A follow up on a small point:

When did Vegas stop smart rendering progressively flagged footage?
Vegas 8 smart renders both Cineform and Raylight with no problems.

kairosmatt

OK, one comment directly thread related, and one hijack.

While not perfect, I have used DVC ProHD as an intermediary. Granted, it is a compressed codec, but fairly minimal compression. I could not tell any difference by eye with real world video. I've just started doing HD stuff for web based delivery, so I'm a novice at this part.

Now the hijack. I need some advice regarding settings in Handbrake to minimize motion artifacts doing panned photos. The video stutters and jumps. Everything I've tried using information gleaned from the web produces great looking video, until I pan a still or video more than a small amount. I'm not sure if it's coming from a deinterlacing problem or the motion estimation being done. The source video is a mix of interlaced video and stills. The problem is not exclusive to Handbrake. I seem to have the same general problem with various 264 encodes, both directly from the Vegas timeline, and out of Edius. The problem shows up in various forms and intensity from each method.

Handbrake so far has done the best job of minimizing these, but it still shows up on some critical material.

Encodes to other formats, like mpeg 2 , do not exhibit the problem, but these are interlaced encodes, so that's why I'm suspecting it is related to deinterlacing of these particular video/photo mixes.

Any suggestions from the brain trust? Have you run into this?

EDIT: For this discussion, I'm talking about some high quality promotional video items that will end up on YouTube and Vimeo.

"Mike, I suggest for YouTube just render out of Vegas using the Sony AVC Internet 1280X720 template - the quality probably is good enough for your downloads as well."

The 1280x720 template uses 8Mb/s data rate and appears to only be one pass? I think it's just way too much for downloadable products. I need to drop the frame size down to less than 1000px wide because HD really isn't necessary.

Perhaps I misunderstood the whole reason for the video tutorial and the good, better and best methods. As I understood, these methods were developed to obtain the best quality video for displaying videos on Youtube and Vimeo. The video also briefly mentions settings in handbrake for local or web playback.

I don't care as much about the DNxHD intermediate file size as I do the speed at which it encodes. You're right, I can simply delete the DNxHD file when I'm through with it. My goal in starting this thread was to determine if there was an alternate comparable intermediate format that rendered faster from Vegas than DNxHD does.....