Two Vegas Gurus Walk Into A Bar….

[John Rofrano]

[Ken Vaughn] “Sony Vegas Pro 8.1”

That’s your first problem. Vegas Pro 8.1 is, at best, a technology preview. It should be used for production work due to many bugs. Download Vegas Pro 8.0c which is a later version that has the most bug fixes. It’s not 64-bit but it’s less buggy and thus more stable.

[Ken Vaughn] “To be most useable to the widest audience what are the best formats/settings for the three purposes I have mentioned? What is the best Vegas output for conversion to Flash, and the best method of conversion?”

MPEG4/AVC/H.264 is the best format to use and Flash is to be avoided if your target audience might be people watching on their iPad or iPhone which doesn’t support Flash. I regularly don’t buy from web sites that use only Flash because I do most of my web surfing on my iPad so if I can’t see your site, I can’t buy from you.

Render your video using Sony AVC using one of the “Internet..” templates. You can modify the bitrate to get the filesize you are after. This codec gives really good quality at low bit-rates and can be played by both PC and Mac users. It’s also a good format to distribute on a data DVD to be watched on their computer. If you want the DVD to be watched on a DVD player then you need to author a DVD using MPEG2 video.

Forget about email. Never, ever send a video via email unless you want to piss people off by maxing out their mailbox causing them to loose other emails that will get rejected when their mailbox is full. Only send links to watch the video from an email.

[Ken Vaughn] “Any clue as to what I can do to deal with the AVI crash issue, btw, this doesn’t happen any other time than when I attempt to change the compression from “uncompressed”.”

Try Vegas Pro 8.0c. if that doesn’t work, ask the provider to send a QuickTime MOV file using the QuickTime Animation codec. This will handle much easier than uncompressed AVI.

[Ken Vaughn] “Is Sorenson Squeeze and good option for compression? Are there services that would use this or other tools to give a better final result than I can get on my own? IMO it would be worth paying for the best output project by project as for me, video is not my “day job” and $600 is beyond my reach for a compression program.”

Sorenson isn’t really needed. Sony AVC gives really nice results.

[Ken Vaughn] “I’m asking all this in one post as I don’t want to nickle-dime you guys to death with multiple posts. A post like this often doesn’t get a very good response but please respond if you wish and know that it is greatly appreciated.”

You would probably be much better off putting your hardware questions in a separate thread. Many short posts is always better than one long one because people will not read a long post to get to the one question they can answer but they will read short ones that have topics they are interested in.

Sorry I don’t have answers for your two hardware related questions.

~jr

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

[Ken Vaughn]

John, thanks a bunch, you’ve been extremely helpful. Funny thing is, I have 8.0c installed on a quad-core desktop I built but that machine is sitting about three feet to my left with a corrupted MBR and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. And, it runs Vista Premium so I figured I’d use this Win7 LT as it’s my main machine now with it’s newer OS. Also, I took it for granted that 8.1 was a newer version but I guess the difference is 32 vs 64 and I thought a 64bit program would always be best with a 64bit OS.

Thanks for an authoritative smack-down of email attachments. I’ve tried to show some I’m associated with the benefit of just sending a link but for many, sending email attachments is the default way of distributing information. I suspect this is because for them email is not just a mode of communication but also a way of filing and managing documents. This thinking is hard to counter. I’m going to copy and paste your response to this issue to my partner who has the bad habit of sending out every version of vid I send to him whether it’s ready for distribution or not. He prefers getting them this way but I’ll have to break him of the habit first and refuse to attach another vid to email.

Yeah, the hardware questions were ill advised.

I’m going to implement your suggestions now, thanks again.

