Does Vegas 8 have Quicktime Sorenson codecs?

[Edward Troxel]

[Gigabyte] “Is version 8 just another stepping stone for Sony or will it be around for a while?”

What does this mean???

Edward Troxel

[Rob Mack]

Pretty incomprehensible. Stepping stone from where to where? What’s a stepping stone to a centipede?

Vegas exports to most quicktime codecs if you’ve got them installed. I’m not sure anymore whether you really need quicktime pro, I’ve always had it and can’t remember why I need it, but it’s cheap.

If you want all the Sorenson stuff you can get it from them for $650.00. I don’t really know how many of the codecs they provide would be available in Vegas, but you could frameserve out to the Sorenson suite.

Rob Mack

[Tim Wilson]

[rob mack] “Vegas exports to most quicktime codecs if you’ve got them installed. I’m not sure anymore whether you really need quicktime pro, I’ve always had it and can’t remember why I need it, but it’s cheap.

I like QT Pro for a couple of reasons. The most common is that you can save online QT movies that aren’t otherwise downloadable.

I use it less, but a feature I like even more is basic editing in the QT player — trim, cut, copy, paste is about it, but that’s plenty. I mean really, isn’t that mostly what we do anyway? 🙂

In any case, agreed, worth the cheap price.

If you want all the Sorenson stuff….”

The new version of the Squeeze Compression Suite streets for $399 at your favorite online retailer.

The codecs alone are $299. They simply show up in Premiere, FCP, and Avid….so I assume they’ll simply show up in Vegas too.

The answer should be around somewhere on either Sorenson’s or Sony’s site….but I couldn’t find it quickly enough to tell you before the Red Sox game starts in a few minutes here. 🙂

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[Rob Mack]

I was hedging about whether the codecs would show up in Vegas because I think that the Flash FLV codec shows in Quicktime Pro but not in Vegas. So I guess some things don’t make it to Vegas.

Rob Mack

[Tim Wilson]

Rather than look at the Sony and Sorenson websites, I did what I should have done the first time and searched the Cow. Apparently Vegas comes with the Sorenson Limited codec. I’m away from my Vegas installation, but I would guess that means fewer options on export.

I’m not sure what that means for installing the full version of the codec. Does it mean that the full-featured codec shows up just fine when installed? Or that the limited version was tweaked because the full version can’t?

Regardless, the standalone version of Squeeze is the way to go. All NLEs rightly focus on the the editing, with the render engine tuned for rendering on the timeline, in (typically, but not always) the same format as the project footage. They aren’t tuned to be full-service conversion machines.

If consistent, high-quality conversion with the least amount of work is the goal, standalone encoders are always going to be the way to go. Some NLEs include them. FCP and Premiere both include separate applications: Apple Compressor and Adobe Media Converter. Avid editing applications include a full version of Sorenson Squeeze.

So even if the full version of the codec can show up in Squeeze, the full Squeeze Suite with many extra codecs and features for only $100 more is a bargain.

Which doesn’t exactly answer the original question. 🙂

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[Rob Mack]

I cannot tell you what Vegas would do with the codecs included in an external compressor like Squeeze or ProCoder. Usually, Vegas picks up all the Quicktime or VFW files you have installed. The only exception I’ve noticed the VP6 codec that Flash installs. Quicktime Pro can see it but I’ve never seen it as a render option from Vegas, suggesting that a vendor can prevent third parties from accessing their codecs through quicktime.

Most other NLEs don’t allow you to run multiple instances of the program, so you need an external compressor to get compression done while you edit something else. External compressors usually give you some nice features like watch folders, render queues, etc, and these features make them superior to rendering directly out of Vegas, but since Vegas can be run three or four times simultaneously an external compressor is not quite as compelling as it would be for PPro or FCS.

Vegas actually does a very good job of being a full featured compressor. I just did some frame serving out to the Windows Media Encoder and in retrospect Vegas could have done everything I did in the external encoder. It sees all the options. The only thing that WME could do is save session profiles that I could then email to someone if I wanted to. I think an external compressor would make life much easier if I was doing a lot of compression.

