Vegas 8 Editing & Re-rendering of MPEG2 (DVD-Readies) files issue - pls advise
 

Hi everyone! New to the board. (Am hoping that retitling the post gets a response from someone. Sorry to be a pain!)

Gave away me ol' SONY-MiniDV (HC-12) but had all the Sony Vegas Captured video stored on a spare hard-drive.

9 tapes of converted AVI type video sitting on the hard drive was just too much space hogging. So using a batch converter (ULEAD) I readied all the AVI's for DVD by rendering them all to DVD-NTSC format. I checked 'High Quality' and 2-Pass Encode in the batch command gui's and am pretty happy with the results - virtually undetectable loss from AVI to DVD ready NTSC video.

Before I went to do any cutting/fading of several video clips using VEGAS 8, I decided to do a test: I re-rendered one of the videos that had been converted by ULEAD to what I hoped would be the exact same format (as per the drop-down menu found in Vegas when you go to render). The file size it rendered the converted-MPEG video was LESS than the original ULEAD converted MPEG file. Any idea why? I opted for high quality video - 16x9 - 2-pass encoding but it ended up about 20 Megabytes less from the original 50Mb file when re-rendered with Vegas.

Using GSPOT.EXE, I have posted the stats of the avi to mpg converted file for someone to analyze so that I can do a proper matchup in Vegas (v.8) for editing and re-rendering for a DVD.

Size: 52.1 MB (or 53,402 KB or 54,683,648 bytes)
Container: DVD "VOB" format
MPEG-2 Program Stream ,, {1 vid, 1aud }
Sys Bitrate: 10080 kb/s VBR
Len: 0:47.848
Frms: 1,434
kbps: 7443
Qf: .719
Pic/s: 29.970
Frames/s: 29.970
Fields: 59.940
-------------------
w x h : 720 x 480
-------------------
SAR: 1.500 (3:2)
PAR: 1.185
DAR: 1.778 (16:9)
-------------------
AUDIO - Codec : DVD_LPCM_AUDIO

When trying to re-render the same file in VEGAS here's what differences GSPOT.EXE states about the file:

Container: Now shows Sys Bitrate of 9921.kb/s VBR
Audio: Shows CODEC change to MPEG-1 Layer 2 (CBR)
info 0xc0:480000Hz 224 kb/s tot , Stereo

Kbps NOW shows 5963 and the Qf is 0.576

EVERYTHING else seems to be the same.

Should I worry that Vegas wants to reset (what appears to be only) the audio to these altered and lower bitrates? I only care that the video is not sacrificed ANY MORE than it has been from converting it from avi to mpeg (DVD ready) format.

Your input is greatly appreciated - memories are important - wouldn't want to mess them up in any way.

Thanks so much!

Martin
Martin Bannet is online now Report Post Edit/Delete Message

Sorry Martin, too many details, the numbers, etc., too much information.

Why don't you just edit the original avi files, make your DVDs and save the tapes? Not sure I understand why ULEAD was brought into the mix, though I'm sure you had a reason.

Vegas doesn't 'Batch Convert'
 

Hi Jeff:

The only reason I did the ULEAD thing was to make use of the batch converter - something I don't believe VEGAS has in its arsenal, yeah? (will do fades & music & transitions in Vegas 8 of course).

I WILL be keeping the tapes, but just don't want to start editing the content until I need/have time to get to it.

Anyway - ALL i see different is the Kbps in audio - image Q seems consistent.

Anyone disagree?

Martin

Vegas *WILL* batch convert - at least the pro version using scripting will. By using scripts, Vegas is a very powerful batch converter.

Converting to a smaller file size is going to lead to a loss in quality no matter how you do it.

It might not be a noticeable loss, but you're going to lose something.

If you don't feel the loss is noticeable after a test run than you're fine. But you won't know how it is going to look after another recompression until after you do your editing unless you test that process all the way through.

If the footage is super important and you don't want to lose any quality at all, then I would purchase a spare drive, move the files onto there and save them as they are and edit when you are ready.

I personally wouldn't convert files prior to editing, but that is just me.