Format question

AlanADale wrote on 4/6/2012, 1:01 AM
I was watching a video yesterday on a YT channel that I subscribe to and in which the user produces some exceedingly good videos using his Canon 5D MkII. This produces the same video format within the MOV container as my Canon 7D - hence the interest.
He does point out, however, that editing the MOV files is very difficult and I have also heard this from several sources now. Whilst I've never quite followed the reasoning for the above, and that's possible a subject in itself LOL, he advocates importing the MOV clips into Vegas and then immediately rendering them into a more edit friendly format MPEG2 prior to reimporting them and editing begins.

Questions:
1. Is this sound practice?
2. I believe the DVD format (PAL) is also MPEG2 so would the initial render into this format followed by subsequent editing before sending to DVDA result in any quality loss?

Thanks.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 4/6/2012, 6:52 AM
If your computer is fast enough to work with hi-def hard drive video (and it can take a quad core or i7 processor to do it well), there's no reason to convert the video to anything else. On those higher-end Canons, the video is as rich and clean as any camcorder video.

But if you need to convert the video, and DVDs are your end product, I'd recommend you down-rez to DV-AVI video, a standard resolution format that should load perfectly and produce excellent results in a Vegas project set up for DV. (MPEG2 would be the format you would output your final, edited, finished video when sending it to DVD Architect to authoring.)
AlanADale wrote on 4/6/2012, 7:41 AM
OK Steve. Well my PC is nowhere near being a quad core and with only 2.75GB of 4GB of installed RAM available and two cores. Upgrade next year maybe but for now.........
Just to make sure that I am understanding you 100% correctly - in the Project Properties I should be setting a Template of PAL DV (720x576, 25fps), Pixel Aspect Ratio of 1.4568 (default for PAL DV Widescreen and put a check mark next to 'adjust source media to better match project or render settings.
Following this - choose Render As.......video for Windows (*AVI) = PAL DV Widescreen.

I just tried this using an mp4 file (yes I understand that it's going to be different than using an original MOV file but I haven't got one handy) and the AVI file is huge by comparison.

Edit: forget that Steve. I just dug the 7D out, shot 6 seconds of video (1920 x 1080, 25fps) and the file size was 34.3MB. In the Project Properties box I only matched the video settings and didn't reduce it down to DV as mentioned earlier. Rendering out in DV AVI produced a file size of 23MB.....smaller and with good quality.