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MP4 files in Vegas
Hello,
When I drop MP4 files into Vegas 9.0 (and i mean just into the project, i’m not even putting them on the timeline yet), it seems to eat up an inordinate amount of RAM. The more MP4 files I drop into my project, the more RAM gets used up until it almost maxes out all my RAM, at which point Vegas simply crashes. It never did this with the significantly larger (about 10x) m2t files with which i worked with until now.
Does anyone know what is causing this? And whether there is a solution?
A bit of background: My AVCHD camera records MTS files which appear to be too heavy for my computer to handle while editing (I only have 8GB of RAM and am using a 1.5 Ghz computer so payback gets really choppy). What I normally do is convert them into M2T files using Vegas itself and (aside from the fact that batch conversion is impossible in Vegas, leaving me with one giant B-Roll file, which makes it a pain to find the scene you’re looking for) it worked like a charm: Vegas didn’t slow down at all while editing M2Ts. However, they are very large files (as large as the original MTS files) and take up a lot of my hard drive. As I tend to render most of my finished videos into MP4 files using the “Sony AVC” option, I figured why not work in MP4 from the start? So I converted a bunch of my raw footage into MP4 files using a software that has an H.264 encoder (Aieesoft’s converter), losing about a day of work as the conversion ate up so much of my computer’s resources that I just had to leave it be, and now I find that I cannot use them!
Is it something with the converter I used or will all MP4 files use up a lot of RAM? If it’s the conversion, there another converter I should be using to make MP4 files? Or is there another file format which you would recommend for editing? Due to file size constraints, my finished clips are rendered as MP4, 1920-x1080, 30fps, 5,000kbps. Obviously editing them in that format doesn’t work, so is there any other small file format that would function well in Vegas?
Thank you so much to any one who has insight on this problem!
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2 Replies
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Tools > Scripting > Batch Render
Vegas pro has batch render, just look up how to use itthe MP4 files you creating are similar to the original MTS files your camera creeates. They are both H.264 and VERY hard on your CPU.
You had it right when you were creating HDV m2t proxies, you just need to figure out a workflow so that when your ready for final output you can switch back to the original AVCHD files
google and youtube have plenty of tutorials on these things
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If you’re looking for lighter weight files for editing… you’re not getting that. In fact, AVC in an .M2T wrapper and AVC in an .MTS wrapper are essentially the same thing… the wrapper is MPEG-2 Transport Stream in both cases, the AVC video (aka H.264, aka MPEG-4 Layer 10) is the thing that your PC can’t handle.
Rendering to an .MP4 file doesn’t do anything for you either… that’s still AVC, just in a different file wrapper. Add to that the fact that Vegas 9 has problems with some .MP4 files (probably not those rendered by Vegas, but you never know).
Try rendering to a similar format in an MXF file. That’s a high bitrate professional MPEG-2 format, which is dramatically easier for your PC to decode. That’s the one that’s built-in to Vegas that I would use as an intermediate file. I have never seen Vegas go over 8GB use (on a 16GB system… I got the memory upgrade for photography of all things; kind of went my 10Mpixel -> 18Mpixel upgrade), so you’re fine on memory. And if that’s a 1.5GHz single core or Pentium, you really don’t have a PC I’d recommend for HD editing. Though I’ll admit to having done it on a pretty slow machine myself in years past, not one that slow.. even my six year old laptop has a dual-core Core2 at 2.4GHz. And I wouldn’t do much AVC editing on that bad boy.
-Dave
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