File Formats for Vegas

bjrohner wrote on 4/27/2006, 8:07 AM

I read somewhere in the forum that MSVF likes still photos in PNG the best for speed and accuracy. Is this correct.

Also, I like to work on my captured clips individually by cropping, splitting, and enhancing each piece as needed and saving each piece back to a file. I can then pull all the pieces back together when it's time to make the actual movie. My question is what would be the best format to use to save these pieces back to my hard drive to minimize rendering time and not lose any quality.

Bob

Comments

Wozz wrote on 4/27/2006, 4:04 PM

Bob,
I don't know how familiar you are with digital image and video formats, let me make a few comments and let me know if I missed your qestion.

There is no general answer, it depends on many factors. The 'ideal' case represents a lossless compressed format (PNG, TIFF with loss free compression), but size and access speed may push you to a lossy compression, like JPG. You can experiment with a few images convert them to various levels of compression and render a movie. A good utility for such batch conversions is XNview (free!). I bet you will not be able to tell the difference between loss free and 'quality 9' compression (10 would be best 1 would be worst image quality). But that depends also on your output medium.
I found the quality increase from standard DVD to 1024x768 on a Multimedia Projector the most drastic, compared to other factors.

If you render a movie clip to any other format than your final output , it will have to be re-rendered and you will add artifacts again. I would render the final video always from as close to original file as possible. Depending on the clip length you may be able to work off uncompressed AVI files, but watch that disk space!

Here is how I do MM shows: 8 Mpix image, convert from camera .RAW to 'quality 9' .JPG, insert captured MPG videos, MPG2 compression for DVD (distribution) or 1024x768 for .MPG presentation.

just my limited hobbyist experience
Wolfgang