Thanks John, that worked out perfectly!

Another quicktime question I know have a 2 hour video for a different customer. They wanted me to edit the 2 hour video segment and want to do thier own DVD authoring on a MAC platform. What settings should I export the project if they want the clip to be in a QuickTime format?

Thanks

AVC compression will give better compression at higher quality than the Sorenson codec in my experience.

1) Render your video as .mp4 using one of the AVC encoders in Vegas at a fairly low bitrate depending on your filesize needs. Quicktime will play the file as-is, or you can rename the extension to .mov if you wish.

As to your second question:

2) DVD authoring on any platform requires a compliant MPEG file, and that is what you should give them. I do not recommend encoding to another format and then back to a DVD-compliant MPEG because this will introduce two unnecessary and detrimental rendering steps to the process.

Thanks for the tip!
Just wanted to confirm some settings before outputting:

Frame Size: 720 x 480
Frame Rate: 29.970 (NTSC)
Field order: None (progressive scan)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0000

Should I use a variable bit rate or a constant bit rate? This is a two hour video? Please let me know what Bit Rate I should be using?

Thanks

I tried rendering the video as .mp4 with and AVC enconder, but from the template drop down menu the only options that I have are the following:

Apple iPod 320 x 240
Apple iPod 640 x 480

However my project is set for 720 x 480.

So I selected custom and manually entered 720 x 480
and below is the following that I entered

Frame Rate: 29.970
Constant bit rate(bps) 384,000

Four hours later the file size was 490 MB and looked horrible. Should I have selected a constant bit rate or variable bit rate? What rates should I be using?

Now I am thinking of rendering the project as a QuickTime 7 .mov

What settings should I render the project?
what video format should I select, there are so many selections from the drop down menu Cinepak, AVI, MPEG-4 Video etc...

Any help will be appreciated, please note this is a 2 hour video with client wanting to do their own DVD authoring.

Thanks

> What settings should I render the project? what video format should I select, there are so many selections from the drop down menu Cinepak, AVI, MPEG-4 Video etc...

QE, I would ask the customer what format they need for DVD Authoring on a Mac. As musicvid said, the best thing you can do is give them an MPEG2 file that is ready to be authored.

If they need a Quicktime file, I would render a DV Quicktime file. It is going to be 13GB/hr but it will be the same quality as your source.

There are two problems with your Quicktime settings: One is you selected 720x480 PAR 1.000 but I'm betting that your project and source are NTSC 720x480 PAR 0.9091 which means you need to multiple 720 x 0.9091 which is 654 x 480 PAR 1.000.

The second problem is you selected a constant bitrate of 300K. That is worse than most internet video (which is usually 512K). By comparison, a DVD uses an average bitrate of 6M. That is 20x more information than you were encoding. (think about it, you took 13GB/hr x 2 hrs = 32GB source and reduced it to 490MB total!)

I'm not sure that encoding to AVC only to have it re-encoded to MPEG2 by the customer is going to give them good quality. AVC is highly compressed already. The best thing for you to do is to encode to MPEG2 for them. Otherwise give them a high quality DV file (I assume your source is DV). If neither of those work for you and you want to try using Quicktime MPEG4 at 6MB and see how it looks. The MPEG4 codec is kinda old and predates H.264 (which Vegas doesn't support rendering to)

~jr