Could use a piece of advise on this topic. I've been struggling for sometime to get high quality renders (for computer playback) exporting via Vegas 7. I've tried .mov and .wmv and though both look "OK" none of them are crystal sharp like I see so many others videos here look and how my HDV source material looks while previewing it from within Vegas.

It's become recently apparant to me that I might need to use an external encoder such as ProCoder, etc.

My problem with this is that it would require me to export my timeline from Vegas 7, and then recompress with the secondary encoder. That obviously doesn't make a lot of sense so the only way I think it'll work is if I export my projects as an uncompressed .avi file.

Does anybody have any suggestions on accomplishing this? I've tried a few different varities in the render settings with very limited success. Whenever I try to playback the "uncompressed" footage, the video quality is quite poor with lots of interlacing issues and even some cases of odd pixel aspect ratio's going on.

I wouldn't think exporting uncompressed within Vegas would be that difficult on the computer essentially creating 30 independent pictures of 1920x1080 source material for every second of video.

What am I missing?

Any help is greatly appreciated...

Jon

try project settings, hdv 1080 60i, then try render as, mainconcept mpeg-2, template, hdv 1080 60i

Won't this simply recompress my original file again into an HDV file? And then, won't the external encoding software not read this as an uncompressed file, but an HDV file?

What exactly are you trying to do with the final output file ? Do you want it compressed but look good ? Do you want it uncompressed ?

When you tried wmv, did you experiment with the different bit rate templates ?

I'm just looking for very high quality online distribution. So if somebody says, "Hey, can you send me some of your work?". I can either email them a 20-30 second clip that's a reasonable file size or FTP a 150Mb clip that might be 4-5 minutes worth of good video.

Yes, I've gone ALL over the .WMV settings and though I've yielded some very good results at times, the file sizes are always disproportionately high relative to how long the video is (i.e., 30 second video - 40 megs, etc).

I've seen lots of video's posted here that have the look and file size I'm trying to acheive. Most of the time they seem to be in the .mov format but often times they are .wmv as well.

The latest thing I'm looking into is H.264 encoding. I want to try the trial version of Cyberlink's MediaEncoder H.264 AVC and see what that yeilds me but to do that, I need to figure out a way to export my timeline projects in a manner in which they are exported very cleanly with no additional compression applied.

Jon

There is an AVC encoder in Vegas that outputs high quality .mp4 files. All you need to do is set the profile to baseline, render in 720p, experiment with the bitrate and you've got a high-quality .mp4 ready.