How to render lossless in Sony Vegas?

[Norman Black]

Except for uncompressed video there is no such thing as “lossless”. All codecs are lossy, but I think what you are looking for is to encode with a setting that will have the same quality as your source encode.

The only straight forward way to do that is to use the same dimensions and same video codec at the same video bitrate. This is not truly exact because some encoders are better than others at equal bitrates.

You can use a utility like, MediaInfo, to get the specs on a video file. It is a free utility.

You mention 55 minutes at 899MB for the file. This comes to about 272 Kbits per second overall bitrate including audio. 899,000,000 / 3,300 seconds. This is a shockingly low bitrate to me unless the video dimension/resolution is very small. Could there be a typo here for the file size.

If you are uploading to Youtube then you cannot maintain the exact same video quality as normal Blu-ray encodes. Typically Blu-ray movies are encoded at over twice the bitrate that Youtube provides. Remember that everything you uploaded to Youtube is re-encoded to their spec, regardless of what you upload.

[Paul Hinderscheid]

Thank you for the reply! Ah, I see. Yup, that sounds right. I just want the same quality as the source encode. Oh, and sorry about that. I was actually looking at the original .MKV file by mistake which was 899MB, but I converted the file to MP4 using handbrake and it’s actually 8.46 GB (9,093,736,457 bytes). Both look identical so I’m not how the .MKV file was so low. Anyway, I used that program you suggested and here’s a screenshot of all the specs on the video- https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-leCmS3zkzhE/VZhLdTStucI/AAAAAAAAAR4/IXBd0UanKpA/w1538-h865-no/Screenshot%2B%25281%2529.png

Now that I know the specs what’s next? Thank you so much for the help! I do not take this for granted. I really do appreciate it!

Video producer on YouTube. I make things. 🙂

[Norman Black]

The specs show about 20Mbps AVC video. So you can use Mainconcept AVC or Sony AVC at about 20Mbps average bitrate. Same frame rate and frame size as well. Use 160Kbps for the audio bitrate.

Understand that Youtube 1080 video is only about 8Mbps which is nowhere near 20. Uploading a 20Mbps video would be a bit of overkill. Rendering 20Mbps AVC from Vegas will preserve the original video about as good as possible.

[Paul Hinderscheid]

Under Mainconcept AVC what do I choose? Like Internet 1080p or Blu-Ray. Under the Blu-Ray one it’s not letting me include audio.

Video producer on YouTube. I make things. 🙂

[Norman Black]

[Paul Hinderscheid] “Under Mainconcept AVC what do I choose? Like Internet 1080p or Blu-Ray. Under the Blu-Ray one it’s not letting me include audio.”

What are you trying to do. Upload to Youtube/Internet or generate a Blu-ray? Hint, Hint.

If Youtube, then start with the Internet template(s) and adjust it as needed.

If Blu-ray then start with one of the Blu-ray templates and adjust as needed. The Blu-ray templates are designed for use with DVD Architect and do not render audio since you render the audio separately from video. The reason is that DVD/Blu-ray support multiple user selectable audio tracks.

[Erik Rakovsky]

Except for uncompressed video there is no such thing as “lossless”. All codecs are lossy.

These two things simply aren’t true.
You can have compressed video which will be truly losless. Even if you only zip the data stream.
There is a list of lossless codecs for video (and it is pretty incomplete) and as you can see, even h264 has lossless mode (in I444 colorspace, however, and what is worse, this option is not readable by Vegas):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs#Lossless_video_compression

What is even better: YouTube accept lossless h264 (I tried it) and for some sources (256 color graphics, some computer generated scenes e.g. in games – because there practically isn’t any noise) the bitrate is not so catastrophic
OBS Studio with nVidia graphic cards can directly encode to the lossless h.264 using hardware encoder NVENC – when using AverMedia LGP2 (1080p30/1080p60, I420 colorspace expanded to 4:4:4) I obtained mostly around 50 Mbit/s, what is less than bitrate of Avid DNxHD or Cineform, which are both lossy (much less, DNxHD is going up to 145 Mbit/s and still is lossy)

However it is possible to make final render into h264 lossless: you can use Debugmode frameserver and feed the data into x264 encoder (maybe after doing colorspace expansion and conversion in AviSynth or maybe it is even possible in x264, I didn’t know).

[George Dean]

Not speaking for him, but I believe Norman’s replies were in context within Vegas. Your reply, although contridictory, taking that part out would be an additional contribution if the OP wanted to get involved with frameserving and complications it comes with.

Regardless, Norman is correct, Youtube is going to perform it’s magic by re-encoding. That may or may not be visually harmful compared to the original depending on what the original upload is and how picky the user is about the results. From my experience, the file size upload isn’t worth it to upload lossless compared to visually lossless and the end results of Youtube processing.

Best Regards……George