If you rerender an avi file on the vegas timeline, is any quality lost. I've heard if you render an avi file to avi then to mpeg you will lose quality.
1. Vegas only re-renders the bits you have changed. This includes transitions, music tracks and that kind of thing. In any case, you are most unlikely to detect any deterioration in quality or even be able to tell the original from the re-rendered.
2. The MPEG story runs differently. I infer from your question that you have a mind to use a third-party MPEG encoder to render your AVI to MPG? First, the stand-alone encoder will be working with compressed AVI (unless your hard drive is as big as a planet). This makes its task harder (the built in Vegas MPEG encoder is fed frame by frame - an advantage). Second, whichever method of creating an MPEG you use, you are much more likely to see a drop in quality over the original AVI. That's not to say that you won't be able to live with it - or God help commercial DVD manufacturers - in fact it will more than likely be very good indeed. But you will be able to see the difference.
It also depends on the AVI codec. If you're going uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. If you're using DV, there's a slight loss of quality, except for the pass-through (no recompression) cases, where there is no loss of quality. If you're using other codec from the Custom page, it depends on the codec, but most are lossy.
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As long as we're on the topic, has there been anymore discussion within Sonic Foundry about releasing a decode-only version of the excellent SF DV codec? I need to deliver DV assets to clients, and it's kind of embarrasing to make them install Vegas just to print the clips to tape in Premiere. Granted, they should be using VV to begin with, but there's no accounting for taste.
Luxo: are you sure they have to install the codec? My impression was that SF's codec encodes to a standard DV format (they just do it better than anyone else), and that any player capable of handling DV files could play them back even without SF's codec installed.
Cheinworks in right, we write the same headers as Microsoft's DV codec, these files should play just fine. Perhaps they don't have DirectX 8 installed or something? What OS & version?
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