Some things that Vegas should automatically do

dcrandall wrote on 12/19/2002, 11:38 AM

I've been lurking on this board for several months now and it seems to me the most redundant questions have to do with:

1) The quality of Slow Motion
(Must "resample" and use "best" quality when rendering...may need to "reduce interlace flicker" also)
2) Capturing a quality still from video on the Time Line
(Must "display at project size" and set the field order to "progessive scan")
3) Importing a still

It seems to me Vegas should automatically set-up all options to give the best quality unless you specifically tell it not to.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 12/19/2002, 4:43 PM

Actaully, not that good an idea and likely over-kill for most needs. This too has come up before, perhaps before you were lurking.

The only difference between "good" and "best" rendering has to do with how Vegas does interpolation. With the good setting it uses bilinear, with best it uses bicubic.

What's the difference?

With bilinear the pixels to the top, bottom, right and left are sampled. With bicubic the caculation is more complex with top, bottom, right, left plus diagonal. Then a weighted average is cacluated.

This adds a good deal of time to the rendering with miminal improvement it the final render.

Paul_Holmes wrote on 12/19/2002, 4:55 PM

I was just in the Cow forum and Dr. Dropout (a Sonic employee) noted the request so we know Sonic has heard about this good idea.

dcrandall wrote on 12/19/2002, 6:38 PM

BillyBoy,

I have used some of your great tutorials and I acknowledge that you have quite a bit more expertise than I do. So, if I have a project with some slow motion (50%) video and stills utilizing pan and zooms, are you saying that I will not notice the difference in quality if I use "good" rather than "best" settings when rendering?

BillyBoy wrote on 12/19/2002, 7:09 PM

Way back when I first tried Vegas I did some testing and didn't see any real noticable difference between best and good as far as general video stuff goes. For sure not enough to wait for a longer render, at least not for me.

Depending on the source and how much you zoom in you may see slight improvement on stills if you render at best. I think it really depends on what you mean by better. I didn't see any jump out differences in sharpness or additonal detail, maybe on some stills the colors were a little richer, but that's just a maybe and varied from image to image.

As I understand the concept bicubic interpolation puts the most demands on a CPU which is what slows down rending.

I look at it this way: If I was working on a still image, say in Photoshop then for sure I would set preferences to bicubic. Even for large images the time necessary to do the extra caculations is minimial and assuming the still image at some time may get printed on some high resolution printer the subtleness of colors would be better. Consider those images would be rendered at 600-1200 DPI or higher. However when you embed any image into a video even at high bitrate the limited capability of the playback device either a TV or computer monitor... we're talking much lower screen resolution so much of the subtle details will just get lost so my thinking is why spend extra time rendering if nobody is going to see any difference. So what I'm trying to say is you may be able to see differences rendering good verses best, but if or not it is "better" is going to be subjective and be influenced by the source material, render settings, format and the playback device.

The best method of course is try it both ways and see what works best for a specific project if you have the time.

dcrandall wrote on 12/19/2002, 8:10 PM

BillyBoy,

Thank you for your informative reply....gives me something to think about and perhaps, experiment with.