Rob Mack

[Jeff Weinberger]

Vegas has offered only partial Quicktime Pro rendering, many of the formats are not available. Other editing programs will allow you to render using all of the options that Quicktime Pro includes.
If Quicktime Pro releases an update that contains a new codec, you can render to it from other programs. With Vegas, you have to wait for Sony to release a new version of the whole program and hope that the new codec is available as a render option.
Another great feature of Quicktime Pro is that it gives most programs the option to export frame sequences. You can specify the frame dimensions and pixel aspect ratio and render as frames. Vegas does not offer true frame exporting. It can render frames of various amounts depending on the size of your preview window, and the output of your frame can have a different pixel aspect ratio than that of your source footage. Sometimes I need to export to frames and take them into another application to create an alpha mask and perform some post operations. The finished footage is then rendered as frames and tossed onto the video timeline for inclusion in the final project rendering. There are times when I need the rendered frames to exactly match the source footage dimensions and pixel aspect ratio, and I haven’t been able to get what I need from Vegas.
Is there a trick to access the Vegas timeline and direct it to the Quicktime Pro exporter so that all of the render options are available?

[Rob Mack]

True, Vegas’ frame sequence output is based on the preview frame buffer. With a little care it’s dead easy to to do and you get essentially uncompressed output, but you only get a few image output options and of course you can only get 8-bit color (and now that Vegas can read and write 10-bit media you might want stills in a higher bit depth).

I rarely have a reason to export via quicktime so I guess I’ve not made a close comparison of what Quicktime Pro offers Vs what Vegas offers. I’d love to try it out. Can you give me an example (other than FLV) of codecs that appear in QTPro and not Vegas? If it’s a free codec I’d be happy to download and install, but I don’t expect Vegas to use non-free QT codecs. I assume tey’re proprietary.

Rob

[Jeff Weinberger]

Quicktime is free as a player, you can pay a small fee and upgrade it to Quicktime Pro. The Pro version functions as a plugin that provides enhanced rendering options for most editing programs, and the player itself can load a media file and export it to the rendering formats that QT supports.
If you have another editing program that supports QT Pro as a plugin, you can render your timeline as Quicktime and all the Pro formats are available. If you are in Vegas and render as Quicktime, not all the rendering formats are there. How is it “Professional” to have rendering formats blocked? How is it “Professional” for Vegas to render a frame sequence as a resized JPEG or PNG with a pixel aspect ratio that is altered from the source footage? How is this better than competing programs which offer the ability to render all the formats included in Quicktime Pro or render as a frame sequence using settings precisely chosen by the user?

[Rob Mack]

Very true, not all the formats that QT Pro lists are there in Vegas. FLV isn’t there for instance, and I assume it’s a proprietary issue. I don’t really know who’s doing the “blocking” but I suspect that it’s not some malicious act on Vegas’ part.

Image Sequence is one of the QT options doesn’t show up in Vegas, so you have to frame serve out of Vegas in YUY2 format and then use QT Pro to make the image sequence. Not ideal because it’s a few more steps.

Vegas’s own image sequence export is a script, not a built in function, so technically Vegas can’t actually make image sequences AT ALL. But it can do it via a script and to configure the output you have to properly configure the preview window. If you don’t do that things don’t work.

But I see what you’re saying about the PAR being screwed up on image sequences. The script saves files using the same “save snapshot to file” function found on the preview window. That feature doesn’t give you an option to save as actual pixels – the only way to do that is to save snapshot to clipboard and then paste it, which is probably unusable in a script. The script saves a sequence of PAR corrected images, which is not really acceptable if you’re outputting to AEFX. Still image output is very dumbed down in Vegas.

So thanks for inadvertantly pointing out the workaround using the debugmode frameserver, as that allows you to use quicktime Pro to create real image sequences.

Rob Mack