Matching bitrate to source files?

[Stephen Crye]

Lee, I thought I would jump in because your question has gone unanswered.

Although I’ll try to shed some light on it, I suspect it went unanswered because we can tell you have a lot to learn, and it is not possible or practical to write a zillion pages here on this thread to guide you.

That having been said, your question shows you are thinking. It is not a stupid question. The quick answer is – rendering at a higher rate with the h.264 encoder will not buy you anything.

Your camera shoots with the AVCHD 1.0 standard, using h.264 encoding with a max bit rate 0f 24 Mbps.

If you are just trying to render for YouTube, it would be pointless to shoot for 24 Mbps on the render, because YT is going to degrade it to far less than 24 Mbps. I suggest a more reasonable 8 Mbps CBR.

But, if you plan to render for something else – for example BluRay – or if you want to use a different encoder such as MPEG (which does not compress as efficiently as h.264), then a higher bit rate might produce better results.

Read, experiment, and don’t expect simple answers to very complicated things.

Here’s a link that might open your eyes a bit:
https://www.jazzythedog.com/testing/DNxHD/HD-Guide.aspx

If you are serious about videography, years from now you will come back and read your post with a smile and with appreciation of how far you have progressed!

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T3400, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM, nVidea FX 570, Vegas 10e (and 11) x64 DVDA 5.2(build 133) Sony HDR-CX550V