I'm on Pro 10 and find the Sony codec generally gives best results for MP4. Some people on the forums refer to these as "consumer" codecs. I'm curious, is there a codec I could buy and use within Vegas for better "professional" quality rendering ?
First of all, all h264 codecs are terrific at high bitrates. Below 10Mbs, however, quality differences begin to show, and some codecs seem to be worse than others at consumer bitrates..
You should give Handbrake (x264) a spin. It's free.
musicvid is, imho, the guru on this subject. FWIW, a couple years back I did some testing of encoders at low bitrates (1.2Mbps) And found Handbrake best, then Mainconcept. The Sony AVC brought up the rear. Results are here: Local Low Bitrate Testing
Excellent stuff. I've just spent a profitable hour going through the "better" method. I took my best guesses with 25p 1920x1080 source, but looking at the outputs on Youtube and Wistia. They are very good.
I see picture sharpness changes at every GOP start with Vegas built in codec even at high bitrate, where Ripbot264 is superior.
And below 10mbit, Ripbot is faar superior than sony/mainconcept.
It works with frameserver and a short avisynth script for handling color space correctly.
It's also free, give it a try!
The one thing that puts me off of Ripbot is it requires so many 3rd party apps to be installed. I'm always wary of something upsetting system stability. Especially as it took so long (for me) to get a stable version of V12.
Lately I have tried frameserving to ffmpeg. Currently using a batch file for proof of concept but I am going to write utility program to make setting options easy.
I should be able to have it render AVC and DNxHD and ProRes. Really anything but those were ideas to target.