Generally you should render to the same format as you are capturing to (in your case probably PAL DV AVI) especially if you will in fact end up going out to DVD anyway (as that is more compressed anyway that DV). I tend to always want to render back out to DV AVI and then archive that back onto a Mini-DV tape. That way I end up maintaining a easily editiable high quality version for my archives (you hear a LOT of posts here from people who desperately need to edit a DVD they created but lost all the original files)

In fact... if it works with your style of editing / workflow you should actually render the final project from Vegas directly to MPEG2 forma as wellt. If you render to DV AVI first you will end up losing some slight color information on anything that you have added (titles/graphics)... but when you go to MPEG2 direct that information is maintained.

There is no great benefit you will get when going to fully uncompressed AVI - especially if you do not have huge amounts of hard disk space. PAL DV AVI will be the same file size per minute of footage as your source format (13GB per hour).

Liam,
Re: "In fact... if it works with your style of editing / workflow you should actually render the final project from Vegas directly to MPEG2 forma as wellt. If you render to DV AVI first you will end up losing some slight color information on anything that you have added (titles/graphics)... but when you go to MPEG2 direct that information is maintained.
"

Would it be true then that if one plans to render to both DV AVI and MPEG2, and does NOT have added titles/graphics, but does have mulitple video FXs (for example color balance, brightness, contrast,etc.) rendering first to DV AVI and then rendering from the resulting DV AVI file to MPEG2(rather than a render to MPEG2 from the original project timeline) would NOT degrade quality, and would be faster than a render from the project timeline to MPEG2?

If you can render to MPEG2 from the timeline, you will get a better quality product, rather than use a DV AVI as the interim.

Reason: When you render directly to an MPEG, the titles are being rendered from uncompressed to MPEG. If you go to a DV AVI first, the titles have been rendered to a compressed format (DV) and then you re-render to another compressed format. The difference might be minimal, but there will be a difference.

Dave T2

Yiasou Alex
Thanks for replying my post.
I'm from Sifnos - Cyclades.

Thanks Liam from Answer my post.
Another question :

BEST settings for mpeg2 rendering?
Progressive scan or interlaced?

If what you have is interlaced video as source... and you will be playing your DVD on an interlaced TV anyway... then you should keep it interlaced.

"If you can render to MPEG2 from the timeline, you will get a better quality product, rather than use a DV AVI as the interim.

Reason: When you render directly to an MPEG, the titles are being rendered from uncompressed to MPEG. If you go to a DV AVI first, the titles have been rendered to a compressed format (DV) and then you re-render to another compressed format. The difference might be minimal, but there will be a difference."


Would there still be a quality difference if the project in question has NO titles -only DV camera footage in typical AVI format? In this case, a number of FXs have been applied which lengthen rendering time.

I ask because I intend to create both an rendered AVI file of the project and an MPEG2 file, as well.

If there are quality issues, I'll render twice, directly from the timeline.
If not, shouldn't I expect to save useful time (without a loss of quality) by first rendering the project to AVI and then rendering to MPEG2 from that new, rendered AVI file?

Can i use an external MPEG2 codec inside vegas or i must use the default but it is not good.
I have TMPGEnc Xpress.

Franky, the " default" MPEG2 preset is known to be not-all-that-good - use the drop down and choose one of the DVDA presets.

When you Render as MPEG2 in Vegas, you can also use Custom settings, including 2 pass encoding. DVDA does not currently have this.

I am a new Sony 5.0 user, and the default setting is AVI. However, I would like to change the setting to an Mpeg fomat. Can anyone tell me how to do this. Thank You