Confused: H.264, MOV, Motion JPEG, MPEG4, AVI…

[John Mccann]

You said: “the Vegas preview window it was very bad, stuttery and next to useless for editing.”
That’s precisely the reason for using the intermediate .AVI files. I was going nuts trying to get the .MOV files to run in editing. Belated thanks to members of this group! Back in late 2010, I found the ‘fix’ (Cineform) discussed right here!

[Dave Haynie]

[John Gregoriades] “I want to buy a new “still” camera, which will also take Hi-definition movies (for amateur work.) But it gets confusing with all the various formats that “Hi-def” exists.”

That’s correct — it can be confusing. There are a few different actual media formats, and a few different containers. And lots of variations within each of those.

[John Gregoriades] “Let me make it simple to answer, if I can: I do not need a description of what each “subtype” does – only which will work seamlessly with Vegas 8 or Vegas 9 or…. without any pre-conversion etc.?”

There’s no simple answer. Each version of Vegas has improved support for the various video types. It’s not simply “will it edit”, but “will it edit usefully”. You can usually edit AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10, H.264… same thing) in Vegas 9, maybe even Vegas 8. But not always. And not always usefully… AVC is very complex to decode, and you may find it not terribly editable prior to Vegas 10, which improved decode performance considerably.

Part of that is the specifics of these specifications. While the various MPEG standards are standards, they’re pretty wide standards. MPEG is really intended as more of a standards generator: MPEG-2 was used in more specific forms to deliver HDV, ATSC television, part of Blu-ray, DVD, etc. AVC is more limited in scope in Blu-ray and AVCHD, once again.

[John Gregoriades] “A Nikon D5100 spec gives format: MPEG4, 1920×1080 (30,25,24 fps.)
A Canon Eos 500D spec gives: H.264 1920×1080 (20fps) or 1280×720 (30fps)
A Canon SX30 iS spec gives format: Motion JPEG 1280×720 (30fps.)
I’d rather go for the Nikon D5100 but only IF it will work directly with Vegas, which I like because it is very “stable”.”

The Nikon D5100, the EOS 500D (550D, and 600D as well), and most HDSLRs record in AVC. Both of these record in “.mov” format, which is Apple’s Quicktime wrapper. A few other cameras may use the “.mp4” wrapper, which is the official MPEG-4 spec for a media wrapper, but also derived from and very similar to Quicktime.

Video cameras tend to record in AVCHD, which is a spec derived from Blu-ray. This was originally designed to be used HD recording on DVD, and extends out to modest bitrates used on camcorders, up to 24Mb/s. This mandates AVC video and AC-3 audio recording. Most HDSLRs don’t use AVCHD, largely because they’re recording at higher bitrates, which can yield a higher quality image. Panasonics use AVCHD or AVCHDLite (a subset of AVCHD, limited to 720p), which may offer some enhanced compatibility, at the expense of encoding quality. In Vegas 10, the higher bitrate stuff (I use a Canon 60D as well as two AVCHD based Panasonic camcorders) works just dandy.

Motion JPEG is a more primitive format, somewhat similar to DV… each frame is basically just a JPEG photo. This is usually also stored in a Quicktime wrapper. A few cameras have used AVI instead, but there were some early standards for Motion JPEG in Quicktime, not so in AVI.

-Dave