Maximum output quality for footage from Flip MinoHD

[John Rofrano]

Have you tested any of your Flip MinoHD footage to see if it can be edited in Vegas Pro 8.0? You can try installing the x264vfw codec if it doesn’t. The Flip uses some variant of h.264 so the x264vfw codec should work if Vegas doesn’t recognize the video on it’s own.

As for 24p, unless you are shooting at 24fps or you are very skilled at shooting 24fps, you may be surprised that the footage may look jerky. You don’t just wave around a 30fps camera and then reduce it to 24fps and expect it to look good. Remember 24p is going to drop 6 frames every second. You need to make sure that your pans are slow so that they won’t look jerky when rendered to 24fps. If I were you, I would find a picket fence and and pan across it at various speeds and then convert the footage to 24p and see at what speed it pans smoothly.

I would set you project properties to match your camera using the Match Media setting. If you are delivering on DVD then your only choice is to render using MPEG2 with one of the DVD Widescreen templates. Since your film is only 20 minutes you can increase the bit-rate to CBR 8,000,000 and still have it fit on a DVD.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[D. Eric franks]

I would agree with John and take it one step further: 24p is irrelevant. If you aren’t going to be transferring your video to film, there is no point in shooting or rendering to 24p. This is definitely true for any sub-$2,000 camcorder and especially true for pocket cams. (I’d actually love to take it even a step further and say that you can’t tell the difference between non-film transfer 30p and 24p on a Canon 5D Mark II, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough!)

As far as what setting you want in Vegas, well, the final render is many magnitudes less important to quality than the production, but John covered the basics: match the Flip video settings in your project and render. What you really need is boatloads of light, solid support of the camera and professional shooting techniques. Do that and there is no reason you can be accepted into and win a film festival or two with a Flip Mino. Well, that and a great story!

[Ranjeet Sankar]

Hi John/Eric,

Thanks a ton for your replies! I really appreciate it.

1. Compatability: Flip MinoHD videos work with Sony Vegas Pro 8 (Thank God!).

2. 24fps film look: I did a test rendering and it was ok for static shots. Moving shots in 24fps look like crap! They are too jumpy. 🙁 So I have decided to take your advice and render it in 30 fps itself. As you rightly mentioned, I am not going for a video to film and so it would be irrelevant.

3. Input Match media settings: This is perfect. Thank you.

4. Output rendering format: I am sorry, I was not clear enough. I am not going to burn a DVD right out of Sony Vegas. I am planning to render the output as a file itself. DVD burning and final rendering will be done in a studio after dubbing and sound mixing. So please let me know the output format for maximum quality. I would like to give my file to the studio with maximum quality. What should be the file type, template, bitrate(??) etc.?

Please advise.

[D. Eric franks]

Ah, excellent: you are talking about a lossless intermediary then, where you don’t care at all how big the file is, you just want it perfect. In that case, I’d recommend AVI with None for the codec. It’ll create a giant file that is largely compatible with other people’s computers. If you were doing this for yourself, I’d DL the Lagarith codec and use that, but you can’t expect your sound engineers to have to install stuff on their machines just for you. If they insist on QuickTime (which is fine) and use Uncompressed for the compressor: it’ll work very nicely, but it’s much slower than AVI.

[Ranjeet Sankar]

Hi Eric,
Thanks for your reply. I tried AVI-Uncompressed and it did create a BIG file. But the file is skipping frames when I open with VLC player/Windows Media Player! Is that a problem with my laptop’s capacity? I tried WMV-Uncompressed output and it runs fine with Windows Media Player. Is there a big difference between AVI and WMI output, even though I render the same ‘Uncompressed’ version? Please advise.