So Lagarith is only beneficial if you're going to Blu-ray?

I could be wrong about this, but I think it still could be useful to use the Lagarith (or HuffYUV or any other lossless codec) to create intermediates, even when going to MPEG-2, IF you are going to do 2-pass encoding. If you render your project directly to MPEG-2 using 2-pass, and if you have lots of fX and other things that take a long time to render, then you will GREATLY extend your rendering time if you go directly to MPEG-2 and can therefore save a lot of time by rendering first to an intermediate format and THEN using that as the source for your render.

To make this clear, suppose you have a five minute video. If you have a fast PC, you could take this video, if it has no fX or compositing, and render it to MPEG-2 in two minutes or less.

However, suppose you do all sorts of things to this video and it now takes one hour to render that video, just because of the fX and compositing. Well, if you do 2-pass MPEG encoding, it will take two hours to render. But, if you first render to Lagarith or HuffYUV, that render will take one hour. Then, you simply render that video to MPEG-2, using the same project settings, and that takes two minutes. So, you go from 120 minutes to 62 minutes.

John,

I'm not using 2-pass - I'm using a constant bitrate of 8Mbps (since this is a short 5 min video with minimal effects. Render time with these Fx is about 8 mins right now).

I'm guessing this is the best (for picture quality) encoding option for a short clip? Please correct me if I'm wrong here.

Since this is a short clip with basic effects, I'm concerned less about render time than with picture quality. Given all that, would rendering intermediates to Lagarith still be beneficial? And speaking of, how do I ask Vegas to render intermediates using Lagarith?

Thanks for all the help.

John's scenario could save you time, but no difference in quality.

My only disagreement would be that I would not do a 2 pass VBR in a video less than an hour. I want max quality so I would use the CBR at 8000kbs. I only recommend 2 pass VBR on video over an hour that you need to fit on a 4.7gig DVD disk.

So in this case, I don't see a gain in time.

edit: Kunal, you responded before I did so my answer is in line with your response.

Codecs like Lagarith and HUFFYUV are usefull if you need to to a pre-render or an intermediate rendering of your timeline. This gives you an uncompressed file at a smaller size than a normal uncompressed file. For prebuilds such as effects, or archiving, these types of codecs are great to use. For your situation here, you gain nothing. As Vegas renders to an MPEG file it has to first, uncompress the video on the timeline and then render that uncompressed video to an MPEG.

Dave T2

My only disagreement would be that I would not do a 2 pass VBR in a video less than an hour. I want max quality so I would use the CBR at 8000kbs. I only recommend 2 pass VBR on video over an hour that you need to fit on a 4.7gig DVD disk.Yes, you are absolutely correct that there is no need for 2-pass VBR for a five minute video. I was just trying to make the example easy to follow.

However, for those situations where you DO want to use 2-pass VBR, namely when you are trying to stuff 2+ hours of video onto a single-layer DVD and therefore need to use low bitrates, the savings in time are even greater and therefore the need to render to an intermediate becomes even more important. For instance, if I extend my previous example, if five minutes takes one hour, then two hours of video from that same project will take twenty-four hours to render. Thus, a 2-pass render will take two days. By contrast, if I first render to the intermediate file (one day) and then render that to MPEG-2 using 2-pass (under one hour on my computer), I have saved twenty-three hours.