Novice Vegas Video User Question

[RKelly]

I am new to Vegas so please bear with me in answering my question. I have some footage that I have joined and edited in Vegas and want to render as Mpeg II files so I can use it with a DVD authoring program and make DVD's out of the footage. The video footage has all been captured from my Mini DV camcorder via the Vegas "capture video" function and therefore are all .avi files. In Vegas, under "Render As" I select Main-Concept Mpeg 2 and DVD NTSC. The problem is this seems to take about 55 minutes for a 4 minute and 20 second clip. I am using a P4 2.53 ghz computer with ~750 ram. I am not running any other programs while encoding. Is this a normal time for it to render? Is there another program I can use which would be faster, but achieve the same results? Should I just render as an .avi file (much quicker) and then use a program like TMPGEnc (or similar) to encode it to Mpeg II, or would that degrade the quality of the footage? Your advice (as always) is appreciated!

[nwo]

I am new to Vegas so please bear with me in answering my question. I have some footage that I have joined and edited in Vegas and want to render as Mpeg II files so I can use it with a DVD authoring program and make DVD's out of the footage. The video footage has all been captured from my Mini DV camcorder via the Vegas "capture video" function and therefore are all .avi files. In Vegas, under "Render As" I select Main-Concept Mpeg 2 and DVD NTSC. The problem is this seems to take about 55 minutes for a 4 minute and 20 second clip. I am using a P4 2.53 ghz computer with ~750 ram. I am not running any other programs while encoding. Is this a normal time for it to render? Is there another program I can use which would be faster, but achieve the same results? Should I just render as an .avi file (much quicker) and then use a program like TMPGEnc (or similar) to encode it to Mpeg II, or would that degrade the quality of the footage? Your advice (as always) is appreciated!

That about right for vegas it's very slow doing any encoding, and it get's even more slow if you add
Magic Bullet.

[guns1inger]

Tmpgenc would generally be slower encoding to mpeg-2 than just about any other encoder.

As to why it is taking so long . . .

1. Are you doing a single pass encode (CBR or one-pass VBR) or two-pass encode ? A two-pass VBR encode will take twice as long.

2. Have you applied any video effects (filters - colour correction, brightness/contrast etc) to the video ? If so, expect it to slow down the render - even worse if it is a two-pass VBR encode.

Mainconcept is a reasonably fast encoder (not as fast as CCE or ProCoder under most circumstances, but far faster than Tmpgenc), so I suspect it is filters causing the major slow down you are seeing.

You could try rendering to DV-avi, then encoding with something else (HCEnc is good and free). If it renders slowly then you know it is the filters. If you haven't applied filters then Vegas will smart render the original DV-avi (i.e., only re-encode what has changed).

[Bjs]

Nope , I think you have something funny happening there , but if you threw a few filters into the equation , then its going to take its time about it .

Even my dell latitude D610 laptop (P3 1.2g cpu + 256mb ram) can render 33 minutes worth in under 3 hours , without filters applied in sony vegas .

[RKelly]

Thanks for the advice everyone. Couple notes: I am not running any filters. The only changes I've done to the video is cutting and deleting segments I don't want. Gunslinger: In terms of single vs. double pass, how does one know if that's occuring? I didn't even know this was an option, and as far as I can tell I can't find this option in Vegas. I always assumed it was single pass. I'll try to use a program like HCEnc, but again I pose the question....does this degrade the quality of the video?

It's time like these I wish I had a new computer....

[guns1inger]

HCEnc will degrade the quality no more than the built-in mpeg-2 encoder. Any lossy encoding will degrade the quality to some degree. If done well, no-one notices.

When you render to mpeg-2 and select the Mainconcept DVD NTSC option and then click on the custom button you get access to the encoder settings. Here you can change bitrates, resolution, type of encoding etc. You need to become very familiar with these settings if you want to get the best out of your video.

[LOWTECH]

Your ram maybe your problem, my friend has simular set up with 2gb of ram 1 hour rendering about 2.5 hours TO MPEG 2.... rendering in PAL.

[RKelly]

ok thanks for all the advice. I was also wondering about the ram, as my system is a bit outdated these days. Before I go all out and buy/build a new system, maybe I'll try an upgrade there......