As Peter said, use a lossless codec like Logarith or Sony YUV, or use a digital intermediary like CineForm which is "near" lossless.

I would not use Avid DNxHD only because it's a QuickTime codec and Vegas has problems with too many QuickTime files on the timeline due to the nature of QuickTime being 32-bit on Windows.

Having said that, you can use Sony MXF HD422 50Mbps which has a high enough bit rate to not notice a few re-renders. Sony MXF is high quality, edits very smoothly in Vegas Pro and produces files of a reasonable size but is not considered a "digital intermediary" but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.

~jr

Your miniDV will smart render in Vegas.

A good truly lossless codec with speed, efficiency, and utility in VeagsPro is MagicYUV.

Are your captured files ginormous because you did not push the start/stop button while filming? As in you let the camera run continuously? Or because you did not enable scene selection when you captured the footage?

If the former, well then cutting out all the junk and doing a smart or near lossless render is the way to go. But if there are scenes then why not recapture with that feature enabled and you can toss a lot of the unusable footage that way.

Regards,

Kimberly

I totally missed the fact that he is using miniDV.

Here's what you do. When you're done editing, use File | Save As... and check the box that says Copy media with project and point to a new folder. Vegas Pro will show you an option to Create trimmed copies of source media. This will only copy the parts that you actually used and discard the rest of the media. It's a beautiful workflow from days gone by. [sigh...]

~jr

Since you are using miniDV, the answer is easy: just render it using the built-in DV encoder in Vegas. Yes, it is lossy, but it is so amazingly good that you'll never see any difference.

This was confirmed, over a decade ago, when multiple members of this forum did tests by rendering the same video over ten times (copy of a copy of a copy of a ...) and were unable to see any difference between the tenth generation and the first generation.

So, my strong advice is to not bother with lossless codecs like HuffYUV/Lagarith or some of the newer ones, and certainly do not render using uncompressed which, IMHO, should almost never be used given all the much better alternatives.

[edit]One thing not mentioned is that any operation you do in Vegas that affects the video will introduce some "loss." This happens because the operation of altering pixels, well, alters them. They have been changed. Therefore, they will not match the original. The whole point of applying and fX or doing compositing is to change the pixels, but sometimes those operations also introduce changes that you might not have been expecting. This doesn't in any way mean you should do these things because, of course, the whole point of Vegas is to let you do creative things to your video. However, some of the changes might possibly be seen as degradation.


Here's a link to Kelly's ancient, but still valid, DV codec tests post:

Multi-generation DV render test

Kelly forced re-render by modifying the content. If only simple cuts are made then Vegas will smart render DV AVI, so there will be no loss of quality.

Kelly forced re-render by modifying the content. If only simple cuts are made then Vegas will render DV AVI, so there will be no loss of quality.Excellent point! For any sections that are smart rendered, the result will be precisely the same as the original.

And, DV is the about the only format that smart renders without any ifs, ands, or buts.

Actually XDcam mxf smart-renders every bit as well as DV SD. The only problem is multi-channel 2-7 channels of audio approach won't let Handbrake (or any other encoder utilities) read two channels as a stereo pair.

Edited. XDcam mp4 no longer smart-renders. I meant XDcam mxf.

"Actually XDcam mp4 smart-renders every bit as well as DV SD. "

Actually I thought the point was that DV is only i-frames and no GOP (i.e. no interframe coding). If you cut MPEG2 or MPEG4 so that the cut is within a GOP (not at an i-frame), the GOP (or what is left of it) has to be re-rendered even when smart rendering.

JohnnyRoy, thanks for that tip. I had no idea you could do that. It's an ideal option for my DV AVI footage. I just wish that it worked for ALL video formats. I wonder why it doesn't? I tried out this same method on a project that used m2t video, and it didn't copy the parts of the video that I used, but it DID copy the parts of the AUDIO that I had used as WAV files.

Kimberly, the main reason many of my captured files are so huge is indeed because I'd end up leaving the camera recording alot of times. I have very little help with my projects. Sometimes I'm the cameraman AND the actor. I've been known to stop and start my tape while it's capturing, shuttling through the footage and picking and choosing the bits and pieces of my video that are useable... but that can prove to be a long and tedious process. So alot of the time (out of lazyness) I'd start the video capture and just let it capture the whole tape while I went off and did something else.

When I first captured HD footage into Vegas I was annoyed to discover that my clips were in a bunch of a little pieces. I didn't understand what the deal was with that. I was used to capturing my videos as big single chunks of video. I had disabled this automatic batch capturing feature, but it managed to go back to doing that. I forgot how I had disabled it. Anyone know how?

