Rendering and compositing

[Drew Ott]

I have two questions that I'm unsure of and I can't find the answers to:

1) Is there a way to tell how large a rendered file will be before you render it? Sometimes I render a video that isn't important and I want to put it on Youtube or Google video, and those only allow less than 100mb. Is there a way to say "I want my video to render as less than 100mb"? I try to render at a good quality, then the video becomes 300mb. I put the quality at 50% and it's 10mb. Is there a solution for this in Vegas 6?

2) Is there a list somewhere about what each compositing mode does? I know Vegas is good for compositing, but I feel I'm not using Vegas to its full potential because I don't know what each compositing mode does. I've messed around with them before, but I don't have any clue what each thing would be used for practically.

Thanks a bunch,
Drew

[glenn chan]

1- Some encoders let you set target bitrates, under sections called bitrate control and things like that.

1b- I believe Youtube will recompress your video, so you can't have bitrate control for it.

2- Check the help files. They're actually helpful.

[Drew Ott]

Youtube won't recompress your file or even deal with it at all if it is above 100mb. Is there a way to figure out how large the video is going to be by looking at the bitrate.

[Drew Ott]

In the help files I have not found a list of what each compositing method does. I still don't know the answer to the first question either. You'd think that Vegas giving an estimate of how large the file will be would be an important feature. Can Quicktime Pro do that?

[glenn chan]

1- Help for compositing modes:

search for "Compositing and masks". go into that section. Click on the part that says "Learn more about compositing modes and transparency".

2- Where the bitrate control is codec/encoder-dependent. For WMV, it's under the bitrate tab on the bottom for CBR. For VBR, which has tradeoffs (longer encode is the main one) but gives higher quality, the bitrate control is located in the video tab.