[Norman Black]

This file does have problems in Vegas 12 770 for me.

When I play in the trimmer the performance is very bad. It starts better and gets worse.

I can drop the media on the timeline and play. Again performance is bad. If I press stop, then Vegas becomes unresponsive.

I can play the video in Media Player Classic Home Cinema. There is a jumpiness from frame to frame. Artistic or bad encode?

What does Sony support say about this?

[Norman Black]

Canon DSLRs, Nikon also, output full range data, 0-255, in their MOV files and flag the data as such in the files. This is a little against the Rec 709 spec but it possibly gives you more levels to play with before rendering. Vegas imports this unaltered. In contrast, I have read that Premiere always normalizes input to 16-235.

In Vegas when you render everything needs to be 16-235 range and this is where your blacks get crushed and highlights clipped. So if your source is full range your need a sony levels, computer to studio RGB levels adjust.

Also realize that the Vegas preview window is a PC display and works with full range data. So when you have a level adjust on the output window then it will look a little flat but be good in render. Contrast this if the source was studio levels then the preview window would look flat and the render would be fine. Bottom line Vegas puts a little burden on us, but is giving us access to the full camera data.

Boy do we need a sticky on this topic. I don’t know how many times I and others have to post this, week after week.

It might be nice of Vegas had a normalize option.

[Norman Black]

[Paul Gregory] “and finding out it a render would result in quality loss”

Since we are encoding with lossy compression algorithms, the answer is there is always loss. How much, well then we are talking about specifics. What we care about is what we can see and not mathematical loss.

If you render out at the same bitrate as your source at the same codec, say AVC, then you really should not see any loss. If you render at half the bitrate of your source, then you may, or likely, will see issues in places. There no 100% answer to this other than render a sample and watch it.

Cameras do not do much if any inter-frame compression. They do not have the time or the power to do so. When we encode on our PCs, we do get this where possible. I mention this because it is very possible for you to render on your PC at a much lower bitrate, in the same codec like AVC, than a camera source and still get the same visual quality.

[Norman Black]

For us to help we really need to know what you did. Otherwise we are feeling our way through the dark. In the case of “render as”, what encoding template did you use.

For “render as”, there really is no match input option. You choose what you want and Vegas does what it needs to do to comply to that request.

If your source is 1080 and 30fps progressive or 60i interlaced then you would choose the 1920×1080-60i template. The Sony AVC encoder gives you a couple of bitrate choices. 10 and 16Mbps. Mainconcept AVC gives you a 25Mbps choice. If you want a higher bitrate you can increase that and save a custom template if you like.

At 1080, Blu-ray officially supports 23.976, 24.0, and 50i and 60i modes.
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154533

[Norman Black]

The “number of slices” slider you can just put at 1. Only specific hardware devices might require a larger number of slices. For example, Blu-ray above a certain level requires 4 slices.

Less slices is better for compression. More slices might, repeat might, improve decode performance on some devices/players.

What a slice means is to divide the frame into X pieces and each piece is completely independent of all others.

[Norman Black]

[John Rofrano] “YouTube is expecting Studio RGB output.”

Yes, and Canon DSLRs output full range. 0-255. There is an option flag in AVC which signals this and Canon sets this flag.

Upload the Camera directly and the online service can correctly adjust and maybe that is why the direct upload worked.

The Vegas decoder knows the option and lets you import the data stream in full range, but when you render you will want the stream in Studio RGB range like John said. Vegas encoders never set the full range flag regardless of source range, AFAIK.

It gets more complicated if you are using the preview window on your PC screen. It wants full range to look correct but then render will want Studio RGB. If your source is Studio then your preview window will look flat but the render will be fine.

Either way you will want to use Sony Levels and the appropriate, depending of source, Compute to Studio, or, Studio to Computer, RGB presets typicaly on your output fx.

[Norman Black]

What do you mean by MPEG4? MPEG4 can mean a lot of things. ASP, Sstp, AVC/H.264.

What “render as” encoder did you use?

Did you mean MP4? MP4 is just a generic file container. Sony AVC and Mainconcept AVC can both output MP4 files and of course they contain AVC video. XDCAM EX outputs MP4 files but contain MPEG-2 video streams.

The only other thing in Vegas that can be considered MPEG-4 is the HDCAM SR encoders. This is MPEG-4 SStp protocol.

AVC is acceptable for Blu-ray.

[Norman Black]

Using Quicksync can be a little quirky when you also have an AMD/Nvidia video card installed in the same machine.

In such a situation you must have the video drivers installed for both Intel and the other AMD/Nvidia card. If you have only one monitor and that is hooked up to the AMD/Nvidia card you will have to take measures to get the Intel functioning.

Here is a link with some info
https://mirillis.com/en/products/tutorials/action-tutorial-intel-quick-sync-setup_for_desktops.html

Another option is if your monitor has multiple inputs. You can connect the video card and Intel to the same monitor and just not use the Intel input.

It is a pain if you have an AMD/Nvidia card and want the Intel graphics only for Quicksync, but it can be done.

[Norman Black]

I did not mention Intel Quicksync since you have an AMD CPU.

Intel Quicksync will be faster than any of the other encoder options in Vegas. To use Quicksync in Vegas you must use the Sony AVC encoder.

Another thing. Sony AVC is much faster than the Mainconcept AVC.

[Norman Black]

That render time is about right from my limited experience with Vegas encoders.

You can try Mainconcept AVC CUDA. That will not be an AVCHD file. It will be MP4 with AVC video and AAC audio.