Am I correct in assuming that most people prefer batch capturing? Do you believe it to be a superior method of capturing video? I never really quite understood what it does exactly. Does it separate the clips based on when you stopped and started recording? I have this little Kodak Pocket Cam that shoots onto an SD Card. With that camera every time you stop recording, what you just recorded becomes it's own little clip. This annoyed me at first, but I guess that's normal these days. I probably sound like a dinosaur here. I don't think I've adapted too well to the 2010's. I feel kinda like I'm stuck in the 00's lol.

One other thing... I had movies on some old VHS-C tapes, which I converted to DVD using my VHS/DVD recorder. I then ripped the footage from the disc onto my computer using DVD Decrypter. The files were VOB, which contained multiple videos. I felt the need to separate them, so I cut them up and rendered them separately as AVI. I was concerned about losing quality, but when I compared VOB to AVI I saw little to no difference. That was a few years back, so it's kinda vague... I just hope I made the right choice. I did a ton of editing to those clips in AVI and would hate to re-do all that as VOB to achieve the best possible quality.

I too thought that pass through / smart rendering will result in the same quality.
But a while ago I rendered out a MXF file and the second pass through was noticeably sharper (one would think the other way around would happen).
I have switched quickly between them to notice the difference and I saw the difference every time.

I'll do that test again soon and let you know.

VMP

"When I first captured HD footage into Vegas I was annoyed to discover that my clips were in a bunch of a little pieces. I didn't understand what the deal was with that. I was used to capturing my videos as big single chunks of video. I had disabled this automatic batch capturing feature, but it managed to go back to doing that. I forgot how I had disabled it. Anyone know how?"

When you capture (transfer) DV, depending on the capture program used, you either get each scene in a separate file or you get one big file for the whole transfer time. It would annoy me to have to hunt for the start and end of each scene but you or your work flow must be different

All disk or card recording (non-tape) HD cameras record each scene into a separate file as far as I know. In addition, due to the file system used, scenes that would be longer than 2GB or 4 GB (depending on camera brand) are segmented into chunks no longer than 2 (4) GB. These chunks need to be concatenated or read correctly to avoid a glitch at each join.

> "I had no idea you could do that. It's an ideal option for my DV AVI footage. I just wish that it worked for ALL video formats. I wonder why it doesn't?"

The reason it doesn't work for all footage is because DV uses intraframe encoding where each frame of video is a whole frame on the tape and most HD formats use interframe encoding where frames and encoded in groups of pictures (GOP) where there is one whole frame (I-Frame) and several delta and predictive frames (B-Frames & P-Frames). What this means is that you can't just cut the video on any frame you want. You can only cut on I-Frame boundaries. If it were that simple it wouldn't be hard but other metadata in the file has to be rewritten in the header so Vegas Pro just copies the whole file.

> "I was used to capturing my videos as big single chunks of video. I had disabled this automatic batch capturing feature, but it managed to go back to doing that. I forgot how I had disabled it. Anyone know how?"

You need to enable Scene Detection. In the DV Capture tool go to Options | Preferences | Capture and check Enable DV scene detection.

> "Am I correct in assuming that most people prefer batch capturing? Do you believe it to be a superior method of capturing video?"

Usually there was a reason that I turned the camera on and off and I like that reason documented as a separate clip. It saves me the time to find it again later in one longer clip. YMMV

> "I had movies on some old VHS-C tapes, which I converted to DVD using my VHS/DVD recorder. I then ripped the footage from the disc onto my computer using DVD Decrypter."

Actually, all you needed to do is put the DVD into your computer and use File | Import | Camcorder Disc... and Vegas Pro would have transferred the footage directly to your timeline.

~jr

Johnny Roy, where do i find the "Sony MXF HD422 50Mbps" redering template in Vegas 13? I live in pal-land and want to render 50p.

Jøran

> "where do i find the "Sony MXF HD422 50Mbps" redering template in Vegas 13? "

Look under the Sony MXF encoder for the HD422 1280x720-50p 50 Mbps template.

~jr

BTW if you're working in the DV world you can use the very successful and useful "Scenalyzer." Very clever program for DV capture and it once cost money to buy but now I think it's out there for free.

One feature I loved was the ability to log a 10x fast-forward through an entire tape for search purposes.

JohnnyRoy, is there any kind of equivalent of the tip you gave me to do this with m2t footage? What's the best way to solve my problem with m2t kind of video? I suppose all you could do is re-render it.

I've always figured that for quality it was best to render using the same format and bit rate. For my HD footage that would be m2t at 25 mbps. I'm kinda confused though when it comes to what exactly the bit rate of my standard def AVI digital video footage is though. I'll click on the properties and it'll say that the bit rate is 29900kbps. Isn't that about 30 mbps? Why would the bit rate for SD footage be higher than HD footage?

