Smart rendering

[James Donnelly]

Just spent half an hour looking in to this, but drew a big blank. Maybe someone feels like helping a beginner.

I would like to employ a process which will enable me to top and tail my original footage without re-rendering.

I know this question has been asked over and over for different formats, but I can't find an answer for the Quicktime container files generated by the 550d.

I use Vegas Pro 9, which I presume I would need the facility to encode Quicktime to get it to do smart rendering. I hope/presume there are ways to achieve this, as it would reduce my archiving headaches without overly stressing my patience/quad core.

I took a quick look at Womble, but the site doesn't mention 1080p/quicktime/h264.

Thanks!

[Francois Lacasse]

Hi James,

How about doing it inside the camera?
It has the basic top and tail editing ...

[James Donnelly]

Useful in the field for the odd bit of space saving, but painfully slow if you have lots of clips to do.

I find it a shame that the in camera feature is so limited. What would be nice is if you could use the thumb wheel to skip forward and back in the video.

I hope I'm wrong, but I have a feeling I'm going to need do drop some dollar on Quicktime to do enable me to do this. I'm guessing that if the VFW Quicktime codecs show up in Vegas, it will then support smart rendering.

[Justin Chen]

Sorry for taking so long, I actually found this thread 10 days ago, and whenever I find a thread asking something that I just spent a long time looking up and finding an answer well I try to be helpful and register just to answer. However it took 10 days for my registration go to through anyways..

I actually have a t1i and I try to record my lectures which are longer than the maximum clip length so of course i have to stop and record and i don't have larger than 4gb sd cards anyways..

I found out for the video you can at least use this program called avidemux
Avidemux - Main Page
the steps i followed were basically
File>open: your first clip
say yes to any prompts
file>append: your second clips
say yes to any prompts
i'd change audio to aac
and video to mp4

i don't know much about codecs, but i did learn that because the t2i/t1i uses vbr encoding it would have been difficult to add clips together, but this should work for similar clips, i hope

[James Donnelly]

Thanks for that.

Since asking I have worked out that Virtualdub does smart rendering, and it is awesome.

The only thing is, it doesn't open the t2i quicktime files. But that's fine as I now transcode everything to Cineform.

I still can't get Vegas to smart render anything, despite following the documentation.

[Justin Chen]

Oh, that's interesting how do yo use virtual dub for that and how does it come out

another thing about avidemux is that the audio might be unsynched afterwards..

[James Donnelly]

Originally Posted by Justin Chen

Oh, that's interesting how do yo use virtual dub for that and how does it come out

What I was trying to achieve in the first place is a way to trim individual clips without having to re-render them, and this is what I've been able to do in Virtualdub.

Before opening the files in Virtualdub, I transcode them to Cineform with Neoscene. You can then set the range of the clip you want to preserve by dragging the markers in the preview window, choose direct stream copy from the video menu and then save as AVI.

Because there is no rendering, it saves almost instantly, and there is no loss of fidelity.

I find it fairly ordinary that a product that costs as much as Vegas Pro 9 has such patchy support for smart rendering.