The Dreaded Red Line?

DrAnton · Post by **DrAnton** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 4:28 am

I was doing fine, editing another play my son was in using VS8. No problems. Then because they used a lot of spotlights in the play that washed out facial features, etc., I decided to play with filters and used the brightness and contrast filters to enhance the picture quality. It seemed to work pretty well (relatively speaking). Then, I added some transitions because the film was a series of scene excerpts from the whole play.

#@#$&%*@ Then, suddenly, there was this red line that appeared on the time track! I couldn't click on it, didn't know what it was, but at the same time it appeared, running through the play clips, the picture quality of the *project* became degraded! If I clicked on the clips and played them individually, video quality was fine. But when I told it to play the project including all effects, video picture quality was seriously negatively affected.

What happened? Can I reverse this effect? How can I keep the picture quality the way it originally was?

I am running Windows XP with 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM.

Thanks!

Anton

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 9:22 am

That red line is the selected preview range. The Mark In and Mark Out buttons in the bottom left corner below the Preview window control the preview range.

The Preview output will rarely match the output quality from the Share stage, especially if you use Instant Preview, which tries to provide a realtime preview of the video at the expense of output quality.

Even if you use Quality preview, the output is still sized to fit the preview window, which is rarely the same size as your target. Thus, the video will be resized and a loss of quality results.

DrAnton · Post by **DrAnton** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 4:34 pm

THoff wrote:That red line is the selected preview range. The Mark In and Mark Out buttons in the bottom left corner below the Preview window control the preview range.

The Preview output will rarely match the output quality from the Share stage, especially if you use Instant Preview, which tries to provide a realtime preview of the video at the expense of output quality.

Even if you use Quality preview, the output is still sized to fit the preview window, which is rarely the same size as your target. Thus, the video will be resized and a loss of quality results.

Hmmmm. But I don't recall seeing that red line before -- maybe I was just oblivious to it? And when I click on "Clip", the video quality in the preview window is good. I have noticed that when I render the file, it is often much better than I expected when I actually view the movie in another program like RealPlayer or something.