vegas studio plat 12 rendering to XDCAM mp4 problem

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Shelton] ” I’ve just upgraded to studio platinum 12 (from 10 …slowly working my way up to pro version I hope!). Upgraded mainly due to advise from this forum esp better render codecs being in vegas 12.”

That was probably me. 😉

[Steve Shelton] “1) One thing that confuses me is right clicking for properties in windows explorer on the AVCHD rendered file it says the bit rate is 256kbps, which seems really low. My AVCHD camara data is at 26000kbps and the mpeg2 renders I did in vegas 10 were 10000kbps. Given my understanding that bitrate corrolates with quality can anyone explain what might be happening?”

What template did you use? You should have used Sony AVC/MVC with the AVCHD 1920×1080-50i template which would have given your 16Mbps (16,000kbps) video by default. You can increase this to a max of 21Mbps.

[Steve Shelton] “2) having been told the XDCAM codec was really good and relatively ‘lossless’ I thought I’d do this to compare.”

Just to be accurate, what I said was that it would be almost visually lossless because your footage is 26Mbps and the XDCAM was 35Mbps. I don’t want you to think that XDCAM is a lossless codec because it’s not. In your situation, you won’t see any loss with your human eyes.

[Steve Shelton] “However the mp4 won’t render. It goes through the render process on screen (I choose the vegas default HQ 1920×1080-24p, 35Mbps VBR) but the output mp4 is just a noiseless black screen (I’ve tried various option with it as well – Field = progressive & frame rate =25, all the same result).”

Why are you rendering to 24p when your source is 50i? Anyway, it renders fine for me but I cannot open the file in QuickTime or Windows media Player. Only VLC will play the file. I can drop the file back onto the Movie Studio timeline and it plays fine. I’m not sure why you are not seeing the same. Try using a template without changing any settings.

~jr

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

[Steve Shelton]

Thank you John for your time (once again!)

Yes the MP4 thing was simply not playing in windows media player, I assumed it should, and yes it drops back into vegas timeline OK; Sorry I should have checked that, my mistake (and I wasn’t trying to falsely quote you I did say XDCAM had been referred to as ‘relatively’ lossless, apologises for misunderstanding).

However the AVCHD render is probably just a windows blip. I did the render using AVCHD, as per vegas default and my first attempt, called ‘funky3’ was (tried it several times as a check)

note how it says 256kbps and that the length is 1hr 50min whereas it actually only 30secs however it played fine and as it should

however I tried it again today called ‘funky’ and I get this:

this all reads correctly. Note while the bitrate is different the two files in the dir have the same size (64Mb) which makes me think they were just the same but something in win 7 explorer wasn’t reading it correctly, saw video time as too long and spread the bitrate over this 2hr duration instead of 30secs
Anyway thought I’d post screen shots to let you know I wasn’t completely stupid!! 🙂 and explain why I was confused. All sorted now but thank you again for your time.

[John Rofrano]

That is really odd that Windows 7 thought the video was 1:50:30 when it was really 00:00:30. That would explain the low bitrate.

In the future, you should use a tool like MediaInfo to determine the attributes of your video and audio files. Windows Explorer is not a reliable source (as you have seen).

~jr

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