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Vegas’s audio compression, YouTube and the acoustic guitar
I’ve been using Sony Vegas Platinum 9 for a couple of months, lots of it’s making sense now after a few years of Movie Maker.
I wanted to pick up some tips on how to set audio levels and compression so that YouTube’s compression ‘system’ doesn’t make things sound awful. I’m starting to get somewhere with this, but the files seem to need to be very large considering they’re twenty to 90 seconds long, especially for someone using not so quick broadband.
Generally what I’ve got is my footage, whether that’s from a Flip HD camera, or some text over a still image processed with transitions, and my own acoustic guitar tunes as the audio. I can see that YouTube is the weak link, and getting weaker, but someone must have learnt enough about compression using the built in effects on Vegas to minimise the wavering and distortion that can occur. I last used the 10:1 -9db preset, that wasn’t too bad, but ideally I’d use 640×360 video, so as not to limit who can see the videos too much. Before I learnt how ot compress avi but leave audio uncompressed I was simulating this by rendering a project as uncompressed avi, then using Any Video Converter to get an MP4 with uncompressed audio.
Acoustic guitar, piano and a tuned percussion instrument called the Hang suffer from YouTube’s compression more than any other sounds it seems.
My template is my custom avi one. I leave the audio uncompressed, seeing as it’s going to get compressed again, and I use a 3ivx codec that was installed with my Flip’s software to compress the video, which for example made a twenty second test earlier a 54 mb file.
Is the 3ivx codec okay? I’ve tried Divx a couple of times but was bugged by all the extra trial software.
The video ‘Mattress’ at youtube.com/users/eyelash07 may give you an idea of the situation if you listen to the 360p version versus the 720p, where the wavering is significantly improved.
Thanks for all thoughts.
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3 Replies
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In case it helps comment, here’s an accurate version of my link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzcPL3WqwJU
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I’m sort of interested in this notion of what is the best way to run compression on Vegas audio tracks. I’ve shot a number of videos of live performances, and would like to compress them a bit before going to Youtube. Is using audio bus tracks the best way or should I be sending these out to something like ACID first? I’ve got Protools, but haven’t linked Vegas to it. It’s more complex than I would like to be using for relatively simple recordings. But I’m noticing that acoustic guitar on stage is overpowered by clarinet and hand drums, even when the guitar is properly mic’ed. This problem is showing up in Youtube, so I’m looking to properly compress before shipping to the cloud. This embedded video sounds just fine on my studio system, but the guitar is quite low on Youtube. Also, the mandolin player would like to bring himself down. Given the mix I got off the sound board, I can’t do that, so I need to compres, or? Sounds like a similar problem to the poster above. Maybe one answer for both of us? (shot in HD on Panasonic 150 w/feeds off the board)
Alf
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Just making a little noise here in to draw attention to this unsolved thread. Thanks.
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