Two Transcoding Questions

[Norman Willis]

Gavin, I am relatively new to Vegas, but I have used Cineform NeoScene to transcode to Cineform .avi, and it works great. It is much easier for the processor to keep up, especially if you have more than one layer, or do FX of any kind. You can get it for $99.00 at https://www.videoguys.com, or https://www.bhphotovideo.com.

I upload to the web all the time, and Vegas has a great preset for that. It also encodes for DVD just great. The bitrate calculator is off, but if you do a search for Mark’s Bitrate Calculator, I am sure there are several threads on that.

May I please recommend trying that first, and then if you still feel you need something more, then you can spend all of your money 🙂

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[John Rofrano]

Does anyone agree or disagree with these suggestions, and can you comment on why?

I disagree with both about rendering uncompressed. For HD you would need to build a huge RAID array to hold the data and provide enough throughput. There is no reason to render everything uncompressed before working on it.

1) They say if your footage is encoded on the camera (in my case, H.264), it’s better to transcode it first to an uncompressed format in order to lighten the load on the NLE during the editing process.

All video is encoded in the camera. I think they mean if your camera uses intraframe encoding and/or high compression (both of which h.264 has) it is better to render to a format that is easier to edit. As Norman points out, the accepted workflow is to transcode to a digital intermediary like CineForm. This is visually lossless and far smaller and easier to work with than uncompressed.

2) It also says that rather than encoding in the NLE (in my case, Vegas Pro 9.0), export to an uncompressed format, and then use more robust software such as Sorenson Squeeze to encode for the web, or whatever format you need.

I guess people with bad NLE’s say this because Vegas does an outstanding job at encoding. The only thing it doesn’t encode to is Flash. Other than that, I do all of my encoding in Vegas. Like I said, perhaps other NLE’s are as good at this as Vegas.

~jr

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

[Gavin Steiner]

Ok great! I am looking at Neoscene right now. Seems do do a lot to improve the quality of the editable footage~!

Thanks so much,

Gavin

—
Gavin Steiner
The PodCan Network
https://www.podcan.net

[Frederic Baumann]

If it may help, following instructions give on this forum, I have bought Cineform to encode the MOV files coming out from my Canon EOS 7D. These MOV / H264 files are known to have problems with Vegas if used directly – causing Vegas to crash rather frequently.
Since I convert the files to AVI with Cineform, I have never had any more crashes.

Regarding Vegas encoding, it works fine for me except for Divx output : the rendering crashes as soon as I start it. My workflow consists in encoding to MP4 in Vegas, and then convert to Divx/MP3 with M4NG (free tool).

I now other people here on the forum can encode to DivX without any difficulties, but I am not lucky enough for that 🙂 (I tried many many many different advanced settings but they are all of no help).

Frédéric