Rendering Questions

[John Rofrano]

[Ryan McRobb] “* To make the video a single file, as opposed to three 2Gb files. (It was recording for about half an hour straight)”

I believe from your other post that you can eliminate this problem by importing the footage using the Device Explorer so that the separate 2GB files are stitched back together into the original recording.

[Ryan McRobb] “* To add some external audio”

I find that this is best done in a separate project. In other words, sync the audio with the video and save it as it’s own project. Then drop this project into your main Vegas Pro project and it will behave as a single piece of media without needing any rendering.

[Ryan McRobb] “* Hopefully to reduce the file size, as it is just a reference video for a friend who was performing.”

Reducing the file size means some loss in quality. AVCHD is already highly compressed so to make it smaller you’re going to need to reduce the bit-rate until you hit the desired file size and hope that the video doesn’t look too bad.

[Ryan McRobb] “I tried rendering to the MPG “HD1920 x 1080 50i” setting that is in the render menu in SV12. It was painfully slow, and as it got to 100%(after about 3 hours) it crashed.”

MPEG2 is less efficient than AVCHD so I would expect the file size to get larger not smaller. You need to keep these AVCHD and reduce the bit rate to get the file size down.

[Ryan McRobb] “I figure many of you shoot with DSLRs, so I am interested in learning how you approach rendering the footage.”

I don’t shoot DSLR but they shoot MPEG4 video so I would render to MPEG4 for Internet delivery. I would stay away from WMV. It’s a proprietary Windows format.

~jr

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

[Norman Black]

[Ryan McRobb] “I figure many of you shoot with DSLRs, so I am interested in learning how you approach rendering the footage.”

DSLRs shoot AVC video, typically in MOV files, at pretty high bitrates. Vegas handles this natively without the need for Quicktime.

Really rendering has everything to do with your target and nothing to do with your source.

If you target Internet (youtube, vimeo, smugmug) then those are your constraints. These will never be near your source video quality due to their low bitrate. For internet delivery you typically can start with the Sony and Mainconcept AVC “Internet” templates.

The only thing that really matter with source is if you want to retain full camera quality for giving to someone else, or import into another project. For a DSLR stick with the same codec, AVC, at the same bitrate as your camera. Mediainfo can give you these specifications of the camera file.