Vegas Studio HD PE 11.322
AMD Athlon II X4 620 2.6GHz
8G Ram
Win 7 64-bit
Nvidia Ge-Force 9800GT
I have offered to help a small non-profit with editing about 30 hours of instructional video for web delivery (I have a lot of web dev and audio editing experience but not a lot of video experience so please bear with my detailed post – thank you in advance for any insights on making this project more efficient). The goal is to provide two quality levels, high and standard: 1280 X 720 at 1280 kbps and 1280 X 720 at 800 kbps. Our media presents a powerpoint presentation that fills 70 % of the screen and the other thirty % shows the speaker presenting this PPT; the PPT details cannot be read properly except at full screen.
We know that we also want the files to play well on iOS and Android Tablets, so the renders will be MP4s. They will need to stream to users, and run between 10 – 60 min long. Any suggestions for an open-source or paid player that allows streaming to iOS devices as well as desktops (without allowing saving of files) from a CDN would be welcome (in the past I have used JW Player and Flow Player). I am also looking at Vzaar.com as a streaming provider – are there any other similar services that you can recommend for budget deployment and extensive user customization features?
My main questions are about the workflow and encoders I am considering: I believe we can get good results for the standard quality files by rendering the higher quality version masters at 1280 kbps, then taking those and batch processing them in Handbrake or another batch encoder (or encoding service provider) to downscale to 800 kbps, same size. Any advice on the best quality batch encoders would be appreciated, and especially an answer to this question:
Which is the better encoder to use from Vegas for my specific need to then batch downscale the files:
Sony AVC/MVC - Internet 1280x720-30p (1280kbps)
MainConcept AVC/AAC - Apple iPad/iPhone 4 720p30 Video around 1280 Kbps (2 pass or constant bit-rate or variable bitrate? Is 2 pass worth the extra time if there is only medium/low movement in frames?).
Another question regards tips for optimizing my computer's render speed; this is what I am currently doing: I am rendering to a different drive than the sources (which are on the boot drive, along with Vegas), and I raise the process priority level to high for Vegas when rendering. A 20 min file of typical editing takes nearly 4 hours, which seems slow and poses practical issues to the rendering of 60 files required for completion (in less than a month). I wonder what the best (easy/inexpensive) ways are to improve render times moving forward. I saw Game Booster mentioned somewhere as a way to reduce other processes safely, and I have installed it and the AMD Fusion program that does about the same thing. My thread number is set at 4 max and the CPU is at 100% almost constantly during rendering.
Is it maybe worth downloading the Vegas Pro trial (and if I do, is it possible to run the two programs off the same drive without problems, easily load the .vf files from Studio into Pro, and then load the Pro versions back into Studio? - I realize the last option is highly unlikely, but may be important as we cannot afford the Pro upgrade...unless there is a significant non-profit discount available). I could also possibly run it from my dual-core Vista laptop to double rendering capacity, albeit at a much slower pace.
Thank You,
MM
* Editing source files are Quicktime MP4s at 18Mbps.
AMD Athlon II X4 620 2.6GHz
8G Ram
Win 7 64-bit
Nvidia Ge-Force 9800GT
I have offered to help a small non-profit with editing about 30 hours of instructional video for web delivery (I have a lot of web dev and audio editing experience but not a lot of video experience so please bear with my detailed post – thank you in advance for any insights on making this project more efficient). The goal is to provide two quality levels, high and standard: 1280 X 720 at 1280 kbps and 1280 X 720 at 800 kbps. Our media presents a powerpoint presentation that fills 70 % of the screen and the other thirty % shows the speaker presenting this PPT; the PPT details cannot be read properly except at full screen.
We know that we also want the files to play well on iOS and Android Tablets, so the renders will be MP4s. They will need to stream to users, and run between 10 – 60 min long. Any suggestions for an open-source or paid player that allows streaming to iOS devices as well as desktops (without allowing saving of files) from a CDN would be welcome (in the past I have used JW Player and Flow Player). I am also looking at Vzaar.com as a streaming provider – are there any other similar services that you can recommend for budget deployment and extensive user customization features?
My main questions are about the workflow and encoders I am considering: I believe we can get good results for the standard quality files by rendering the higher quality version masters at 1280 kbps, then taking those and batch processing them in Handbrake or another batch encoder (or encoding service provider) to downscale to 800 kbps, same size. Any advice on the best quality batch encoders would be appreciated, and especially an answer to this question:
Which is the better encoder to use from Vegas for my specific need to then batch downscale the files:
Sony AVC/MVC - Internet 1280x720-30p (1280kbps)
MainConcept AVC/AAC - Apple iPad/iPhone 4 720p30 Video around 1280 Kbps (2 pass or constant bit-rate or variable bitrate? Is 2 pass worth the extra time if there is only medium/low movement in frames?).
Another question regards tips for optimizing my computer's render speed; this is what I am currently doing: I am rendering to a different drive than the sources (which are on the boot drive, along with Vegas), and I raise the process priority level to high for Vegas when rendering. A 20 min file of typical editing takes nearly 4 hours, which seems slow and poses practical issues to the rendering of 60 files required for completion (in less than a month). I wonder what the best (easy/inexpensive) ways are to improve render times moving forward. I saw Game Booster mentioned somewhere as a way to reduce other processes safely, and I have installed it and the AMD Fusion program that does about the same thing. My thread number is set at 4 max and the CPU is at 100% almost constantly during rendering.
Is it maybe worth downloading the Vegas Pro trial (and if I do, is it possible to run the two programs off the same drive without problems, easily load the .vf files from Studio into Pro, and then load the Pro versions back into Studio? - I realize the last option is highly unlikely, but may be important as we cannot afford the Pro upgrade...unless there is a significant non-profit discount available). I could also possibly run it from my dual-core Vista laptop to double rendering capacity, albeit at a much slower pace.
Thank You,
MM
* Editing source files are Quicktime MP4s at 18Mbps.