Sony Vegas rendering problem. Movies get much larger than estimated.

[Night-Blade]

Hey everyone.

I'm new to editing but i think i'm doing okay already.
I tried looking over the forum for an answer but i couldn't seem to find any.
If there are then i'm sorry for the extra post.

Now for my questions/problems.

I recently started recording world of warcraft videos using Fraps.
I then use Sony Vegas 8 to edit and render the movies.

I record my videos in a resolution of 1280x1024 and i also want my movies to be in that size.

My first problem is that when i drag the recorded files into Vegas it doesn't include the audio.
I know that the sound is included cuz it is there when i play the uncompressed files.
I don't know why the sound isn't included. If someone have an explanation, then plz tell although it is not as importent as the next question.

The main problem occurs when i want to render the movie.
I've read here and there that for what i'm doing i should render the movie in either AVI or WMV
My problem is that the files are much bigger that other videos out there.
As i wrote earlier my vids are 1280x1024 the lenght is about 10 min long.
Now i've compared my movies with other WoW movies with the same resolution and they are much smaller even though the are longer.

ex. one of my movies are 10 min long and has a size of 1GB
compared to a movie of 13 min and a size of 450MB.

I rendered that movie with the following wmv V9 settings:
Quality VBR; 29,97 FPS (Same as recorded)
and quality set to 79%

I can't get AVI to work either. If i render in one of the predefined resolutions it works fine except that the resolution gets fucked.
If i then change the resolution to 1280x1024 then when i play the movie i just get a black screen.
Besides that the movie doesn't get compressed so it is several GB in size.
The funny thing is that i have seen WoW movies which was encoded in AVI but still in 1280x1024
so i don't get why it doesn't work for me.

It may just be that it is I who suck at choosing the right settings but as i said I'm rather new to this.
I hope someone has a solution for me and again if someone has already answered something like this then i'm sorry for the extra post.

ps. If some info is missing, then just let me know and i'll see if i can post it here.

[Baldrick]

What audio codec does fraps record in? Identify the audio in an avi with mediainfo or gspot.
What video codec are you choosing when you export to avi?

And if you want smaller output file size you must lower the quality settings or lower the video bitrate and audio bitrate.

[Night-Blade]

Well when i open one of the recorded files in gspot it says the following about the audio.

0xfffe (Extensible wave format)
48000Hz 4608 kb/s tot (6 chnls)
Codec NOT Installed

Which to me sounds strange since i can play the uncompressed video files in both Windows media player and VLC player and there is sound in both players.

As for the AVI codec... there really isn't that many choices for me to take if i want a resolution of that size.

Uncompressed is ofc not a good choice since the end result will be too big.
Then there is the NTSC DV and PAL DV none of which allows me to change the resolution.
Then there is the Sony YUV and Sony 10-bit YUV they don't work either. Filesize becomes much to big.
Then there is Microsoft Video 1 i't wont even start too render when i use that one.
Same goes for the Intel IYUV codec.
Then there is the Fraps Video Decompressor. For obvious reasons that wont work either.
Then there is a DivX 6.8.3 YV12 Decoder. Not working either.
Again a DivX codec (same version) cept this one says 2 Logical CPU's. Not working either.
Then i have a Cinepak codec by Radius. Don't work either.
Last but not least i have a XXX which doesn't really work either. It does render the audio but there is no image.

I've tried everyone of them cept for the NTSC DV and PAL DV. There were no reason to seeing as how i couldn't change the resolution.

So now u know what i have tried. A little excessive though but i wanted to be sure that i had them all in 1 list.

[BJ_M]

If render outputs not working -- re-register vegas with sony ... not properly reg'd ...

WMV V9 is ok for what you want to do -- set project properties to same as render output (size wise and frame rate) that you want..

fraps is not an editable format for vegas - nor is it an 'uncompressed' format as you indicate ..... you will have to convert the audio at the least to wav files ... mono channels x 6 or 3 stereo channels .... or just downmix to stereo

[Night-Blade]

fraps is not an editable format for vegas - nor is it an 'uncompressed' format as you indicate ..... you will have to convert the audio at the least to wav files ... mono channels x 6 or 3 stereo channels .... or just downmix to stereo

oki my mistake. It was my impression that videos recorded by Fraps was uncompressed.
Especially with the huge size of the files.

oki. any suggestions on how i shoudl do that?
What program i should use?