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Sony Vegas 13 – rendering produces awful quality video
Hello everyone,
I am a complete novice. I just bought Sony Vegas Pro 13.0, so I can make travel videos available online.
I own a Sony A6000 video camera. I specifically bought this camera because an amateur filmmaker recommended it in early 2015 for its high-quality video output, and after having viewed his films online, I thought it would be a good match.
My problem is that every rendering setting I have used in Sony Vegas Pro 13 so far (about twelve attempts) produces videos that look awful: the quality seems substantially diminished and the video does not play at the right speed.
I’ve looked at various tutorials on Youtube, but nothing I’ve tried has worked well. In stark contrast, I’ve viewed other people’s videos online that look truly amazing, crystal-clear footage with good depth of colours, and on occasion, they say they’ve used a really old video cameras, less ranked than the Sony A6000.
Can anyone, please, advise me what settings I should be using on Sony Vegas? I want to publish my videos to my WordPress blog, and to Vimeo and Youtube.
When I play my videos straight from my Sony A600 video camera, they look wonderful, so something is obviously amiss with the processing part.
Or should I really just buy a 4k video camera if I want better quality?
As a side note, I’m also using the Stabilize feature in SV13.0, as a lot of my clips are a bit shaky. This was a major disappointment with that particular camera, as it doesn’t appear to have a built-in stabilizer.
Does using the Stabilizer function in Sony Vegas reduce quality somewhat?
Thanks in advance for any advice forthcoming,
Best regards
Aron -
5 Replies
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Welcome to the world of Vegas Pro editing. The problem is definitely NOT your choice of camera (you don’t need 4K to shoot high quality video), but rather your choice of camera settings (frame size, frame rate, etc.) when shooting in conjunction with your choice of project and render settings inside of Vegas during editing. To help figure out your problem, we need to know three things:
(1) information about your footage. The best way is to produce a screen shot from one of your video files using the freeware MediaInfo. Or you can simply look at the media properties window within Vegas. This provides detailed information about format, frame size, and frame rate. Here’s an example
(2) your project settings. Again, another screen shot is most useful. If you key-in Alt-enter a window pops up with detailed project settings. Select the video tab. Again, an example.
(3) your render settings. Again, another screen shot is most useful. This gives information about your render template. Another example.
To maintain the highest quality, the three settings should be pretty much the same. E.g. if you shoot 1080 60P video, then your project settings should be 1080 60P and your render template should also be 1080 60P. It sounds as if you probably have a mis-match. E.g. if you shoot at 1080 60P and have project or render settings set to 1080 24P. In any case, you will need to provide us this detailed information.
Regarding stabilization. Anytime you stabilize footage, there will be some loss of quality, especially if using the stabilizer within Vegas. You will notice that your footage will be noticeably “zoomed in”–hence the loss of some quality. Third-party stabilizers are available that will minimize the amount of zoom.
wwaag
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Also Disable Resampling on every event on your timeline
when you are ready to render, for a cleaner output.Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia -
Hi Wayne, thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me. I am sorry for the delay in coming back to me.
I have collected the three screenshots you have asked for. I should say that the video footage I am working with was prior to installing the firmware 2.0 update on the Sony A6000, so the video I am working with is not XAVC-S, although my Sony A6000 is, at today’s date, able to record in XAVC-S. It is a bit confusing for me as I have about 100 videos shot in XAVC-S and 6000 which were not shot in XAVC-S.
Also, to complicate matters even more, I’ve just bought a 4k-capable Panasonic GX8, so I’m working with two different cameras, with different settings.
Anyway, to simplify things for you, here are the three screenshots you asked for.
I never know which Rendering Setting to choose, so I ticked the Box which says Match Project Settings. Even then there seem to be quite a lot of options and I don’t understand what some of them are, or what the abbreviations mean.
I wanted to add, when I pull a video from the Media Library onto the Project Timeline (when I say Project Timeline, I mean the area with the time across the top) I always click Yes when I’m asked “do you want to set your project video settings to match this media?”
Thanks for your comments about stabilization within Sony Vegas.
When I get the hang of shooting video on my newly-acquired Panasonic GX8, I might need to ask your advice on how to get the best quality video from that using Sony Vegas.
Thank you for any help you can offer me.
Kind regards
Aron -
Hi Steve, thanks for taking the time to respond to me. I’m sorry for the long delay in responding to you and to Wayne on this thread.
That’s a very good point about Disabling Resampling. I’ll make sure I do that in future.
Kind regards
Aron -
[Aron Nordico]
From your screenshots (excellent), the main problem is that you are using the wrong Project Properties. You are obviously in PAL land. Your input is 50i, but your project properties are 60i, those used for NTSC. You need to change the project template to HD 1080-50i (1920 x 1080, 25.000 fps). That is most likely the main source of your problems.
Question, why did you choose HD 1080-50iYUV as the render template? That is a digital intermediate which will lead to huge file size. Do you want to use an external encoder such as Handbrake? If you want to do a final render directly from Vegas, you need to choose a delivery format such as MPEG-2 or AVC. Since you have interlaced source footage, you might want to choose something like MPEG-2, Blu-ray 1920×1080-50i, 25 Mbps video stream. Or do you intend to render for upload to something like Youtube? In that case, other templates would be more appropriate.
wwaag
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