Sony Vegas Pro 12 Few Questions About Project Settings, Quality Settings, FPS etc

[John Rofrano]

[Carl Lundell] “Now, I’ve also upgraded my RAM to 16GB, and that leads us to my first question. I want to get the most of my RAM for Vegas but I’m not sure of my limits. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/36m9i.png As you can see I have it at 12000 MB, and Max Available: 15351 MB, so, can I go up to 15351 MB or will that slow down other things for me? Advice/recommendation on this.”

You want to set that back to the default of 200. That parameter is only used for manual RAM previews and steals memory from the rest of Vegas so it should be used very sparingly otherwise your renders will run out of memory.

[Carl Lundell] “If I record my gameplay with Fraps in a 1600×1200 resolution, is it OK to render my movie in 1920×1080 to get the movie in full HD format? Basically what I’m asking is, must the project settings always match with the resolution I used in-game?”

Well… let”s just say it’s not optimal. If you want great quality, you need to record at 1920×1080 because when 1600×1200 gets resized down to 1920×0180 it’s not going to be as sharp as you’re expecting. Yes it will work, but you probably won’t be happy with the results. Try a few tests and see for yourself.

[Carl Lundell] “Similar question…
If I record in 30 fps (or any other amount, e.g. 29,97 fps, 60 fps whatever) must my project setting have the same amount of fps for movie rendering AND when compressing as well? (I use Easy h264 screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/fm2rr.png – Like, 30 fps in fraps, 30 fps in my project properties and finally 30 fps in compression options.”

If you change the frame rate you may get ghosting and not like the results. It is best to record at the same rate you will render at. If you can’t, you may have to disable resample to eliminate the ghosting.

[Carl Lundell] “Will it be good if I render it in 24p? The eye can’t see more than 24 frames per second, why should I need more than that?”

Who told you that? The people here who shoot 60p will swear that they can see the difference between 60p and 30p and I can definitely tell the difference between 30p and 24p so your assumption is false. The human eye can and will tell the difference. If you render to 24p I can almost guarantee that you will be complaining the your video looks choppy (because you can tell the difference too) 😉

The 24p reference probably has you confused because that’s the rate at which the human eye start to not see individual frames and perceives smooth motion, but rendering faster than 24p the eye can definitely see even smoother motion.

[Carl Lundell] “Can you tell me if these settings are good for a full HD gameplay video (Video: https://i.imgur.com/D3yFs.png Audio: https://i.imgur.com/rJE4Y.png)? “

Yea, those setting look fine for full HD.

[Carl Lundell] “EDIT: Another screenshot, my rendering settings: https://i.imgur.com/BZkeX.png“

I would not render uncompressed. Those files are going to be huge and I hope you have a RAID 0 array with at least 5 discs to handle uncompressed HD. You should just render to MainConcept AVC (MP4) to upload to YouTube.

[Carl Lundell] “LAST QUESTION! Off-topic actually.
How do I remove my picture on Creative Cow?”

Why it’s a great picture. You can delete it by editing your profile and there will be a link at the bottom to “Update Your User Photo” but please add a different one if you don’t like that one because I’m tired of everyone looking like a cow or a milk man. lol.

~jr

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

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[Carl Lundell]

[John Rofrano] “Well… let”s just say it’s not optimal. If you want great quality, you need to record at 1920×1080 because when 1600×1200 gets resized down to 1920×0180 it’s not going to be as sharp as you’re expecting. Yes it will work, but you probably won’t be happy with the results. Try a few tests and see for yourself.”

I see. Though not all games let me choose that resolution, 1600×1200 is sometimes the highest. Or it’s very high like 2048×1536 and no 1920×1080 option available. But yeah… I’m testing this out.

[John Rofrano] “If you change the frame rate you may get ghosting and not like the results. It is best to record at the same rate you will render at. If you can’t, you may have to disable resample to eliminate the ghosting.”

Yeah. I’m familiar with this sort of ghosting and I’ve disabled it in earlier projects. I once rendered a movie I had worked on for quite some time and didn’t know how to disable that UNTIL I had already removed my movie files and the project save file, hehe. It wasn’t a very good movie anyway… so nevermind that :p

[John Rofrano] “Who told you that? The people here who shoot 60p will swear that they can see the difference between 60p and 30p and I can definitely tell the difference between 30p and 24p so your assumption is false. The human eye can and will tell the difference. If you render to 24p I can almost guarantee that you will be complaining the your video looks choppy (because you can tell the difference too) ;-)”

Ohh, I got totally confused with this. Thanks for clarifying. Well, I’m rendering at 29.970, that should be decent enough for a gameplay video… I guess it won’t matter if I fraps in 30p and then render the movie in 60p? I have yet to try that out.

[John Rofrano] “I would not render uncompressed. Those files are going to be huge and I hope you have a RAID 0 array with at least 5 discs to handle uncompressed HD. You should just render to MainConcept AVC (MP4) to upload to YouTube.”

I’ve got no idea what RAID 0 array is or what it means, first time I come across this. I know however that uncompressed movie files are huge, but I’ve used a program called Easy h264 to compress those, it’s actually not so bad, I was recommended to use it on another forum. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in quality comparing with MainConcept AVC (MP4), and the filesize was almost HALF of that. I could show you an example if you like. Of course both have their advantages, with MainConcept AVC (MP4) you don’t have to render the movie uncompressed first and if one cannot handle the huge filesizes you shouldn’t do it, but for me that works fine, and the result of using Easy h264 is as I said, 1/2 the filesize and quality remain pretty much the same 😉

[John Rofrano]

[Carl Lundell] “I guess it won’t matter if I fraps in 30p and then render the movie in 60p? I have yet to try that out.”

This will work if you Disable Resample on all of your video events so that Vegas doesn’t try and resample 30.0 down to 29.97 (if FRAPS is really recording 30.0 fps)

[Carl Lundell] “I’ve got no idea what RAID 0 array is or what it means, first time I come across this.”

A RAID is where you combine multiple physical discs into a larger logical disc that performs faster because there are multiple discs doing the work under the covers. RAID is usually recommended for working with uncompressed HD. But it sounds like you are not trying to edit uncompressed video, just render uncompressed so that you can compress it with another program. That’s cool.

[Carl Lundell] “I know however that uncompressed movie files are huge, but I’ve used a program called Easy h264 to compress those, it’s actually not so bad, I was recommended to use it on another forum.”

If you want them in H.264 then why not just make H.264 directly from Vegas using the Sony AVC or MainConcept AVC encoders? They both can create H.264 MP4 files. That would save you an additional render and a lot of disc space.

~jr

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

[Carl Lundell]

Thanks for the help 🙂

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome. 🙂

~jr

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

[Jorge Murguia]

Hi John: I am doing a project for my children using some videos from original DVDs, If I play the original it looks with a great definition, but when I render it, it does not matter what kind of render I use I have tried almost all the render options with different combinations, customizing templates etc. and they all come out pixelated, or some come very dark, the borders of the images are not clear, I will play them from a computer to a 12 by 9 feet screen, do you have any suggestions?