Out to x264 (build 270) from Vegas 6.0b? Problems...

[jlafferty123]

Hi,

Long story short, I'm looking to output HD content (progressive intertitles and animations) to small(er) files without losing too much quality. I'm going from Vegas to an FCP studio with this material, and so I'm transporting it as either HD Quicktime files (targa) or hopefully h.264 (as per the client's request.)

I've done some frameserving from Vegas to Nero Recode at their highest BR, and some of my titles look a little questionable -- bigtime banding in gradients. I don't have a plasma screen here to really give the stuff a good once-over, so I figured I'd bring it to the studio and look at it on their equipment. I wanted to give x264 a try, given the questionable performance of Recode, so I could fit a few of these titles on a single layer DVD, but from Vegas it's simply not working.

I've tried all three output choices (single pass - BR; single pass - quant.; multipass). All the "Advanced" setting have so far gone untouched. They all give me an error:

"The selected codec does not support the current render settings"

I'm using 1280x720 progressive material, going out to 24 or 30p progressive (tried both), MOS.

For those of you with Vegas, here are the .veg and .PNG files used in the project.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

- jim

[Soopafresh]

I'd use a lossless codec like Lagarith instead of x264 or h264 for your purpose. It's very efficient and stable.

[jlafferty123]

Thanks for the reply -- sorry I haven't written sooner, I was out of the country for an extended weekend.

OK, can I use Lagarith inside QT?

- jim

[celtic_druid]

x264 actually offers a lossless mode. Problem is that Vegas, etc. aren't really designed for use with codecs like x264. Also I never got around to adding all the features to the VfW version. You would be better off saving to a lossless file as suggested and then using the cl app to convert. It offers direct mp4 output to.

Don't think that there is a largarith quicktime plugin. Don't think it will handle lossless AVC either though.

[Soopafresh]

Whoops. I didn't read the original request well enough and skipped the part about FCP. Lagarith is a PC codec. Never mind my original suggestion.