rendering to wmv from hdv, pls help

goodtimej wrote on 4/20/2008, 9:29 AM
Hey, I have a project that I did in all HDV, it is about 5 minutes. Plenty of graphics and footage, nothing too crazy generated by Vegas, though.
Basically, when I render this thing out as NTSC DV Widescreen to burn onto DVDs, it takes me an hour and a half. No biggie there for me. Well, I wanted to send a .wmv comp to my client so I set out to making a file that I could send him. I opened a new Vegas project, NTSC widescreen, dropped the nested file on the timeline, and chose "good" render, 90%, CBR dual pass at 3M. Then i went to bed. By the time I get around to checking, the file is 10 hours into rendering with 5 more to go. I know dual pass doubles my time, so obviously I could do single pass, but it seems like a 5 hour single pass is still extremely long compared to a 1.5 hour MPG render. BTW, the MPG render was all on "Best" settings. Where did I go wrong here. Is there something about WMV that makes it that much harder to render than MPG. Can anyone give me some tips here? Thanks.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 4/20/2008, 9:44 AM
WMV render is a resource hog (at least that's been my experience).
goodtimej wrote on 4/20/2008, 10:58 AM
is there a better suggestion you could give me that isnt so hoggy but is as universal?
navydoc wrote on 4/20/2008, 1:36 PM
I'm not sure how you want to deliver your .wmv video to your client but if you are thinking about doing it over the web, I might suggest this:

Open your HD project and be sure your project properties are set to 1440x108060i.

Then, when you render it to .wmv, the default template for 1440x1080 HD will already be selected. Click the 'custom' button and go to the 'video' tab. Change the encoding to CBR, the screen size to 1280x720 and the pixel aspect ratio to 'square'. Next, go to the 'bitrate' tab, uncheck the ISDN checkbox and check the 'High speed internet' box at 1M.

Here is an example rendered as shown above. I did have the project set to 'best' and there is no audio (for streaming, you would want to reduce any audio bitrate also). The clip is 11 sec. long and took 5 minutes to render producing a filesize of about 1.6mb.

http://glewis.us/media/f16_jet_engine.wmv

Even with DSL, it will take a few seconds before the clip begins to play. The clip above was shot on an overcast day so I did tweek the levels and did some color correction too.

Added If you don't need to display your video in a HiDef mode, change the screen size to 'custom'> 640x360 and keep the par at 'square'. On the bitrated tab, change to ISDN @ 500K. I would also suggest you render a few seconds of your video to test. Once your pleased with the results, go ahead and render the entire video.

Doc