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Sony NXCAM and Vegas Pro 9 and .mov files.
I just bought a Sony NXCAM and Vegas Pro 9. I chose Vegas over FCP and all the others because I used it in Portland, Oregon to edit news and I loved it. Now I’m doing freelance for AOL.com and they prefer .mov files. I installed Quicktime and now I can render .mov files. I’m having difficulty figuring out exactly what my render settings should be in the custom video settings. Also, if the files render too big, my computer won’t play them smoothly in my Quicktime player. My computer is a Sony Vaio, i7core, so it should be able to handle playing back big files in my Quicktime player, right?? Last time I rendered my videos, I used the animation codec because it seem to play smoothly without creating HUGE files. AOL said it worked fine but there were interlacing problems they had to fix. They told me they are not very familiar with Vegas, but I should try to save them with the DV/DVCPro NTSC codec. Does that make sense to do so?? If anyone can answer I’d appreciate it.
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3 Replies
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Also, if the files render too big, my computer won’t play them smoothly in my Quicktime player. My computer is a Sony Vaio, i7core, so it should be able to handle playing back big files in my Quicktime player, right??
That depends on if the playback is CPU bound or I/O bound. If it’s I/O bound, it’s your hard drives that can’t feed the big file fast enough so the Core i7 doesn’t mater.
Last time I rendered my videos, I used the animation codec because it seem to play smoothly without creating HUGE files. AOL said it worked fine but there were interlacing problems they had to fix. They told me they are not very familiar with Vegas, but I should try to save them with the DV/DVCPro NTSC codec. Does that make sense to do so?? If anyone can answer I’d appreciate it.
Actually it does not make sense. I assume AOL.com wants video for the internet so why would they ask you to use an interlaced DV format? You can certainly do this in Vegas. It supports DV/DVCPro NTSC. You just have to make a template for it. You might be better off figuring out why they had interlace issues with your last movie because the Animation codec will give you much higher quality than DV. (I assume you are shooting SD and not HD)
What are they going to do with this video? Are they going to edit it further? If this is the final delivery format, why not render to MPEG4/h.264 for the internet?
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
That depends on if the playback is CPU bound or I/O bound. If it’s I/O bound, it’s your hard drives that can’t feed the big file fast enough so the Core i7 doesn’t mater.
Forgive me, but I’m not very clear on what I/O bound means.
Actually it does not make sense. I assume AOL.com wants video for the internet so why would they ask you to use an interlaced DV format? You can certainly do this in Vegas. It supports DV/DVCPro NTSC. You just have to make a template for it.You might be better off figuring out why they had interlace issues with your last movie because the Animation codec will give you much higher quality than DV. (I assume you are shooting SD and not HD)
What are they going to do with this video? Are they going to edit it further? If this is the final delivery format, why not render to MPEG4/h.264 for the internet?
I do shoot these videos in HD. They are for AOL’s ‘Pawnation’ section of their website. They are called ‘Pet On The Street’ videos. Not sure if I’m allowed to post links, so I won’t, but if you google those titles you’ll find it pretty easily.
The AOL guys took a look at the render options in Vegas and helped me create this template, we named it “DVCPro HD Template:”
Frame Size: High Definition 1920X1080
Field Order: None (Progressive Scan)
Frame Rate: 29.970000
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.000
Video Format: DV/DVCPro NTSC
Compressed Depth: 24bpp color
Quality: 100%They told me this template should work. I think they suggested the DV/DVCPro format because they felt the Animation format was too big and unnecessary for web videos, plus a lot of other guys shoot with DVCPro, so that’s what they are used to. I’m kind of the black sheep with my Sony gear and Vegas Software. So I rendered one of my projects with their template and it seemed fine, yet the quality was not as crisp as the Animation format. I think you’ve solved my problem. I should just stick to the Animation format or try the MPEG4 format which is the same as h.264?? I did not know that. For some reason I think I remember one of the guys saying not to render as MPEG4. I’ll have to find out why, or maybe I heard him wrong. I thought of trying h.264, but I didn’t see the option in Vegas Pro 9, of course at that time I didn’t realize MPEG4 is h.264. And yes, this is the final delivery format. They don’t do any additiional editing.
Also, maybe you can help me with this… Would you recommend a website I could use to send them these files over the internet? Right now I send them on dvds, or they send me a hard drive where I dump the videos onto and send back. They told me to look into a file sending system, but I really don’t know much about that.
Hey, thanks for your help. I sort of jumped into this gig, but beleive it or not it’s going very well. They like my work a lot, it’s just some of the tech stuff with computers I’m unsure about, and the AOL guys are so used to Final Cut and Panasonic gear (however, they were very impressed with Vegas’s rendering and output options.) So thank you!
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Forgive me, but I’m not very clear on what I/O bound means.
Sorry. I/O is Input/Output and I was referring to your hard drives not being fast enough to output the video.
I do shoot these videos in HD.
The DV/DVCPro codec in Quicktime is not for HD. You can certainly feed it 1920×1080 but it is an SD codec. You really want the DVCProHD codec for HD which Vegas doesn’t have. This is probably why your DVCPro render doesn’t look as good as the Animation codec does.
I should just stick to the Animation format or try the MPEG4 format which is the same as h.264?? I did not know that. For some reason I think I remember one of the guys saying not to render as MPEG4. I’ll have to find out why, or maybe I heard him wrong. I thought of trying h.264, but I didn’t see the option in Vegas Pro 9, of course at that time I didn’t realize MPEG4 is h.264. And yes, this is the final delivery format. They don’t do any additiional editing.
When people say don’t render to MPEG4 they are usually talking about it as an editing format. You never want to edit MPEG4 if you can avoid it. MPEG4 is the perfect format for delivery. This is why I asked if they were going to edit it. What you should ask is if you can encode directly to the format they will deliver on or if they will accept your MPEG4 files without re-encoding them on their end. That will keep the highest quality.
Would you recommend a website I could use to send them these files over the internet?
Sorry, I haven’t a clue. I mail hard drives back and forth for my work.
They told me to look into a file sending system, but I really don’t know much about that.
Why don’t you ask them to recommend one. If they have done this before, they should be able to tell you which one to use.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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