Need a little help with Sony Vegas and Divx

[1Wolf]

Hello,

I've got a little project I've been attempting and I'm running into some problems. I wouldn't even rate as a "novice" for video editing and such so I'm feeling a bit lost and was hoping maybe someone might chime in and offer a bit of help.

In order to explain what I'm attempting to do here, I think its probably best if I give you a bit of background on my project...so please bear with me...here goes:

For many months I've been using FRAPS to do video captures of game-play for a video game. FRAPS captures up to 30 second clips to some sort of *.avi format. The game runs in a window and, on my screen with my video settings, it runs at 1920x1150. My desktop resolution is 1920x1200, but the video game window is slightly narrower to allow for Windows Task Bar at the bottom...thus the 1920x1150 resolution.

I've needed to store up lots and lots of these 30 second captures over a great deal of time so that I have alot of material for my editing project. The problem I was having was that these FRAPS *.avi captures had large file sizes (around 500 MB a piece). The initial dilemma I had was a means to somehow compress them down, while still retaining as much quality as I could and without changing the resolution.

Previously, some other very helpful folks helped me come up with a solution for this. I puchased a registration for the Divx Codec (I believe it was like Divx 6.8.5) and used Virtualdub to compress it. What they had me do was create a batch job to create a multipass compression job with Virtualdub. They had me create two sets of "compression parameters" within Virtualdub. The first set was for the first pass of compression, and I would run the first pass of compression in Virtualdub with Divx using that initial set of parameters. Then, I would set VirtualDub and Divx to a second set of parameters that was for multiple passes. I found that creating 5 passes made it so that the 5th file generated was small enough and retained the right amount of quality. So then, I'd only keep the file that resulted from that final pass.

This worked wonderfully. It reduced my file sizes down to about 20 MB from 500 MB, I was able to retain my 1920x1150 resolution, and I wasn't able to discern much quality loss at all. When playing the original with the compressed version side-by-side, they appeared identical.

Well....I've been doing that for a while now and I have a ton of those Virtualdub/Divx compressed clips to choose from to begin editing together my project.

My wife has Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum version 10 which seemed like it would be perfect for what I'd like to do.

What I wanted to do was to start taking scenes and shots from the various files I've stored, edit them together with some scene transitions and maybe some text and that sort of thing. I'm really a novice at this so what I'd like to do is pretty basic.

So, to experiment, using Sony Vegas I brought in just one of my stored virtualdub/Divx compressed *.avi's as project and I just dragged the whole thing to my tracks. I wasn't going to do any editing or anything, just an experiment to see if it would "render" properly.

I've run into some problems I just can't seem to figure out.

I don't need or want to re-compress the video at all. In the end, I'll just want to take the raw footage, edit it, and have it spit it back out again in the original format. Its all already been compressed with Divx and Virtualdub following the steps above so I don't want to do that again. For my experiment, I'm just trying to render out the same video that I imported for my project with no changes or editing at all.

I've tried a bunch of different options to do this, and the thing that 'seemed' right to me based on what I've read on the internet was to set the Media Properties for my project to those of the original movie and then to render the video uncompressed.

First off, I can't seem to figure out how to make Vegas keep my original video resolution of 1920x1150. There are options for "Custom Frame Size" but every time I enter 1920x1150....it seems to default that to 1920x1080. Then, if I somehow get it to seem to "keep" my custom frame size, when i render the video, it ends up as 1920x1080.

Second, the video that is produced just does NOT play right. It plays as if its in slow motion. It literally looks like the entire thing is in slow motion.

I've been researching and experimenting with this for days now and figured its time I cut-bait and ask for some help and advice. I figure that I can't be the only person that would attempt something like this....to a novice like me, it at least seems that it would be common for folks to want to store a bunch of stock footage compressed and then edit that footage together into a project without compressing it further and keeping all the quality and the resolution of the originals.

I've done the best I can to explain, hopefully this made at least some sense

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you might offer!

Thanks!

[aedipuss]

the size you've chosen 1150 is not acceptable to most video formats. most would like a number divisible by 16 or at least 8. yours in not even divisible by 4. from now on i'd record your fraps at 1920x1080 to make working with them easier.

divx is an end format for playing and not capable of editing and saving out again without re-encoding. as for the slow motion i'd guess the framerate of the source was over 30fps and the output was created at 30fps without discarding frames. please use mediainfo on a source file in text mode and post the results here.