[Justin Loebel]

So I’m revisiting this as I’m going to have a ton of footage to compress after this weekend.

One requirement I have is that I have to run jobs in a batch and TMPGEnc Xpress works good for this. Do you know if the motion-jpg or MPEG2-HDV will populate a template in Xpress after they’re installed? Also, what container would these formats be in or does it matter?

I got excited to see AVCHD was listed in the new TMPGEnc application but it didn’t have 30fps and 60fps file outputs for some reason.

[Justin Loebel]

Lord. Not sure why you’re in such a huffy there Steve.
John recommended MXF and AVCHD. In detail…no. Which is why I asked about the resolution options in vegas.

“All the formats” recommended have had a continuing theme as you pointed out in your first comment, they are codecs natively available in Vegas. So yes I’m listening. Also from my little bit of reading, the MP4 AVC is very comparable to the AVCHD recommended by John. I’m told they use the same codec and could use the same m2ts file extenstion in vegas. Popular opinion is that mp4 is more “edit friendly” than AVCHD so I thought it was worth a try. So far so good, tested with a 1080p 30fps render and it ran pretty smooth in vegas. still need to test 60fps.

What I said I didn’t “entirely accept” (with intended respect toward John), was that every project you edit requires the least amount of compression. I explained how that wasn’t an ideal solution for me and I’m sure many others.

“Why am I hang up on Xvid?” ….because I’ve been using XVID for years, and for years I didn’t have a problem. It was just recently with the higher fps and resolutions that I’ve had an issue editing specifically in vegas. I apologize if mine referencing a familiar and very popular codec comes across as being “hang-up” on it.

“If you dont want our advice, you shouldn’t have made a post.”

Steve, this is the internet. I can post questions and dig a little deeper on those questions. Even if you didn’t nail what I was looking for 100% someone else might read your recommendations and find them very useful. Meanwhile someone else might find my digging a little useful. The Internets. Yay.

[Justin Loebel]

Thanks, I’m first looking at MXF. I couldn’t find much online about converting to the MXF format. I pulled a clip into vegas just to check out my rendering options, and it doesn’t appear as though it supports 1920x1080p? I think the max width was 1440.

MP4 is looking like a good option, I’ll need to try it tonight. Do you have any HQ setting recommendations that’d be on par with XVID Quantinzer 2. Footage for edit is 1920x1080p @60fps.

[Justin Loebel]

Ok, I can do some testing comparisons with that. I don’t have the capacitity to natively capture that that, so I will need to convert. Is there a utility you recommend that could handle that format in Bulk. Normally my go to’s are Virtual Dub and TMPGEnc Xpress.

[Justin Loebel]

hmmm, yeah I don’t entirely accept that 🙂 I think the content really determines what is necessary for the edit, and for this scenario I’m looking for a good balance between compression and quality.

I don’t have the means for storing lossless footage. The kind of material I’m working with is content dependent, so you have to record a LOT to capture those moments you need. I apply a good deal of fx to that footage so any compression artifacts are marginal by final render.

The HDD in my laptop is large, but slow. I get the same performance from a 1080p Huffyuv scene now as I do from an Xvid clip. I’m making the assumption that Huffyuv is taxing my hdd where Xvid is taxing the CPU more. The output is the same. I’m planning on moving to SSD as well which presents an even larger storage issue.

Let me ask this, what kind of HD compressed footage performs best in Sony Vegas?

[Justin Loebel]

As I said I’d be fine with using an alternative codec but I have yet to find anything that looks as good with the amount of compression I get from XVID.