Multiple "lossless" renders & workflow suggestions

Jessariah67 wrote on 6/20/2019, 6:13 AM

Hey All,

I did a search on this, but the topics were centered around DV tape footage, DVD, YouTube, etc...

I'm in post on a "found-footage" project that was shot primarily on a Pixel 3 at 4K, 100MBS. I am looking for advice on workflow & rendering settings. I will be working on the picture & sound separately (soundtrack will be done by a third party in ProTools). My work on the picture will include color work, contrast/sharpening adjustment & likely some noise reduction here and there. Not all of the tools I will be using are made for Vegas (I plan to use Red Giant MB suite tools). Even if that were not the case, I would still want to break things up with work on individual scenes, as opposed to pulling all original footage for 50 scenes onto a single timeline mess...

What I ideally would like to do is work on/render "touched" picture in After Effects (from renders of the assembled scenes in Vegas), then bring that video into a master timeline and marry it to the finished audio, then lay the score under all of it. I have played with the idea of cleaning up noise in AE, then making other picture adjustments in Vegas, and making the "picture" part of my master timeline consist of VEG files, rather than actual video renders (I'm not a real fan of this, as I've found working with VEG/sfap files to be a bit buggy at times). The other option is to do ALL of the picture in AE, render out each scene, and import the "finished" video into Vegas on the master timeline, then render the entire movie from there. I won't do the whole thing in AE, because I hate how it handles audio, and I don't want to be working on a stacked master timeline that is 60+ tracks deep.

Regardless, any scenario is going to involve at least one pre-render, possibly two. So, other than your thoughts on the best work flow, what would be the best render settings to use to get to the most "lossless" version of a final?

Thanks for any help/insight!

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 6/20/2019, 11:36 AM

See if Magic YUV (rgb mode) suits your purpose for a lossless intermediate to AE. Since it is AVI, keep an eye out to maintain correct rgb/709 levels door-to-door.

The time-proven warhorse for this workflow is DNxHR / DNxHD, a free Avid download, which also has selectable levels and alpha! Used it for many productions. ProRes 422 is also worth testing. Either of these two should sustain 5+ generations without detectable losses.

Former user wrote on 6/20/2019, 11:55 AM

And of course, you always have uncompressed, which renders much faster. But does require a lot of storage.

 

Musicvid wrote on 6/20/2019, 11:59 AM

Yes, the relative uncompressed size is shown in the first example above.

Jessariah67 wrote on 6/20/2019, 12:01 PM

Don't we have ProRes 422 as an option in Vegas? Is the Magix Intermediate XQ/HD/422 the same/similar?

Former user wrote on 6/20/2019, 1:06 PM

Some intermediate and MagicYuv multi generational comparisons ...

Jessariah67 wrote on 6/20/2019, 1:26 PM

Looks like the Magix Intermediate HQ (422HQ) is a good option for what I'm trying to do.

Thanks for all the info, everybody!

Former user wrote on 6/20/2019, 2:06 PM

You can do all this in Vegas without the need for After Effects.

1.The Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks plugin is compatible with Vegas. Then you can do your colorization work in Vegas itself.

2.It is also possible to clean image noise in Vegas using the Neat Video Plugin (Not Free) or Happy Otter Script Temporal Denoise Tool by Waynne Waag @wwaag (Free of charge so far and in Beta Version). Happy Otter Script download link https://tools4vegas.com/

3.It is also possible to do multiple lossless processing directly in Vegas using Happy Otter Script Render Plus Tool by Waynne Waag and automatically import rendered scenes into the Vegas timeline.

4.But if you still want to use After Effects, you can also export the project from Vegas to After Effects by creating an EDL file with the extension (.txt) and importing it into After Effects using the "Import EDL to After Effects" script. If you want I can send this script to you.

Musicvid wrote on 6/20/2019, 5:59 PM

Looks like the Magix Intermediate HQ (422HQ) is a good option for what I'm trying to do.

Thanks for all the info, everybody!

Just be sure the handoff to AE works and maintains levels and gamma integrity round trip. There is a free HD grayscale in my signature to help you with that.

Jessariah67 wrote on 6/21/2019, 3:07 PM

Amazing amount of help here! Thanks to everyone.

BTW - here is the trailer for the project, in case you're interested:

Thanks again for everything!