Good/Best changes the resizing quality.

I think it also affects motion rendering.

On Gary Kleiner's DVD he recommends always rendering as "Good," although I have seen a few recommendations to render HDV to MPEG-2 as "Best." I have tried each, and cannot really tell the difference.

I now render everything in 'Good' but am interested in what others' reasoning is, one way or the other.

TB

I never occurred to me to render using anything other than BEST. I just leave it and walk away any how.

Tom, funny you mentioned Gary K. because I was watching his vids tonight and saw that comment. I have been using "best" ... just wondered what others were using and why. Gary is a good teacher....I learn a little something everytime I put his DVD's in the player.......

I agree with Jim, I render everything in "best" and walk away. No sense taking chances if you have the time and you want top quality but you don't know what the exact compromises are.

kairosmatt

Here is a thorough and healthy discussion on this very subject that occurred recently.
Good vs Best render

There are many, many threads on this topic that can be found using the convenient Search function on these forums. I hope they provide enough information for you to make a decision.

Personally, I set it at Best and leave it, even though it means longer renders. That way, I won't have to render the whole project twice if there is some effect, stills, or pan / crop in the project that would look bad if rendered at Good. Just a personal choice, you understand . . .

Always Best


Just in case

Sigh ...

Best uses an algorithm that is designed to produce better results when you render from one resolution to another. Thus, if you have HDV footage and you are down-sampling to SD, or you have still photos (which are almost always higher resolution that your video), then you want to use Best.

For all other situations, you can use Good.

Because of the way the settings are labeled, a lot of people on this board insist on using "Best" because they don't want to compromise. If the settings were labeled more accurately -- such as "no resolution change" render -- people would react differently. Rendering "Best" when there is no resolution change simply chews up more time. On my computer it is 3x the time in some instances. If you place no value on your time, and don't mind waiting the extra time, I guess you can go ahead and leave it on Best, although I think there actually have been some reports where this produced results inferior to Good.

My recommendation is simple: If you have still photos on the timeline, or if you are converting from one resolution to another, use Best. If, on the other hand, you are rendering from HDV to the same output resolution, or from SD to SD, then use Good. You will not give up ANY quality.

I am more than happy to be proven wrong on this, however. So, if anyone can post original footage along with a VEG file, that when rendered to the same resolution as the original footage produces better results with Best than it does with Good, I'll certainly change my tune.

Oh, and here are replies directly from Sony, on this very subject:

Sony reply about render quality settings

Render quality

Good Best Render Times

I find that if you do any image size manipulation (not just resolution change) you should use best. I am referring to any PIP effects or sliding images across the screen type effx.

This has been my experience anyway.

Dave T2

dumb question:
What about when using pan/crop?
Thanks,
Randy

ok, anything that isn't showing at a pixel for pixel match should use Best because it's resizing something somewhere.

I usually render good, unless I'm doing some 3D compositing.

I believe this is gone over in Vol. 1 or 2 of the DVD's from VASST's Absolute Training Series for Vegas, can't remember which one.

Dave

AND

When you are on the Save/render page, click the advanced button at the bottom right and on I believe the second tab, move the quality slider all the way to the right for max quality, or whever you want it. On HD renders on my machine, this defaults to mid quality, not the highest quality.