I never render to uncompressed AVI. Those files are HUGE. I render to DV-AVI files which is what Vegas natively uses (i.e. NTSC-DV or PAL-DV depending on where you are).

You're doing a lot of extra rendering for nothing. As long as you keep saving the VEG file and don't mess with any of the source files likes moving them or renaming, till your whole project in finished keeping as ONE project really makes more sense than rendering little bits and pieces only to put it all back together only to render again.

I've made projects over two hours long. While I don't recommend it either, Vegas can gulp that much uncompressed AVI if you feed it to it. Of course if you do (because you preprocessed in VirtualDub for example) you do need tons of hard drive space and ample memory. All I'm saying is Vegas can handle big files. Really BIG files, like 20, 30, 40 even over 50GB and not blink. So if size is holding you back thinking something will go wrong, and you're better off carving up into little pieces you don't have to.

When I do a render, I only get one file type option related to AVI - "Video for Windows (*.avi)"

When I select that, there are several templates: NTSC DV seems to be the obvious choice, but there are no "compression" settings, and the output looks clearly larger than the input (captured AVI from a Sony mini-DV camcorder).

I'm getting files that are around 225Mbytes per minute.

I wouldn't mind the size, but the real killer is that I can't monitor these on an external monitor. My Sony PC101 can't read the Firewire input stream when one of these rendered AVI files is on the timeline. It can make out a single frame (after a second or two) but it goes to a blue screen whenever I try to play the timeline or print to tape.

Please help me out here -- how do I render AVI files that are similar size to the AVI files I capture from my mini-DV camcorder?

Thanks!

John.

John,
Your Sony min-DV camera natively encodes the video into DV-AVI already and you should keep this setting if output to AVI is desired. As you said, these files will be roughly 225MB per minute vs. about 1GB per minute in uncompressed AVI. DV-AVI files are still large compared with MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV, RM, QT, etc.., but 1/5th the size of uncompressed and virtually no image quality loss. Also, rendering time is significantly decreased on portions of your video that have no special video effects such as transitions, video effects, pans, crops, etc...

Duke,
Rendering samll chunks to AVI may not be necessary depending on how you are presenting the final video. Like BillyBoy said, Vegas can support very large files and as long as you save your VEG files and all the pictures and clips, you can render straight to the final file type. WMV, RM, QT are good for internet streaming while MPEG1 and MPEG2 are good for TV or multimedia CD. AVI is a good for keeping small quality clips that you use a lot in other videos. For archiving, Send your final video back to Digital tape using the Print-To-Tape feature.

FYI - NTSC-DV (US) or PAL-DV (Europe) are compression settings under the AVI file format selection. They will make your "DV-AVI" file.

Hope I've helped you two out.

-Lee

Thanks all. I know you can make a very large project in VV, but frankly, they get too big to work on, and I'd rather screw up small chucks at a time. As anyone rendered MPG2 files, and then brought them into another project, if so, how's the quality of that?

Thanks everyone.

You don't want to use MPEG-2 files for editing, first of all you will get a big quality loss when you re-render them, and secondly it will take Vegas forever to import them and edit them. MPEG-2 is a distribution format, not a editing format.

You can bring MPEG-2 into other projects but the problem is recompression. When you get around to rendering again, then the source will get recompressed which is something you should try to avoid. Rather, try saving as a DV AVI. While that's compressed too and much smaller than uncompressed AVI, it also supports a much greater number of re renderings without loss of quality. Which is another reason I suggested ONE larger project. If you prefer to work will smaller projects think about keeping on DV tape. While somewhat expensive, you won't lose the quality.