Vegas 10.0a (388) vs. PPro CS5…render quality

[Mike Kujbida]

I”m guessing that you were using the default templates in each case.
What you need to do is take a look at what the bitrates were for each piece of software.
IMO, Sony sets them far too low for maximum quality which is why I always create custom templates depending on the length of the finished edit.
For example, the default MPEG setting in Sony is a VBR setting of 9,500,000 / 6,000,000 / 192,000.
If the program is less than 70 min. I use a VBR of 8,000,000.
If it’s longer than that, I use the bitrate calculator found at https://www.johncline.com/bitcalc110.zip to determine optimum VBR settings.
I recently did a 2.5 hr. DVD of a play and it looked great on a single layer DVD.

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks for the link and advice Mike. But if you set your VBR to what you specified, did you use that number used for the Maximum, Average or Minimum?

Thanks again.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Scott Morrison]

Also, I wanted to mention that I tried using the default VBR settings in PPro and changed Vegas VBR settings to match:

Min – 2,800,000
Target – 5,000,000
Max – 7,000,000

Just for this test, I used those same exact settings in Vegas and the result still looks terrible from Vegas…same “jaggies”. I am trying to do a 1:1 comparison, but Vegas keeps coming up short in terms of quality.

Interesting is that the resulting .mpg filesizes are nearly identical from both packages. Vegas does render MUCH more quickly, however.

Any other ideas? Thanks again for the help.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Dave Haynie]

Since you’re downscaling and rendering… did you try setting the project to “Best” quality and 32-bit/video level pixels. This will affect your final output quality. Of course, given its MPEG, you do want to match the bitrate and other issues (VBR vs CBR, multiple pass) to match what you’re seeing in Adobe.

There was a day when MPEG-2 encoders varied dramatically in quality. I haven’t found that to be as true today, but that doesn’t mean there’s no possible difference. But for certain, you won’t see Vegas match Premiere if one is set to best possible output and the other is not.

-Dave

[David Shirey]

As Dave Haynie suggested, you want to make sure Vegas is set to “Best” under the project settings. This would definitely account for why Vegas is rendering much quicker.

I’m in the same boat in the sense that I use Vegas but everyone else in my office has switched from FCP to Premiere, so I’m trying to learn Premiere too and we’re just having nothing but problems with it. At first I was really disappointed that Vegas 10 didn’t include some of the technical advances Adobe has made with CS5, but after actually using it I’m pretty happy with Vegas after all.

[Mike Kujbida]

[Scott Morrison] “But if you set your VBR to what you specified…”

Scott, I just realized that it was a typo.
It should have read a CBR of 8,000,000.

[Peter Nestor]

David Shirey: everyone else in my office has switched from FCP to Premiere,

wow this is interesting! what brings an entire apple
group to switch to premiere cs5?

David Shirey: Premiere too and we’re just having nothing but problems with it.
.

really? what problems and are they all sorry they switched?

thanks

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

I believe I’ve solved the issue. By taking the suggestion to change to CBR at 8,000,000 rate AND by changing the project settings to “best quality” and 32 bit (thanks for that Dave), I re-rendered and was very happy to see the quality improved tremendously.

Further comparison seems to have each rendering between the two packages on par with each other, and file sizes are similar as well.

I was still surprised to see the render times for Vegas drastically faster than PPRo. For my small 1 minute clip, here’s what I saw:

PPro – 5 minutes and 12 seconds
Vegas – 1 minute and 33 seconds

That is an incredible difference. Hats off to Sony for an efficient render engine. That alone nudges me back towards Vegas, in addition to the scripting support which PPRo has none of.

Again, I appreciate all the help.

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[David Shirey]

[Peter Nestor] “wow this is interesting! what brings an entire apple
group to switch to premiere cs5?
Well we had some personnel changes and basically were left with only one intel Mac that was actually capable of editing HD. Budget is tight and I’m a PC guy so I offered to just build really fast PC’s that could utilize CS5’s Mercury Engine with Nvidia’s new cards. The performance gain both in the real time previewing and rendering projects to h264 for bluray were too good to pass up. I’d have loved to get the whole crew on Vegas like me, but Premiere is a lot easier transition coming from FCP in terms of interface, and Vegas 10 really dropped the ball on the preview window not being GPU accelerated.

really? what problems and are they all sorry they switched?”

Where do I start? Premiere forces every audio track to render to “conform audio files” even if all the audio is already in the proper format for the timeline and your PC is perfectly capable of playing it in real-time. This is a worthless option that cannot be turned off and just eats up disk space. This causes a lot more files to have to load each time you open a project, which can take a very long time if you’re dealing with projects that have 400 video clips in them, such as a 2 hour wedding video.

Also the Adobe Media Encoder, while I really envy the idea of it and also Compressor for FCP, since us Vegas folks don’t really have anything similar, ours is pretty useless in the sense that it’ll render out the first project you send it then immediately hang and not continue on to the others. Obviously this problem is unique to our systems because Adobe would never release a program with a bug that obvious if it affected everyone. So we’ve been rendering out directly from Premiere just like I do with Vegas, and already it’s rendered a DVD + AC3 where despite the times matching up, the audio lags behind the video once you burn it to DVD in encore.

So, to answer your question, they are kind of sorry they switched, but buying everyone new $3,000 macs was never an option, so it’s certainly better than what they had. Me, I’m happy to be the lone Vegas editor even if I have to pay for the software myself. In the end it pays to be different.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Hi Mike,

How do you know to choose CBR over VBR?
Cheers,

Gilles