New Camera, rendering questions...

ShawnGN wrote on 3/21/2010, 8:11 AM
I just bought a Sony HDR550 HD camcorder and I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out the best ways to go about rendering my videos to keep the best possible picture quality and size.
My usual order of working with my videos is: First edit in Vegas rendered as Quicktime (uncompressed) so I can add effects in FXLab Pro > Then I render in FXLab Pro in Quicktime best quality animation > Final edit (sound effects, music) in Vegas - I prefer WMV files for the final render but if it's not the best choice I'm willing to change that to get better quality.

I'm not sure if anyone reading this is familiar with FXLab Pro, but if so My full question is what are the best settings for each step (Vegas>FXLab>Vegas) to end up with a great looking video? (Video fresh from the camera looks much better than my finished videos so I gotta be doiing something wrong)

Thanks for any help.

Comments

ritsmer wrote on 3/21/2010, 12:37 PM
I just got my SONY CX550 some days ago - and have been doing some experiments how to get the best results - as every new camera I get seems to have its own new video-formats - that again seem more or less compatible with the video editor.

I am, however not using the Movie Studio, but the Vegas "Pro" version and here I found that the output from the CX550 can be put directly to the Vegas Timeline and edited and rendered to the final result (1980x1080 50i 25 Mbps) directly.

As you presume also I do not know the FXlab - but after I changed from the Vegas Studio to Vegas Pro (not to be confused with Studio Pro) some years ago I found that It fullfills 99 percent of what I need for editing, and so I keep the whole editing in one process and on one timeline...

...and doing so the video from the final result does look as fresh and crispy as the fresh video directly from the CX550.

BTW some years ago I also has an issue with the WMV media as everything that I rendered to WMV seemed to look kind of washed out and pale. After some searcing I found out that that was because that WMV has another colour-space as what I expected (see i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space ).
Vegas has a possibility to convert to and from like studio RGB but every conversion cuts a part of the colour space, so I see this only for emergency, not for everyday editing.
ShawnGN wrote on 3/22/2010, 2:29 PM
To be more specific, I'm trying to figure out how to render my cameras original footage into a high-definition QuickTime file. I don't seem to have a problem if all I want to do is edit and render to a WMV file, but if I want to take my video into FXLab pro for further editing it needs to be a Quicktime file and I can't seem to render in quicktime at nearly the same quality. 3Mbps seems to be quicktimes max rendering option with no video size specifications that I can see. I don't really know much about the advanced settings so if anyone knows how to get the best Quicktime render possible with Vegas and is willing to be specific about how achieving it that would be much appreciated. Thanks again, and Thanks ritsmer for your reply.