.avi questions

[Rick Mac]

[John Magee] “#1 I render a 10 second clip off the timeline, to “Windows avi”, uncompressed, and it’s 400 megabytes. What’s that about?”

Uncompressed video makes huge files. That is why we use codecs to compress the files to smaller sizes. DV for example is a compressed file. AVI is simply a wrapper. AVI’s can be uncompressed (huge file) or compressed DV for example (way smaller file).

[John Magee] “#2 I want to render a file off the timeline for later conversion to .mov (with quicktime pro) or maybe later, to flash. Isn’t the “windows avi” uncompressed what I should use? Or is it the NTSC DV?”

How about just rendering from the timeline to the format that you need. Vegas will render to many formats and codecs.

Tip – If you are using the the pro version of Vegas (not studio version) you can use the batch render script to render your timeline out to several formats unattended.

regards, Rick.

Rick Mac
Director of Audio Production
TCT Network – Directv 377

[Terry Esslinger]

How about just rendering from the timeline to the format that you need. Vegas will render to many formats and codecs
But apparently not to Flash. What if that was the desired end product?

[John Magee]

Yes, I was thinking of quicktime “pro” which gives you h.264, or flash.

But I’m still not clear – in what form does the DV clip exist on my computer? “Windows .avi”. OK, so if I have a couple of these clips on the timeline, and I want to render them out to the same type of file they began in – assuming this is how to maintain fidelity – then what “video for Windows” .avi Template do I choose?

One would think “uncompressed” would offer the best quality, but 10 seconds = 1/2 a gig…, and since the original clip was 30 mb, this doesn’t make much sense (shouldn’t it be called “decompressed”?)

In any event, I tried rendering to NTSC DV and the clip looked weird – bright and harsh.