Video Rendering Quality

fongaboo wrote on 3/10/2002, 8:25 AM
SF: Would you care to detail precisely how the different classes of Video Rendering Quality (Draft, Preview, Good, Best) differ? I'd say it's obvious that they differ not only in speed/picture quality of the codec, but also how a lot of the elements in Vegas act. A detailed breakdown of what does and doesn't happen in each quality setting would be cool.

Comments

Cheesehole wrote on 3/11/2002, 5:49 PM
this is a good idea. when we render from a 3d application, we are presented with a page full of quality options so we can decide which options to turn off based on the content of the 3d model (whether it really needs shadows, or antialiased reflections etc) which can save hours of render time. the way I see it, Vegas has 4 quality 'presets': best, good, preview, and draft.

this is my best guess as to what the presets mean.
best = all quality options maxed out
good = balance between speed/quality biased towards quality
preview = balance between speed/quality biased towards speed
draft = all quality options minimized & half resolution

but we don't know what quality options are compromised at what level, so most of us are forced to leave it on 'best' because rendering at 'good' would require a second render at 'best' as a comparison to make sure we weren't losing anything. if we knew what the presets meant, we could make an intelligent decision before rendering and save ourselves a lot of time perhaps.
HPV wrote on 3/11/2002, 7:37 PM
I'd love to hear the low down also. I've asked before, and SF said they would try to answer after 3.0 was out the door. Soooooo, what's the scoop?
For all those that want to see what the difference is without rendering, OHCI ext. output gives you real time updates when you switch preview quality settings. They are the same as the render quality settings. For checking motion, you'll need to prerender. Slow motion and deform filter are the only things I've found that look better at the Good quality setting vs. preview. Preview quality is damn fast, btw. Using both with the new print to tape feature is heaven. Best is not needed unless your reducing the frame size, afaik.
My take so far is.
Draft = full resolution, 30 frames, not 60 fields, no resample
Preview = full resolution, 60 fields, no resample.
Good = all of Preview plus resample and some filtering.
Best = all of Good plus scaling engine and more filtering.

Craig H.
sqblz wrote on 3/12/2002, 3:33 AM
I always do "best".
Why loose my time on doing less than "best" and later regretting that I hadn't do it ? Or going back and doing what could be done in the first place ?
The same goes for pre-rendering. If it takes (say) 2 minutes to pre-render in "worse" and 6 minutes, I just wait a little more. I consider it worth.
BD wrote on 3/13/2002, 8:02 PM
The www.CreativeCow "Sonic Foundry Vegas Video" forum today has a complete description of the VV3 rendering quality levels.