have a blank DVD in there!)

Under the “Speed” option, you can either choose the fastest speed if you are in a rush, or if you want to play it slightly safer, choose a slower burning speed to make sure the laser really gets in there and burns those pits in the dye.  Some might argue that this is irrelevant, but in my experience, burning at slower speeds assures the DVD will play on any consumer DVD player – especially these days when you can buy super budget cheapo versions new for less than $2o.

Click “Finish” and watch the magic ensue.

++ If you have more than 1.5 hours of video to put on a single DVD, you must do some math. Find the total time of your movie in minutes, and use the following formula: (34400 / (Time*60)) * 900,000. This result is the average bit rate you should use to fit the video on a single DVD and leave 400 Mbytes free for the audio and menu. Click CUSTOM: VIDEO. and type this number under Variable bit rate: Average (bps). (this tip courtesy Williams College)

If you have any thoughts, comments, critiques or suggestions on how to imporve this guide or apply it to other software platforms, I invite you to post your comments.