I see most people online that put up trailers use .mov. I don't know if that is because they use FCP or not but most video I view are H264 .mov's and they look really good and load fast.

I was wondering if there was a way in Vegas to render an H264 as an .mov. I know I can render as an mp4 but when I do that and upload it to a server for people to stream it wont play; I am guessing that is because of the file extension. I think the mp4 is hard to play for most video players unless your using something like VLC.

I know their are a TON of threads about the best way to render for a streaming video, but what do most of you Vegas users do when you want to render a high quality, fast loading video on your web page / server?

While most of what say you have seen is quicktime, actually flash is by far the most common method of web delivery of videos (think youtube, etc.) then windows media player, then quicktime. I might be mistaken, but I feel pretty sure that is the order they fall in.

I personally use a mix of wmv files (windows media files) and flash files (.flv). I like the look of windows media files much better than flash, there is a significant difference in quality in my opinion. Colors are sharper and brighter with wmv files, and I have read it has to do with the method of compression that flash uses.

If you use dreamweaver, flash files are much easier to utilize as Dreamweaver CS3 has built in skins for flash players it can embed directly onto your pages.

To render quicktime there is a template in Vegas, so no problem, same for windows media player.

However for flash, if you edit in Vegas only, you must render in .avi (uncompressed setting is best, but files are large) then convert to .flv via another tool. Sorensen makes a tool to do this with, or you can use Adobe CS3 flash converter, part of the Adobe Flash program. I personally use Adobe Flash CS3 for converting video to flash.

Another route to go is to use Premier, which will render directly to flash setting of your choice, or you can use Adobe Encore to do the same thing.

In Vegas, H264 is known by its other name... Sony AVC.

Its in the MPEG4 rendering options, and essentially compresses the vid to open in a Quicktime wrapper (If that makes sense)

The hard bit is judging the bitrate. It works out to get the same 'quality' as MPEG2, go for half the bit rate. So if your MPEG2 is at 8mbps, use 4mbps in H264.

But it still does not look as good. Motion is juddery.

My best results are with WMV, using a bit rate of 750Kbps and a size of 640x480 with audio no less than 192kbps.

Ben

I will stick with .wmv for now then. Thanks guys.