Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/23/2003, 6:50 AM
Vegas will play all clips at the bit depth specified by the project properties. When rendering, it will convert all audio to the render settings.
Maxter wrote on 11/23/2003, 9:03 PM
So if i now switch to 24 bit (project proerties) to facilitate the 24 bit audio in my project, it wont adversly affect the 16 bit in my project?
Maxter wrote on 11/23/2003, 9:11 PM
What i am getting at is that i have my background music and sound effects that are all 16 bit and some important audio that is 24 bit. I want to leave the 24 bit as high rez as possible untill it goes out to DVD.

I was bringing in the important audio in at 16 bit untill I realized that would be double dithering from Pro tools to VV and VV out.
Rednroll wrote on 11/24/2003, 6:32 AM
Vegas was the first to support multiple file types within the same project. For files that are different sampling rate and bit depth, Vegas will resample these to match the Vegas project sampling/bit depth. Vegas has a dithering plugin to insert on the master bus, if you're not using it then don't worry about double dithering
drbam wrote on 11/24/2003, 6:33 AM
No, there won't be an adverse effect if you now switch your properties to 24 bit. Any rendering you do will then be at 24 bit. The 16 bit files won't sound any different except that if you apply any effects, this will done at 24 bits - a good thing. Of course, dithering is the very last thing you want to apply after mixing and mastering.

drbam
pwppch wrote on 11/24/2003, 11:17 PM
Vegas does everything internally in floating point, so this is not an issue. Your 24 bit files have more resolution than your 16 bit files. That is the only difference.

The project settings for bit depth control the audio hardware more than anything else, as we must convert from floating point to fixed point before we can stream to the hardware.

When you render, all mixing is done in floating point until we write to the file, then the bit depth conversion is done.

Your project sample rate will cause Vegas to resample any media that is not at the same sample rate. This can be expensive. You are always better off working with media that is the same sample rate as your project. While Vegas does a fine job of doing sample rate conversion on the fiy, you can do offline conversion in Sound Forge that is superior - and time consuming. If you have a lot of files that are not the same sample rate, you should convert them as you will save CPU cycles in a complex project.

Bottom line:
Bit depth conversion is not expensive and everything in your project is moved up to floating point. However, this does NOT mean that the original audio is any better after this conversion as there is still only X number of bits to work with in the original audio.

Peter