-
Another rendering question
Hi guys, I’m currently running Sony Vegas Pro 8 and am fairly new to video editing.
What I’m doing is taking video footage of live bands, with my cheap Samsung S360 point & shoot, dragging the file into vegas and editing/replacing the audio track. Now my question is how do I render the video footage to be exactly the same quality as the original video file I’ve dragged in?
My camera records at 30fps and the videos come out as AVI’s with 640×480 dimensions and 352kbps bitrate (so windows explorer tells me)
With a 500mb video I’ve tried playing around with a few different formats and some of the dimensions and ‘best quality’ settings under custom templates and I’ve ended up with bad quality MPEGs around 100mb in size and a 15gb AVI that’s in slow motion!
What do I need to know here?
-
5 Replies
-
What is your target device? DVD? Web? That will ultimately determine what you need to render to. DVD’s must be MPEG2. Web video is probably best rendered as MPEG4. Use the Sony AVC or MainConcept AVC render types. There are a number of templates for iPod, PSP, etc to choose from.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Hi John,
The target device is to basically just archive as a decent video quality on my computer, but it will also be uploaded to youtube, and probably eventually appear on a DVD – so I guess it would be good to know how to render it for each of those options.
I’m just trying to get out exactly the same video quality as what’s put in. I’ve tried some of these settings including your suggestions with the following results (all of which still seem to be lesser quality than the original video file):
MPEG1 – 60mb file
MPEG1 at best quality – 100mb file
AVI – NTSC DV – 1.4gb file
AVI NTSC DV with frame size 640×480 and ‘uncompressed’ video format – 13gig, lags
Mainconcept AVC/AAC (mp4) – 33mb
Mainconcept MPEG2 – 323mb
Sony AVC (mpeg4)- 34mb -
I like to archive to the same format as my source. I’m shocked to hear you say that DV AVI gave less quality than the original MPEG4 that your camera shoots. Perhaps there is something about your project properties that causing the loss of quality?
I would start testing by creating a new project. In the project properties window on the extreme top right is a button with a folder icon. If you hover your mouse over it, it will say, “Match Media Settings”. Press this and navigate to one of the media files from your camera. This will make your project match your cameras media.
Now that we know the project matches the media, you should do some render tests to check the quality. Since your camera shoots MPEG4 I would only use the Sony AVC or MainConcept AVC render types as these are MPEG4. MainConcept AVC has an Apple iPod 640×480 Video template that sounds like it might match your camera. It is 30fps an uses a bit rate of 1.5Mbps which I’m sure is more than your source.
Those settings should produce a video that is very close in quality to your source. Keep in mind that your camera is shooting in a very lossy, non-standard, highly compressed MPEG4 format. Every render is going to loose quality and there is nothing you can do about that.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
As far as I know the camera records to an AVI format – the manual says it’s an ‘.avi (MJPEG)’ (which confuses me a little) but anyway I’ll try a few renders with the matched settings and see how I get on.
As you say if there is always going to be quality loss on a render then perhaps I just have to bite the bullet and deal with the nearest quality I can get.
-
> the manual says it’s an ‘.avi (MJPEG)’
If the camera shoots MJPEG then I would archive to MJPEG. Did any software come with the camera that installs an MJPEG codec for you? It may have only installed the decoder and not the encoder. Otherwise you will need to buy an MJPEG codec for rendering.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up