Unfortunately, you can't import m2t into Adobe After Effects. So to do that I've rendered the clips I need for AE MP4 at 50 mbps, cause MP4 on Vegas doesn't give you an option for 25 mbps.

One thing that's annoying about AVI is that for some reason the text that you put on your video always looks like crap when you render it out AVI.

And just to verify... your video will become a separate scene on a mini DV camera by just pressing pause? Or by turning off the camera? I guess that would be way easier... jeeze, and to think all these years I've just been capturing the bulk of my footage as big chunks, then cutting it all up in editing.

"One thing that's annoying about AVI is that for some reason the text that you put on your video always looks like crap when you render it out AVI. "

That's an unavoidable artifact of the 4:1:1 color sampling of the DV .AVI format, it is not inherent in all AVI files. An AVI file is just a container and can contain video compressed with a number of different codecs, the DV codec just happens to not handle solid color, high-contrast, diagonal areas in text very well, it is particularly noticeable when using red text.

You have to stop thinking of just the file extension when you consider a video file. That normally only tells you the container. You should also ask what the codec is and what bitrate each codec requires for a certain quality.

DV AVI is standard definition with only frame compression (no inter-frame compression. See JR's post about that above.)

Standard definition MPEG2 video in a Program Stream container (normally .mpg extension) uses inter-frame compression and GOP and is therefore more efficent in compressing compared to DV. As a rule of thumb you can use about half the bitrate for the same quality.

A file extension of .m2t is normally HDV which is HD MPEG2 in an MPEG2 transport stream container. Being HD, the bitrate will be higher than for SD MPEG2.

m2ts and MTS (same thing) is usually an MPEG4 AVC codec, which is more efficient than MPEG2, so you might expect half the bitrate for the same quality. It uses an augmented, MPEG2 transport stream container.

MP4 is a container defined in the MPEG4 standard and is based on the Apple MOV container. It does not tell you what codec is inside. You have to know that before you can decide about bitrates.

Vegas will smart render HDV so you could convert your m2t file to MPG with no quality loss. After Effects will accept that.

When you shoot DV, each time you pause or stop the camera, the scene change is remembered. (If you rewind the tape or take it out, you may get a break in your otherwise contiguous video stream.) When you transfer your DV to a computer you can either capture it as a continuous stream or as individual files for each scene, depending on the software. When Pinnacle Studio, for instance, captures DV, it puts the video all into a single file with an associaed sidecar file that tells Studio where each scene break is, so you don't have to find the scene breaks yourself. For DV transfers I always used a little utility called WinDV. It captured each scene as a single file and named it according to shooting time and date.

> " is there any kind of equivalent of the tip you gave me to do this with m2t footage? What's the best way to solve my problem with m2t kind of video? I suppose all you could do is re-render it. "

Unfortunately No. M2T uses a Long GOP so you can't just split it anywhere you want. I know of no tool that will trim M2T files without re-rendering so it must be hard to do or someone would have done it.

> "Why would the bit rate for SD footage be higher than HD footage?"

Because DV SD doesn't use interframe compression so every frame is a full frame instead of every 15th frame as with long GOP formats; therefore you need a higher bit rate to represent it because you are using more bits for each frame.

> "Unfortunately, you can't import m2t into Adobe After Effects. So to do that I've rendered the clips I need for AE MP4 at 50 mbps, cause MP4 on Vegas doesn't give you an option for 25 mbps. "

This is what Digital Intermediaries like CineForm are for. I convert all of my footage into CineForm to use with AE. Digital Intermediaries are lossless or visually/near lossless. IMHO if you are working with a Long GOP format, you should use DI's for all pipeline transfers.

> "One thing that's annoying about AVI is that for some reason the text that you put on your video always looks like crap when you render it out AVI. "

That has more to do with the DV codec and not AVI as a container. DV samples chroma at 4:1:1. Then when you put it on DVD which uses MPEG2 4:2:0 you get 4:1:0! That's a lot of color information loss.

> "And just to verify... your video will become a separate scene on a mini DV camera by just pressing pause? Or by turning off the camera? "

My video cameras don't have a pause button. There is a record button and it's either on or off. This is independent of turning the camera on or off. So every time you press the record button, you are marking a new scene that will become a separate clip on ingest. If you consider pressing the record button a pause then yes, every pause will be a new scene.

> "I guess that would be way easier... jeeze, and to think all these years I've just been capturing the bulk of my footage as big chunks, then cutting it all up in editing."

Glad I could hep you improve your workflow. Scene detection is almost always a desirable way to capture.

EDIT: Change Int ;-)

~jr

Great post, JR.
Did you mean "DV SD doesn't use interframe compression . . ." ?