Rendering .avi files versus vegas files

B

bigox

Well-known member
Okay, so in the past I have created long projects in Sony Vegas by first putting together files for all the scenes of between 1 and 5 minutes, and then pulling the Vegas files together in a Master Vegas file. The problem I find with that is that my computer hangs up sometimes because perhaps a file is missing in one of the subfiles. So for this latest project, I decided to render each scene as I made changes and then pull the rendered .avi into the Master Vegas file. This file would include video and dialogue and some sound effects. Score and other music were put on the Master file tracks. My computer handles this better and it renders faster.

What I want to know is, am I losing quality by doing this? My logic was because it's a .avi either way, the quality should be the same. But since it renders so much quickly I'm doubting myself. I want to do what's best for the end product. Any ideas? Thanks!
pj
 
AVI is simply a container, AVI has nothing to do with quality. What codec did use in your AVI file? Uncompressed?

Have you tried the Lagarith codec? It's free and is basically lossless quality. Very large files but again no loss of quality. I'm sure others can recommend other codecs to use.
 
If your AVI files are DV-AVI (from a camcorder) and you're rendering to the same format, than Vegas will not recompress anything other than transitions.
The DV codec in Vegas is excellent and has been tested and proven to maintain quality for up to 100 generations.

Mike
 
Until you tell us more info, I can easily assume you're using a lossy codec which means you will get generation loss every time you render.

I've stitched together many projects by dropping smaller project files onto the timeline. I've never had any major problems. If you do experience some hanging or crashing of sorts create a new project and drag each project into there one by one as to force Vegas to create the relevant waveform and thumbnails files associated with each project. If you modify any project after that point, close the project and create a new project, then dump the recently modified project onto the clean timeline to once again force Vegas to create the waveform/thumbnails, then open your full stitched together project without a hassle.
 
rs170a said:
The DV codec in Vegas is excellent and has been tested and proven to maintain quality for up to 100 generations.
Click to expand...

This is fine if your source video is DV resolution, but many of us are shooting HD video, and sometimes using FX that requires the CODEC to preserve an alpha-channel too.

For mastering work, I use the CineForm NEO Scene CODEC which seems to be a good compromise in terms of compression, color-space, and preservation of details over many many generations. It's also one of the few cross-platform CODECs, where you can open/process/save the same IDENTICAL file under Windows and Mac based software apps.

Cheapest place to buy NEO SCENE is the www.videoguys.com website. ( last time I checked it was $100 )
 
Thanks for the help. I am not shooting HD at the moment, and I'm rendering the files to avi using vegas. I suspect I have some loss, but I don't think it's much, though I will try your solutions. I've been doing this for 5 years and I still have a lot to learn on the technical end. Any good resources for teaching myself?
 
Just render as 24p DV with 2:3:3:2 pulldown. Well, if you're shooting 24p. If not, render as NTSC DV.

(Widescreen, if appropriate, of course.)
 
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