Ken

[Ken Vaughn]

Ok, following recommendations I rendered the project file to “Sony AVC (*.mp4;*.m2ts;*.avc)” which yielded a .mp4, 16MB file. The original durations of the file is 2:30 seconds. Everything looks fine until the assembly starts to revolve and then there are serious artifacts on the object itself and in the background. So, I need to do some setting tweaking. As I don’t assume you can see what I see when choosing settings here are my choices;

Custom Settings;
Video Tab;
Video Format – AVC – Memory Stick
Profile – Main – Baseline
Entropy Coding – CABAC – CAVLC
Frame Rate – 29.970
Field Order – None (progressive scan) – Lower field first – Upper Field first
Pixel Aspect Ratio – 1.0000 – 1.3333
Bit Rate – 768,000 – 4,000,000 – 10,000,000 – 20,000,000

System Tab
Format – MP4 File Format (.mp4) – Mpeg2 – Video elementary stream (.avc)

Btw, I’m not seeing any sort of “Internet template”.

Ken

[Bill Church]

Ken, not to horn in on your discussion with John, but I think he might have meant for you to try one of the MainConcept AVC/AAC (*mp4) internet templates. There are six templates listed, and each can be further “customized” to acommodate your quality requirements. Hope this helps.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Ken Vaughn]

Bill, no problem at all, I don’t mind, any and all input is welcome.

I did try the Main Concept option but I’m still not seeing anything “Internet” listed.

All I see in the dropdown is;

Project Settings
Apple iPod 320 x 240 Video
Apple iPod 640 x 480 Video

I did learn what happens with a 50,000,000 average (bps)….the render wouldn’t complete, had to Crtl+Alt+Del Vegas..like a black hole.

With normal title fades and the like it doesn’t take much to look good from what I’m seeing but the rotating 3D models and the pan across an engineering drawing are different matters entirely.

Thanks for the input.

Ken

[Bill Church]

Ken, my bad. I’d overlooked the fact that you were using an older version of Vegas Pro, and I was referring to newer versions. I don’t have Vegas 8, but Vegas Pro 9, for instance, does indeed provide the internet templates under the Sony AVC dropdown, as John had suggested. The templates also appear under the MainConcept AVC menu in Vegas 11. Sorry to confuse the issue.

Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC

[Ken Vaughn]

No problem, at least I’ve solved the case of the missing templates. I do intend to upgrade at some point but it can’t happen now and I need to show this vid to a prospective client hopefully this weekend. I’m starting to get good results though, file size is coming down still maintaining good quality.

Thanks,

Ken

[John Rofrano]

Ken, Sorry I never got back to you. I got crazy busy at work yesterday after answering your post.

I actually acknowledged that you were using Vegas Pro 8 and then promptly forgot and told you to look for the Internet templates which weren’t added until Vegas Pro 9 i guess, and that Sorenson wasn’t needed but I was referring to the AVC encoder in recent versions of Vegas Pro 10 and 11. So… you are 4 versions behind, a LOT has happened with regard to internet video, and you have none of the benefits because you’re using such an old version. You will get a lot better quality by upgrading Vegas Pro.

Here are the setting to make a template that is close to the one that now ships with newer (Vegas Pro 9, 10, 11) versions of Vegas:

Hope that helps.

~jr

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

[Jorma Nippala]

John,
it seems they dropped the Sony AVC Internet preset templates in VPro 11, so one needs to use there a custom one like the one you show, or a MainConcept one.

[Ken Vaughn]

John,

Absolutely no problem. I’ve been banging on these keys long enough to know that the fact you or anyone else is willing to help at all is a blessing.

While video was more of a hobby for me when I bought VP-8 now in my own enterprise I can see that it can be a powerful marketing tool so I will definitely upgrade as soon as it is practical (meaning as soon as I can do it and keep the lights on). Along with this I’m going to upgrade my shooting hardware and I’m hoping to be able to do that as I’ve said by getting rid of one setup and using the proceeds to get another.

I worked on embedding the vid and trying to find the sweet spot between quality and file size last night. If this vid were simple fades as I’ve said it would be easy. But with the rotation of the 3D model and a background that is made up of a gradient it’s not so much so. Here are two efforts;

https://www.ifab.us/skidvid.html

…and a .wmv version;

https://www.ifab.us/skidvid-win.html

I’m hoping the need to add the QT plugin won’t be a problem. My typical users are not web/computer savvy.

Also I wish there were a progress bar when QT is downloading a file, I can see some wondering what’s going on. I may just add a text note to the page saying “If you see the blue Q, you’re good to goo”….or something like that…

Thanks again,

Ken