Lossless video rendering?

KevinK wrote on 4/14/2005, 7:39 PM
Hi,
How's everyone doing? I'm working on a long project and have sadly ran out of disk space on my harddrive. Since I've reached a point that I can stop I am planning on rendereding the first part of the project and deleting the files that go with it, then finishing the second half, and then putting them together. Anyway... What should I render the first half as? My final output is going to be to dvd. What is the best option, avi? mpeg2? I actually won't be using Architect for the final dvd. I have it, but someone else is doing some work on the final dvd.
Kevin

Comments

rs170a wrote on 4/14/2005, 7:48 PM
Definitely render as an avi. You'll lose too much quality by choosing mpeg-2.

Mike
KevinK wrote on 4/14/2005, 7:51 PM
Will I lose much doing avi? Or is that the best?
rs170a wrote on 4/14/2005, 8:47 PM
The best is umcompressed avi but I don't think your hard drive will take the drastic increase in size nor is it really necessary. If you have a lot of graphics/stills in your project, then choose Best instead of Good in your render settings (select NTSC DV - then Custom - Best). Otherwise, regular avi is just fine.
Understand that, unless you have an effect of some kind, the outpput quality will match the input quality. A render test was done some time ago and, even 100 generations down, the quality was still excellent. This is a tribute to the excellent encoder in Vegas.

Mike
johnmeyer wrote on 4/14/2005, 9:06 PM
Use the Sony DV codec and render to an AVI. If your original material is DV video, the Sony codec is so good that even the fussiest person cannot see any difference, even after multiple generations. If your source material is DV, there really isn't any reason (relating to quality)to ever use uncompressed video.
rmack350 wrote on 4/14/2005, 9:39 PM
I have another suggestion to go with rendering to DV AVI. Turn off the graphics tracks and just render your edited DV footage to a new track. That way all the graphics, which are probably either generated or from stills, will stay sharp and intact. Then later on you can render to MPEG for your DVD.

Rob Mack
KevinK wrote on 4/19/2005, 8:17 AM
Hi,
So I tried the render to new track, NTSC video best quality. Anyway... How big should the file be for about an hour or hour and a half of video? Does having color correction, etc... affect it? Just wondering cause it rendered 10 mins of video and it ended up being 25.5 gigs and I was trying to figure out why. That seemed a little high to me considering I have about 15 hours of video on my computer now and so 25.5 for 10 mins seems a bit high. Could I have done something wrong? Also, I wasn't the smartest with media management and when I edited I didn't use the trimmer and my bins, anyway... If you trim something then put it in the bins can you then delete the source material? I was thinking if I go back and trim the spots where I have material and add them to bins, then it may not find it when I open it, but I can have it go and find the clip, etc... Would that work? If I could figure out why it's rendering at 25.5 for 10 mins then that would work too, cause I can just render it then delete the source material! Than add new video and edit on to the end! Thanks!
Kevin
johnmeyer wrote on 4/19/2005, 8:40 AM
Well, you are definitely doing something wrong. DV NTSC video takes 13 Gbytes per hour. You are obviously rendering uncompressed, not to DV. If you are starting with DV, this is pretty much a waste of disk space: the difference in quality is totally unmeasurable. You have to select AVI for the render type ad NTSC DV for the template.