Saving .AVI without recompression
 

Does anyone know how to save an .avi file in Vegas without recompressing it? ...Say if i've made a lot of editing changes on several different tracks and want to render it down to one track without losing any video quality. What would be the correct settings in the render dropdown menu if this is possible?

Thanks for any help!

If you're starting with DV-AVI, render to DV-AVI. Any sections not changed will simply be copied. Any modified sections (i.e. effects added or dissolves) will be rendered. So, just choose either NTSC-DV.

Also make sure you don't have force recompress or any options like that (by default it will simply copy unmodified sections as Edward said)

I think I messed something up because my .avi files are playing extremely fuzzy and sort of out of focus after the render. I'll check my preferences and reset everything if I have to.

Thanks for the tips.

Even if it did recompress, you shouldn't be seeing fuzzy/blurry video after one recompression to DV avi.

If your footage is NTSC DV AVI open a new project set to NTSC DV (4:3 or widescreen as appropriate) and render to DV AVI (4:3 or widescreen as appropriate)

See how that looks.

It's doing the same thing with other projects too and has been for a while. This has forced me to go ahead and encode with Mainconcept thru Vegas when I'm done editing, even though I MUCH prefer a separate encoder like TMPGenc.

The only thing that makes a difference is when I click render as > custom > select the video tab under Custom Template > then change the video format. This varies the results, but none of them are good except when I choose 'uncompressed'. Of course this creates a GIGANTIC .avi file that I don't have room for on my drive. (1.7 gigs for a 30 second test file)!

1.7 gigs for 30 seconds? Somthing is amiss. Are you using any of the HD settings?

Devin, 1.7 gig for 30 seconds is about right for "AVI Uncompressed". Remember that DV copied from the cam to the harddrive is DV-AVI compressed at 4:1 or 5:1.

If you want to use TMPGEnc, why not frameserve to it and avoid the DV rendering step altogether?

Tony

I must be off then, but I've been a user from V-4 and have not quite had that. Most of the time I'll average around 8 to 12 gigs for every hour of capture.

DV-AVI is about 13 Gig /your (it will NOT vary from 8 to 12 gig/hour).

Uncompressed AVI is much larger.

Tony,

How in the world do I frameserve TMPGenc to my Vegas file so I don't have to re-encode?

Sounds great, I've just never heard of such a thing before.

Devin, I have to agree with Edward, DV-AVI is 13gig per hour, but AVI Uncompressed can be MUCH larger. be careful which format you render to or you'll eat up disk space and then just have a cumbersome file to work with.

Hi Brandon, go to http://www.debugmode.com/frameserver/ and download the free Frameserver and install it for Vegas. Then when you render, choose debugmode frameserver as the file type and it will create a "signpost" .avi file which you then open in TMPGEnc and encode as usual.

I do it all the time with TMPGEnc and Procoder and it works great. It sends your file one frame at a time (but very quickly!) and it even works when Vegas itself won't render a timeline without crashing during the render (which happened to me once and frameserving saved the day). It also saves using any hard drive space for the render and of course there is no quality loss.

One thing to be aware of - in TMPGEnc you need to use Cut Edit to select the last frame and cut the footage beyond that, otherwise you can end up with a very long encode!

Tony

thanks Tony - I learn something useful here every day!