File format - Expert opinions

mkwilliams wrote on 2/28/2011, 9:41 PM
Hi everyone - I am in need of an expert opinion

I have a Sony HDR-SR11 and shoot family videos at the highest settings (1920x1080 60i - 16Mbps) in AVCHD/.m2ts format.

Most of my editing consists of simply merging several video clips to better organize our library of videos.

** My question ** - what is the "standard" recommended video format in Sony Vegas for people who want to preserve the highest quality video (most critical) and have a highly compatible file format (second critical).

I know there's a lot of subjectivity, just want to get people's input.
Thanks in advance,
Mark

Comments

gogiants wrote on 2/28/2011, 10:56 PM
Not sure if I'm an "expert", but here's a few things to consider:

To maintain the highest quality video, you'll want to output to the same format as what you recorded in.

That said, this may not be possible depending on what you want to do with your edited footage... you'll have to let us know:

- What is your delivery format? Playback on PC? Output to DVD? Playback on YouTube/Vimeo?

Provide a bit more background on that and I'm sure you'll get lots of good advice...
Markk655 wrote on 3/1/2011, 5:41 AM
If you have AVCHD clips as source, save the source clips. That way you'll always be able to go back and re-render at the highest possible quality for your source.

Picking a final output with the most similar settings should be give you your best quality output for your merged files. Changing settings such as progressive from interlaced, increasing the bit rate will increase the amount of effort and time for rendering and may yield slightly lower quality footage (although depending on your choices you may not notice them now).

I have been using AVCHD with a 1st gen camera since they came out. I keep the source and render as appropriate. For maximum compatibility (depending who is on the receiving end), I render to either mpg and put on a DVD (standard def). You can render to a Blu-ray format which is very similar to AVCHD too for those with HDTV and a BluRay player.

mkwilliams wrote on 3/1/2011, 9:30 PM
My delivery format is PC (via windows media player or VLC) and also we have Boxee and Popcorn hour C200.

Hope this helps,
Mark
mkwilliams wrote on 3/1/2011, 9:33 PM
I have heard several recommendations for Blu-ray as a format, but I believe it does not render the audio stream if you use that format... I've heard you have to render the sound seperate and then merge the files... A

Anyone have any experience on rendering to Blu-ray.. thanks,
gogiants wrote on 3/2/2011, 8:50 AM
If you're going to a PC/Boxee, maybe you don't need to worry about Blu-Ray?

In any event, if you are actually going to burn to Blu-Ray then yes, you'll have to use the appropriate templates to output both sound and video... I've skipped the whole Blu-Ray thing so others can comment on that. If you're going to output Blu-Ray onto a file structure to be played on Boxee/elsewhere, I guess the process would be the same.