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Rendering 720p video from digital camera
I’m trying to compress/reencode videos directly from my Panasonic FZ28 digital camera which original come out as .mov files and about 150mb per minute of video. I’m using Sony Vegas Pro 8, and would like to render as .avi because of compatibility issues, but I’m clueless on the settings I should be choosing.
I have read I should stay at least at a 4mbps bitrate, and the audio is from a mono microphone so it’s not that important. I appreciate any help, thanks.
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8 Replies
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What are you encoding for? Web? Broadcast? DVD? BluRay?
Are you PAL or NTSC?
Where do the compatibility issues come in at? Are you going to FCP or some other NLE?
If you tell us how you wish to output it, we may be able to help you pick the right template to start from and give you some ideas on how to tweak it.
j razz
https://www.jrazzcreations.com
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Uhh, I’m not trying to do anything as complex as some of the options you mentioned. I basically want to shrink my existing .mov files, though I am kind of siding towards .avi conversion because I will be sharing these videos with family and friends. I will be doing both uploading to the web (youtube/flickr) and straight up copying the file from my computer to another, which is why I want avi because a lot of computers don’t come equipped to play .mov files by default.
I’m afraid to choose a youtube-specific configuration because I fear that it will sacrifice quality to save some space. Basically, I want to convert my 720p .mov’s to .avi, and in a way where the quality won’t suffer too much. That’s my greatest concern, really, the quality.
Thanks a lot for your help.
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I basically want to shrink my existing .mov files, though I am kind of siding towards .avi conversion because I will be sharing these videos with family and friends.
If you want to shrink… and your footage is 720, you may want to consider encoding to them to mpeg-2 files. The quality will be there but you will lose a lot of file size.
Avi is just a wrapper. Any codec can be placed in the wrapper. So unless they have the right codec on their machine, there is no guarantee that your avi files will play on their machine(s).
You should also consider a second encode to something like flash or wmv. If you are sharing these with people who have a Windows based computer, they all should e able to play a wmv file as that is a windows media file.
Also, take a look here for youtube settings: Youtube Settings
j razz
https://www.jrazzcreations.com
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Great link, Jeremy. That contains everything I need, thanks a bunch for being so helpful.
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…and so this post will be helpful to others, I found that using a .wmv package yielded the best results.
I tried the settings on the page you link, Jeremy, using the .mp4 container, but the video was very choppy, and there was definitely some quality loss.
Using .wmv, I was able to maintain the bitrate at above 4.2mbps, and after comparing the two new mp4 and wmv files, the wmv had way better compression and quality.
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Keep in mind that the mp4 container was for youtube encodes. So when you watch it on youtube, the quality will be just fine and at the top tier for what youtube allows. The WMV file you made has an extremely high bitrate for anything other than watching it from a hard drive. If you had that online, I would think most would have issues playing it back without it being choppy.
The mp4 file was probably choppy due to your computers capability to playback mp4 files. What player were you watching it in? If Windows Media Player, that is probably your issue. Try VLC (it is free) and it will play those files just fine as long as your computer is up to the task.
j razz
https://www.jrazzcreations.com
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I suppose I worded it wrong: the video isn’t choppy as in it freezing, instead I see the video kind of blocky most of the times. It doesn’t play smooth at all, and at times, there is even some blurriness.
Are you saying that the max bitrate for youtube videos is 2.2mbps? If so, I’ll have to do double rendering, one for posting videos online, and one for personal storage. Overall, would you recommend those settings you linked to for youtube uploading?
I highly doubt it’s a problem with my computer’s performance. I played it with both VLC and KMplayer on a beefy dual core laptop, so I think that can safely be ruled out.
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No, I’m not saying that Youtube’s max is 2.2 mbps. What I am saying (or what he is saying) is that youtube is going to compress your video. And for what he saw result-wise that produced the best results for youtube after they do their flash conversion and compression.
I would recommend you archive your footage in a different format that has less compression and higher resolution. If you don’t intend to edit the footage anymore, save it to mpeg-2 and you should be good- just save it to a hard drive for safe keeping.
j razz
https://www.jrazzcreations.com
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