The Template features in Vegas FOR MC aren't enough? There are loads of tweaks you can do! I say YOU can do, as I really haven't the FOGGIEST idea what they mean: Matrix Coefficients; Non-Linear Quantization and not forgetting Psychoacoustic Models ( 1 & 2)!

I guess you've seen these huh?

Grazie

Not the same thing unfortunately.

One answer might be to frame serve out of Vegas into the standalone encoder.

Bob.

I use the free www.debugmode.com frameserver to frameserve into the external MainConcept encoder. Works great. Make sure you set the RGB setting in the external encoder. I think it needs to be checked (render a small sample and then put it back on the Vegas timeline -- you'll see an obvious levels shift if this setting is incorrect).

The question of using it directly within Vegas was asked many years ago, and I think some people tried copying DLL files from the standalone MC installation into the appropriate Vegas folders. I don't think it worked, as I remember.

I would agree with the frameserving. One of my issues is that from Vegas it takes a *VERY* long time to do a two pass encode yet with the stand alone it takes about real time, well almost less than real time considering it does two passes. As I type this I am on the last 4 hours of a 16/17 hour, two pass, render from Vegas. The project is about 90 minutes long. I didn't have much of a choice with this project as I had to clean it up the video a bit, I guess I still could have frame served though...didn;'t think about it this morning when I hit the render button.

As for what John was saying about the codec swapping it had to do with Mainconcept seeming updating the endoder elements and SoFo not doing it. One could, in theory, take the encoder files and drag them into the SoFo shared folder and replace them. This is somewhat true for any program that uses MC engine but ths issue I think this is is the interface. The stand alone encoder does have a lot more options available but that is not the same issue as an updated codec. Sony would have to update the UI to the codec before any sort of new options would show up in Vegas.

Also, this may or may not be a valid issue, but if you looked at my recent post about Cineform Neo, David made a comment about Vegas using the VFW interface and not DS - the stand alone MC encoder uses DS for the codecs as far as I can tell so trying to use those in vegas would not work. If there was a VFW version (ala the MC DV codecs) it would be an option - to use the updated codec that is.

CRAP!!

So I wake up this morning and what do I see?

"An error occurred while creating the media file..."

Yep - you got it. A nice freaking Vegas 17 + hour render for nothing!!! Of course there is no way to tell what really happened because of the oft talked about cryptic message of "The reason for the error could not be determined" following the "error" msg.

Ain't life grand.