What am I missing here?

[Richard Davidson]

I am a total newb with this and had a good workflow for our kids sports videos using Handbrake. I now have a Sony CX560V camera which shoots 60p and I am trying to figure out how to keep that detail and not convert it to 30p since Handbrake does not do 60p. Can I do this with Vegas, it seems like I can but for the life of me I have not been able to figure it out? Any ideas as to workflow would be very helpful.

I am trying to end up with a MP4 or similar file in the end, something that can be played on a computer and that is smaller than the file size I start out with. Right now I am shooting basketball so there is lots of motion and I am just trying to make it as good as I can.

Thanks

[Jeff Harper]

Just change a 60i template to 60p.

[Jerry Amende]

In HandBrake, choose Framerate=Same as Source. That will allow you to render to 60p.

...Jerry

[Jeff Harper]

Because Vegas will render the footage natively to the same frame rate as the original footage, why would handbrake be necessary at all? I don't get it. If he's not resizing and/or deinterlacing?

I render original 720 60p footage to bluray weekly, the results are stunning. Vegas 10 and 11 both even downsize to 480p perfectly fine, and my DVDs look amazing. Maybe I'm missing something here.

[Jerry Amende]

Jeff, You make a good point. HandBrake excels at deinterlacing (yadif) & resizing (Lanczos). However, it also uses the X264 codec which produces superior quality for a given bitrate vs MainConcept or Sony AVC.

Reference: Sixth MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison - Short Version

and, HD Video for the Web - Guide for Vegas Users

...Jerry

[Jeff Harper]

But if you are rendering to an identical frame rate and dimension, I highly doubt their would be a significant difference, and if there is it wouldn't be noticeable.

[Jon Shohet]

Jeff,
In my experience, if you are encoding with high bitrates, and your source footage is well-exposed, it's harder to find noticeable visual differences between encoders.
But if you need a low bitrate encode, or have to deal with dark/grainy source footage, x264 is very noticeably superior to MainConcept.

[Jeff Harper]

That's nice to know. If his footage is grainy maybe he's better off.

[Alen Koebel]

Originally Posted by Jon Shohet

Jeff,
In my experience, if you are encoding with high bitrates, and your source footage is well-exposed, it's harder to find noticeable visual differences between encoders.
But if you need a low bitrate encode, or have to deal with dark/grainy source footage, x264 is very noticeably superior to MainConcept.

+1
I see a noticeable difference between the two encoders even with 16Mbps encodes, which some people may or may not consider low bitrate for 1080i H264. And that's when starting from well-exposed 28Mbps 1080p. Maybe I'm just picky. Sony's AVC encoder is even worse, IMO.

[Jerry Amende]

At the risk of repeating myself (a common problem when you reach my age - [grin]), the link I posted above: HD Video for the Web - Guide for Vegas Users demos a comparison of renders via HandBrake, MainConcept & Sony AVC - all at the same bitrate. I believe HandBrake is the clear winner.

...Jerry

[Tom Roper]

Just to add a thought to Jerry's comments and links, Handbrake is really good for web videos in particular because it accepts a wide range of input file types and returns m4v/mp4.

If you need full control with forced frame rates, pulldown, flagging progressive as interlace or other Blu-ray tunings, film tunings, working with 10 bit 4:2:2, just point out that the underlying command line core used by Handbrake, x264.exe is available separately for Windows 64bit OS, and accepts not only the aforementioned DNxHD but also in 10 bit 4:2:2, but not only that also accepts native XDCAM 4:2:2 mxf input files. So rather than being constrained to inputting large uncompressed frameserved AVI files into avisynth or virtualdub to get at those available filters, we use Vegas instead to apply its own filters and code to 10 bit 4:2:2 DNxHD or XDCAM for final render as h.264 using the x264 command line encoder. Your script is just a text file containing the file names and selected x264 encoding parameters that you copy and paste to the command line.

I really like 220 mbps 10 bit 4:2:2 DNxHD as a virtually lossless intermediate format for grading, or if no grading was necessary then Vegas exports no-recompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 mxf that is read directly by x264 without an intermediate step, Neat!

Those plus the aforementioned Blu-ray compatibility and frame rate tunings are a few of the things you can't do when the Handbrake API is used as a front end for the x264 encoder. Handbrake is still a great learning tool to jump into x264.

And except for Vegas, everything is free!
Jerry's links should take you to Avid where you can download the free DNxHD codec. You will also need Quicktime 7 installed.

http://x264.nl/
http://www.x264bluray.com/

[Jon Shohet]

Another option, which is mentioned in Jerry's link, but is perhaps worth mentioning here as well is MeGUI
MeGUI | Free Audio & Video software downloads at SourceForge.net
which allows extensive customization of x264 settings without the need to use the command line directly.
It works fine with 64-bit windows even though it's a 32-bit program.
I really like it for it's great Avisynth integration, audio and muxing options and render queue.

Tom - You are not constrained to uncompressed AVI with Avisynth and VirtualDub. With the right input filters set up you can open pretty much any format, including QT.

Avisynth is still limited to 8-bit as far as I know, so I'm not sure if MeGUI supports the 10-bit version of x264, considering it relies on Avisynth to load the video.
But if you don't need the 10-bit support it's a great option IMO.

[Tom Roper]

Originally Posted by Jon Shohet

Tom - You are not constrained to uncompressed AVI with Avisynth and VirtualDub. With the right input filters set up you can open pretty much any format, including QT.

Thanks Jon for the correction! If you take that approach, why use Vegas? Also, I think you only need 10 bit x264 to render 10 bit output. The 8 bit version will read 10 bit input yuv but convert to 8 bit output, which is fine for Blu-ray etc.

[Jon Shohet]

I think you are right about the standard x264 accepting 10-bit input, but since Avisynth processing is limited to 8-bits you will not benefit from 10-bit intermediates when using Avisynth/MeGUI.
(There are some plugins written to add high bit-depth support http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/High_b..._with_Avisynth, but I have never tried using them).

However there are still advantages to using Avisynth filters over Vegas filters, so my point is you don't have to necessarily render an uncompressed AVI out of Vegas if you want to use Avisynth, you can use practically any lossless/visually lossless format.
I usually render to CineForm out of Vegas/Premiere and then do all my h264/mpeg2 encodings with the aid of Avisynth.

[Phil Lee]

Hi

Originally Posted by Jerry Amende

At the risk of repeating myself (a common problem when you reach my age - [grin]), the link I posted above: HD Video for the Web - Guide for Vegas Users demos a comparison of renders via HandBrake, MainConcept & Sony AVC - all at the same bitrate. I believe HandBrake is the clear winner.

...Jerry

x264 is much better at difficult scenes (as used in HandBrake), and I've seen numerous examples where other encoders have struggled but x264 has been true to the original.

With something like MeGui, when it comes to making a Blu-ray or AVCHD compliant video there isn't much you can tweak without potentially breaking compatibility, so while it offers access to lots of stuff, often you shouldn't be tempted to tweak if your aim is a compliant video for a particular format, just stick to the template they provide.

Regards

Phil