[D. Eric franks]

Two entirely different issues here: (1) “best playback on a PC” and (2) “to preserve the files”. The second issue is easy: If you are pulling the raw files straight off your camcorder, then the native format they are already in is the best and only archive format you should consider, sans any sort of editing at all.

Now, as to the best playback, editing your video and file size, that depends on your source video, but I’d bet rendering to an H.264 (MP4) file will give you the most bang for your buck, in terms of file size vs. quality. Again, this depends on your source (SD? HD?), but a 10-20 Mbps data rate is a good guess. Keep in mind, this is a high-quality distribution format and not and archive format (although it will look really really good!). Keep your raw files and keep your project files and you’ll be able to render out to whatever super new format comes out next year!

Anyhow, I think the experts here will need a tad more information to give you more specific recommendations. For example, a 1 GB file might be large or not: How long is it? A 30-minute video in 1 GB is pretty small! Is it SD? HD? What kind of camera (manufacturer/model)?

[D. Eric franks]

Very common problem that can be solved after the fact with Mr. Troxel’s Excalibur scripts from jetdv.com (there’s a Gap function that works nicely).

Now, as to avoiding it in the first place, Snapping should be toggled on in Vegas (button on the bar or just press F8 to toggle it on and off) by default and is a common feature in all editing apps (like you discovered in Premiere).

This will at least make it easier, but there are still many situations where you’ll accidentally get a gap anyhow and this is especially easy to do if the frame rate of your project does not match your clips. Therefore, I’d recommend matching your project settings to your primary footage: File > Properties and then click the Match Media Settings button (looks like a folder icon) and then selecting one the files from your camera.

[D. Eric franks]

Ah, I see: you want DVD-Video (I thought a DVD data disc might suffice on a laptop).

Well, then, this is much easier, because the DVD-Video format is much more standardized and limited. You’ll be forced to render 720×480 widescreen MPEG-2. Some options might be 2-pass VBR, ~6 Mbps is a pretty healthy data rate. Since this is all standardized, I’d just select an appropriate template from the list.

Now, that said, MPEG-2 is a licensed encoding format (read: it costs money), so while DVD-Video discs are widely playable on most systems, it is not necessarily playable on ALL systems and, without the proper license (and codec), DVD-Video discs will not play in the Windows Media Player by default for free. There are commercial/shareware players that will play DVDs and many (many) computers come pre-installed with DVD playback software by default.

Considering it isn’t 100% universal, that may be a reason to go with another format, such as I recommend in my first post. Or, again, why not do it all? Create a DVD-Video disc with a separate folder that contains your other renders. You’ve got plenty of room on a 4.5 GB disc, so I can’t see a downside to doing it this way.

[D. Eric franks]

Hehe, good point, Don. I’ve always been an “exact calibration doesn’t matter” guy for exactly that reason. Pre-press? Sure! Broadcast? Better get it right! Anything else? Meh. Tuning your video to look good on your monitor won’t do anything for anyone else. But Scott is right about troubleshooting your monitor: Maybe your monitor is messed up?

I think it’s pretty safe to assume it’s not however, since I’ll also assume other DVDs look fine, but yours look over-saturated. I think the easiest solution would be to toss a Broadcast Colors filter on the final output (the FX button on the Preview window). That might be all you need. Another troubleshooting idea is to toss NTSC color bars on the DVD and see how they look after a render. The red (Is it bleeding to the right dramatically?) and the gray-darkgray-reallydarkgray pluge area can tell you a lot with just a glance.

[D. Eric franks]

Just a rough guess: 720p (1280×720), MP4 (I use MainConcept AVC), maybe 4-6 Mbps. That’ll look very good and fill the screen nicely.

More details on the destination laptops would help and, even better, being able to test one, because you never know. You could go higher to 1080p at 10Mbps, but it’s unlikely the laptops have 1920×1080 screens unless they are really nice and that data rate is pushing it for a DVD player. And if the laptops are really old tradeshow veterans, you could even go lower with DVD-video standard SD video in MPEG-2, which will have a higher data rate, but will be more friendly to slower processors.

