What is the native format for Vegas?

Furthercom wrote on 2/7/2004, 7:31 AM

If I want to render a segment and then use it in another vegas timeline, what format, and settings should I use? AVI, MPEGII, etc? In other words which setting are the most compatabile with Vegas. I know Vegas will work with many formats, but which one has the best quality and uses the least resources in decoding?

Joe

Comments

RBartlett wrote on 2/7/2004, 7:52 AM

DV and uncompressed are the native formats for Vegas.
Any resolution of uncompressed within 4kx4k theoretically and possibly BGR24 or RGBA32.
DV will be uncompressed to your windows preview but if unmodified on the timeline, will go out to your DV-preview-monitor without recompression.

If you start off with DV, you might as well continue with it, although any effects or motion will taint the information, it should be virtually unnoticable. Working with DV with an intermediate uncompressed format will keep it the same, but most PC systems are sluggish in Vegas.

You do need fast RAM and disc I/O to deal with anything other than DV on most computers. If your PC is recent or bleeding edge, then you will be wondering why I've suggested that uncompressed video is slow. On fast machines with an optimised directshow or custom interface, uncompressed layers are far more efficient than DV as with enough layers the decomp of DV does start to become more of a burden than the rate that the uncompressed is taken off the HD. I don't tend to stripe drives anymore but put DV and uncompressed acrosss IDE drives. Then the 30MB/sec (inc audio and Avi overheads) fits well within even the worst parts of my 160GB 7200rpm drives. DV can live even on drives used by Windows or Vegas (scratch pad) in many cases.

I don't think it matters too much if your wrapper is AVI or QuickTime, but PC's are slightly more friendly to AVI, so I'd choose this.

All the other codecs have the disadvantage of needing decomp even if unchanged on the timeline. There is no passthrough for MJPEG/Wavelet/MPEG-2 etc.