Rendering 720/60p in Vegas Pro 10

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Shepherd] “The new upgrade for Vegas Pro 10 includes a new rendering template for AVC 720/60P.
Has the maximum bit rate increased at this setting or is it still limited to 20 mbps?”

I don’t see a new rendering template for 60p (just a new project template) but you can certainly make a rendering template for 60p. It is still limited to 20Mbps.

~jr

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

[Bill Shepherd]

Can anyone recommend a commercial editing firm that can take my 720/60p AVCHD edited videos and render them at 35mbps?

[Danny Hays]

Rendering as m2ts is limited to 20 but if you switch to mp4, you can type any bitrate in. I have a Panasonic HDC-TM700 that records at 1080 60p at 28 mbs. I render to 1080 60p in mp4 and wmv at 28 mbs.

[Dave Haynie]

You’re talking Apples and Oranges here a little.

Your JVC Prosumer camcorder is recording in MPEG-2 long GOP at 35Mb/s, which is roughly equivalent to AVC at 17.5Mb/s, with a modern encoder anyway. I’m not sure you could convince Vegas to SmartRender to MPEG-2, but you might give it a try. Things get a little weird, because JVC uses the .mp4 or .mov (Quicktime) wrappers on these (assuming you have something like the HM100), rather than the usual MPEG-2 transport stream. But there’s MPEG-2 inside. The Main Concept MPEG-2 CODEC will render up to 80Mb/s, depending on settings (I have a high quality 80Mb/s MPEG-2 rendering right now… I’ve been using this for intermediate video, until Sony gets Cineform working under Vegas 10 — always crashes on output). Blu-ray supports slightly over 40Mb/s, so you could use your 35Mb/s if you wanted to, assuming DVDA will have it. This wouldn’t be practical for very large videos, and unless you can SmartRender, you probably will get the same quality with AVC at much lower rates. Though I’m not entirely happy with Sony’s limitations on AVC bitrate anyway; they’re fairly artificial, there’s no reason the encoder should have such limits.

Bit-rate is a little like CPU clock speed… it’s one indicator of performance, but only within the same family. Just as MPEG-2 is many times more complex, and thus, of a much higher coding efficiency than DV or Motion JPEG, AVC is many times more complex and about double the coding efficiency of MPEG-2.

On-camera AVC had been a work-in-progress until the 2009-2010 cameras. The fact is, the more complex algorithm was still maturing (and probably still is, only much more slowly), and you needed a better compression processor than many of the early AVC camcorders had available. IMHO, the quality of AVC surpassed that of HDV (25Mb/s with reduced resolution) in the major implementations over the last two years. Some companies, like JVC and Canon, have boosted the bitrate of their MPEG-2 to compete… also allowing them to use less computational juice on-board the camcorder, and drop right into existing MPEG-2 workflows (more of an issue for corporate/broadcast video than indie stuff).

Nice thing about those cameras, too, is that they record audio in 16-bit LPCM (eg, uncompressed), while HDV and AVCHD-based camcorders all use audio compression.

-Dave