Another idea to consider: since the content is only 3-4 minutes, you can definitely squeeze three versions on the disc, say an SD version at 2 Mbps, the 720p at 5 Mbps and the 1080p at 10 Mpbs.

[D. Eric franks]

Any sort of resize is going to result in a loss of some quality, however, it shouldn’t go Gaussian crazy on you. To troubleshoot, toggle the Preview Window to Best (Full) and see what happens. It might be that the lower-quality preview is what looks bad and not the actual output from Vegas (a render might also look fine, even with the preview window fuzzy). The other thing to check is the size of the preview window. Certain sizes will make the window very fuzzy and other sizes will look great. You can double click the title bar to expand the window to make the window project-sized.

[D. Eric franks]

Yea, I’m not suggesting any sort of magical best size/quality data rate, I’m just saying that when uploading to a service that is going to re-encode anyhow, you might as well max out your data rate, since it is effectively just an intermediary anyhow. Can you see the difference between 6 Mbps and 14 Mbps? Maybe not, but it can’t hurt.

[D. Eric franks]

I can’t tell what you are talking about, but that might be because I’m not sure what the original video is supposed to look like. I DID see some macroblock encoding errors at 00:15 (and elsewhere I think), not unlike what you see on television when the signal breaks up for a frame or two. This can be corrected (and maybe the squiggle/wave thing I can’t see) with a higher data rate: kick it up as high as you dare. I’d render MainConcept AVC/H.264, data rate in the 10-14 Mbps range. Actually I’d go higher if I could, but YouTube has been choking on my higher data rate video lately for some unknown reason and it never chokes until the video has completed uploading (error), which is intensely frustrating, so all I can tell you is 14 Mbps works, higher might too, but 20 Mbps errors.

[D. Eric franks]

If I had to speculate, it’s a simple flag the rendering engine needs to call somewhere, because (as I mentioned) other apps (Camtasia, Premiere) calling the same MainConcept DLLs (for example) do not exhibit this problem. Of course, being an “armchair engineer”, that’s easy for me to type in a random forum!

My workaround has been to render QT > Animation codec intermediary and then bring the file into Camtasia Studio, where, to be perfectly honest, the export wizard makes me wanna pull my hair out. But once you figure out the flow, it’s not all that hard:

(1) Run Camtasia Studio.
(2) Click the Import Media button and select the Vegas intermediary.
(3) Right click the file and select Add to Timeline.
(4) Select Recording Dimensions as a Preset.
(5) Click the Produce Video button.
(6) Select Custom Video Settings.
(7) Select MP4.
(8) Click Next.
(9) Pull out a couple of clumps of hair from my head.
(10) Click the Flash Options button and (set up the encoding settings)…
(11) Click the Change Dimensions button and make sure to add 18 pixels to the height for the playback controls.
(12) Pull more hair out and contemplate using a simpler transcoding app.
(13) Click Next and wonder where’s the option to save this as a template so I don’t have to do this again.
(14) Click Finish and render the files into a separate folder. Which is not really what I want to do, but if I don’t, Camtasia is going to spew the file I want (hoooray!) and the player files that I don’t (booo) into whatever directory I’ve select.

Now, at this point, the render is very, very fast and wonderful. And Camtasia is a fantastic capture app (I’ve been using it all afternoon), but… I still can’t remember where I saved the template (although I have definitely done so).

Yea, Render As > MP4 out of Vegas would be easier.

[D. Eric franks]

(sorry I’m late to the conversation…)

As far as I can remember, this was not introduced in 9.0c and has been an issue with MP4 renders out of Vegas 9 since day one: I have always had to render out an intermediary and bring it into Camtasia Studio to get rendered tutorials to play right away instead of waiting for the entire movie to download and it may even be the case that Vegas 8 did this too. Honestly, I’m not sure, because I can’t remember it ever working! And we know it’s a Vegas issue, since Camtasia and Premiere and everyone else are calling the same MainConcept MP4/AVC encoder, and the files out of those apps work fine.