Two Vegas Gurus Walk Into A Bar….

[Ken Vaughn]

I remembered seeing a promo mail from Sony and I found it, 20% off everything including the needed upgrade. Looks like it’s going to happen sooner than I thought. John, I tried to approximate the settings in your screen shot…produced a 141MB file…but it looks really good.

Ken

[John Rofrano]

[Jorma Nippala] “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.”

Yea Jorma, I see that they moved them under MainConcept AVC. I still have them from Vegas Pro 10 but when I switch to a PC with only Vegas Pro 11, I can see that they are gone. 🙁 I guess I’ll start using the MainConcept AVC Internet templates and see how they compare.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Ken Vaughn] ” I tried to approximate the settings in your screen shot…produced a 141MB file…but it looks really good.”

Yea, the video that you posed had a bitrate of 3.5Mbps. The template I posted was 8Mbps so I would assume it would look better. You might try lowering it to 6Mbps and see if it still holds up during the rotation. The trick is to find the minimum bitrate that still yields the quality you need.

~jr

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

[Ken Vaughn]

Woo Hoo, I am officially in a state of upgradedness…. Version 11.0 (Build 511) 64 bit. The down side is I’m going to have to PM Santa and tell him to forget about that cowboy outfit I’d asked for…

It’s dark, and scary….

So never mind all my 8.0 questions and prepare for upgraded queries.

Ken

[Ken Vaughn]

Ok, so far some interesting results. The v11 render is smaller dimensionally, higher bit rate and the file is 4MB bigger but the quality is noticeably not as good. Here is a comparison of the two;

Existing: (file at the MP4 link above)

800 x 600
17.6MB size
Bit Rate: 918kbps

New: (Vegas v11)

640 x 480
21.5MB
Bit Rate: 995kbps

Main Concept: Internet 480p 4:3

Unfortunately I don’t have the custom settings from v8.1 that created the “Existing” file but I tried to use the same ones for v11 as best I could remember. I guess I’ll have to do some T&E.

It seems that “Enable progressive download” might be an advantage.

Ken

[Ken Vaughn]

Well a day’s worth of working with V11 has taught me some things. One thing I have learned is that to make a video smaller than the dimensions at which it was created actually adds to the file size. This is a revelation as with my extensive experience working with digital images I’m use to the opposite being true. Making an image smaller dimensionally will always make for a smaller file all other things being equal. This is why going from 800 x 600 to 640 x 480 didn’t reduce the file size by an appreciable amount.

One thing I noticed also is the fact that the original animation files were rendered at 24fps so I tried rendering from Vegas at that rate but the result was not impressive.

If I wish to have smaller files when bandwidth is an issue, I must have smaller originals. One thing I really do like about V11 is progressive download. It seems to work well. For my small project it’s not as big of a deal but I can also see that GPU acceleration is would be good for large projects.

Now I need to nail down the right settings for burning to optical disk. As John said one setting will work best for playing on a computer, another for playing on a television set.

I’m looking forward to the next project. I’d like to know what should be considered when obtaining stock footage.

Ken

[John Rofrano]

Also try the Sony AVC encoder and try using the same dimensions (800×600) for both.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Ken Vaughn] “This is why going from 800 x 600 to 640 x 480 didn’t reduce the file size by an appreciable amount.”

No. The file size is controlled by the bit-rate. To keep your image file analogy, it’s like saving a JPEG file with 80% compression vs 50% compression. Same dimensions, but a smaller file due to more compression. So the size stayed about the same because you used the a slightly higher bit-rate, not because you made the resolution smaller. I just said to render to 800×600 so that you were comparing apples to apples as far as quality goes.

[Ken Vaughn] “If I wish to have smaller files when bandwidth is an issue, I must have smaller originals. “

No. The size of the original has nothing to do with the size of the rendered file. They are completely independent.

Actually, to maintain quality with lower bit-rates you should render to a smaller resolution. Here’s how it works. The bit-rate controls how many bits you have to represent the video. The lower the resolution, the less bits you need to represent the video. The lower the bit-rate, the smaller the file. There is also Variable Bit-Rate (VBR) and Constant Bit-Rate (CBR) encoding. When you want the smallest file possible, you want to use VBR so that it only uses the minimum number of bits needed.

~jr

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

[Ken Vaughn]

I’m on the verge of understanding this and I want to better illustrate my thinking that video differs from a still digital graphic image in certain respects regarding dimensional changes. So here’s what I did, I rendered my project file with two different custom sizes. All other settings/parameters were the same (the “all other things being equal” part). I used VBR so the actual bit rates in the two files were slightly different as a result of the VBR setting.

Frame Width: 800
Frame Height: 600
Date Rate: 916kbps
Total Bitrate: 1045kbps
File Size: 19.5MB

Frame Width: 640
Frame Height: 480
Date Rate: 894kbps
Total Bitrate: 1023kbps
File Size: 19.1MB

Graphic Image;

Dimensions
Width: 800
Height: 600
DPI: 300
No Compression “12” Setting in Photoshop
File Size: 70.8kb

Same file opened and resized;

Dimensions
Width: 640
Height: 480
DPI: 300
No Compression “12” Setting in Photoshop
File Size: 52.3kb

So this means that reducing the video file dimensionally with all other settings remaining constant only resulted in a roughly 2% difference in file size. Doing the same with a graphic image resulted in a roughly 25% reduction in file size.

I don’t wish to put forth an argument about this as I’m a right brain kindof guy and it’s often difficult for me to wrap my brain around concepts of a numerical nature. I only wish to illustrate why I reached the conclusions I did above. And admittedly the video world includes some basic concepts I must become comfortable with as understanding the concepts are as important as understanding the mechanics. And as it always is with such things (for me) there is a good chance there is a huge flaw unseen in my thinking.

You’ve been very helpful all through this thread John and I appreciate it very much. I’m glad you pointed out the error in my concluding the source file sizes were critical as I was on the verge of requesting smaller renderings from the designer. That saved me a lot of time.

Thanks again,

Ken

[John Rofrano]

Ken, you got me there… Bad analogy on my part because bitrate is different than compression as you pointed out. So that was a bad example. The important thing to remember is that bitrate determines file size not resolution. That’s the point I was trying to make.

~jr

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