Rendering time - AVI vs MPEG-2

Nickelman wrote on 12/2/2004, 3:44 AM
Hi, I purchased VMS4 about a month ago and have been reading the posts here for a while.

My first project with VMS4 involved capturing some old Super8 home movie clips to be put on a DVD. I used VMS4 to capture all the clips as AVI files. I put them together and did some editing and added FX affects - all went well considering the learning curve with VMS4. When I was ready to render, the process took a little over 9 hours for 2 hours of video (no audio). I was pleased with final result.

I have now began a 2nd project with some 16mm film clips which I captured with my ATI AIW card as MPEG-2 files directly. After some minor editing, I decided to make a test DVD-RW to see the results using the MPEG-2 files as the source instead of AVI files. To my surprise the rendering time for 30min of MPEG-2 files (again, no audio) took a about 2 hours. This would equate to roughly the same time it took to render using AVI files.

I was under the impression that you could save rendering time by using MPEG-2 files instead of AVI because they were already compressed. Is this not true? Other than hard drive space, is there any advantage of using AVI files instead of MPEG-2?

PC Specs: ABit NF7-S, AMD Athlon 2500+, 512MB DDR, ATI AIW 9600Pro
DVD±RW DL: Sony DRU-710A

Sorry for the lengthy post,

Nickelman







Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/2/2004, 3:50 AM
There are some big advantages including quality and editing speed/responsiveness. MPEG is a terrible format to use for source files. Vegas must decompress and recompress while rendering and you'll lose a lot of quality.

Saving hard drive space is the ONLY advantage of capturing in MPEG, and with hard drives being so cheap now this is hardly worth worrying about.
Nickelman wrote on 12/2/2004, 4:05 AM
Thanks Chienworks for the quick reply!

I guess I'll stick with AVI files for quality sake.

Nickelman