Mov h.264

[Sherman]

Footage shot in DV SD.
Captured to a Mac hard drive for rough edit, and exported as uncompressed .avi.
But Vegas Pro 9 won't accept it on timeline.
Message says the file(s) must be corrupt to of an unknow format.

Then we output to mov H.264, and Vegas likes it on the timeline and it seems all is well until I check the size of these files.
Each are about an hour long and under 3 GB.
I know that SD should be about 13 GB an hour, right?

My concern:
Can I edit this and expect good quality when rendering to MPEG2 or will it be poor quality?

 

[JohnnyRoy]

Then we output to mov H.264... Can I edit this and expect good quality when rendering to MPEG2 or will it be poor quality?

H.264 is highly compressed and you are correct that you may not get good quality when you recompress these to MPEG2. Why don't you output a DV MOV file from the Mac? Vegas should have no problem with this and it will be the same format as the source.

AVI and MOV are just containers. They are like "paper bags" that hold your video. The codec is what determines the encoding of the video. If you have DV on the Mac you should transfer DV to the PC in whatever container your software supports.

~jr