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Which video codec is easiest for Vegas 12 to decode and can support non-standard resolution?
Hi all,
I’m working on a project which has been split into separate nested projects,
but the nested projects take too long to render in the combined project,
which video codec(s) can be easily decoded by Vegas 12 and from which of
these could accept non-standard resolution (e.g. 1920×1040 PAR 1.0) @ 59.94p?
Maybe the video codec used for Vegas’ inbuilt proxy-editing is the one I’m
looking for but I doubt it supports non-standard resolutions…Could be either mathematically or visually lossless, otherwise I’ll stick
to Lagarith. Thanks in advance.RickAVC
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4 Replies
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The custom dimensions in going to be your limiting factor.
Anything MPEG-2 is about as fast to decode as anything. The Vegas smart proxy uses XDCAM which is mpeg-2 but that does not allow custom resolutions. If the file is always intermediate then you could render standard and crop off the excess stuff on entry. Just a guess.
Cineform is free to download and supports custom resolutions. You have multiple bitrate qualities to choose from. The free GoPro studio is how you get this codec. Cineform is found in the Video for Windows render as templates. Fast encode and decode.
You might think of using Mainconcept AVC, with Baseline profile and a suitably high bitrate to be visually lossless. What is suitable all depends on what your source file(s) are. The Baseline profile turns off things that slow down decoding of AVC video. MC AVC can be slow to encode.
Sony AVC does not give you enough control to select Baseline, and it is bitrate limited.
Things like HDCAM SR, XAVC Intra or DNxHD do not let you do custom dimensions.
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Hi Norman,
I have the Cineform codec working, perhaps I’ll have a go at that one,
the final render would be output 16:9 with letterboxing anyway, so I’ll
see how that goes with other codecs that don’t support custom resoultions,
Lagarith’s a bit slow to preview in Vegas at higher resolutions.
Thanks. -
I found Sony’s Huffman lossless CODEC to be faster than Lagarith or HuffYUV, I assume it’s just a coding optimization thing, as none of these ought to be expensive per se. DNxHD also suffers from what seems like slower than reasonable performance.
Of course, the other concern is HDD performance, particularly with I – Frame CODECs, but particularly anything lossless…. so 150MB/s for lossless uncompressed 8-bit video without alpha channel (most of the I’m doing pure uncompressed, it’s for animation, so I need the alpha too). That’s faster than pretty much any single HDD, so unless you use an SSD or a RAID, disc is going to be the limiting factor. Crunching that to lossless compressed may help, but on a modern PC, I’d expect much better performance overall with I-Frame-Only MPEG-2 or AVC, or maybe something like Cineform, if it’s become stable again.
-Dave
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Hi Dave, I found the Quicktime Animation codec in lossless mode @ 1080@50p seems to play much more smoothly in Vegas compared to Lagarith (30fps compared to 5fps), using Cineform at the moment, is Sony’s Huffman lossless codec included in Vegas already or is it separate?
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