Video Rendering Quality In Vegas

[duraysteeus]

Hi All,

I'm using Vegas 6.0c

I notice that one of the choices when customizing your rendering options is the quality of the rendering. There's a little drop down box that says "Video Rendering Quality" and then "Draft, Preview, Good and Best." In the manual it only tells me that the choice affects the speed of the rendering.

What I want to know is: Does the quality of the video suffer? Why would someone want to use different qualities of rendering?

Thanks,
Dustin

[edDV]

I haven't tested them all but normal advice has been "good" is good enough for video. Draft would be used to get faster rendering for intermediate test encodes to evaluate composition and detect errors.

[scrappy3111]

on Sony's website is says to use good. It's hard to say how long it would take because it varies on processor speed.

[pijetro]

There's a little drop down box that says "Video Rendering Quality" and then "Draft, Preview, Good and Best."

As far as Premiere is concerned (and i'm only using this as a guideline, since they're both advanced editors), Video rendering is determined by the project settings, and nothing else..
As far as Draft, Good, and Best is concerned, this is a function strictly tied to playback..In this way, you can alleviate CPU/GPU power..
This is how Premiere gets you "Quasi realtime" playback..

[King Ghidora]

The speed of rendering with the best setting in Vegas is MUCH slower than the good setting. A test was run on another board recently that compared the good vs. the best setting. Most people didn't notice a difference on most scenes. But a few types of things there was a difference IMO. In particular any generated media shows up differently. Also photos are said to lose quality if a "good" render is done. But for most purposes the good setting is good enough according to the test. Some of us could see differences in the results but we weren't always able to even tell which was better. I strongly suggest that you try a test for yourself. There are differences but whether the longer render times are worth it is up to the individual.

[edDV]

The speed of rendering with the best setting in Vegas is MUCH slower than the good setting. A test was run on another board recently that compared the good vs. the best setting. Most people didn't notice a difference on most scenes. But a few types of things there was a difference IMO. In particular any generated media shows up differently. Also photos are said to lose quality if a "good" render is done. But for most purposes the good setting is good enough according to the test. Some of us could see differences in the results but we weren't always able to even tell which was better. I strongly suggest that you try a test for yourself. There are differences but whether the longer render times are worth it is up to the individual.

That matches my memory of tests past (without searching Google). This should apply near equally to Vegas and Premiere Pro since they are both based on the same Mainconcept encoding engine (SDK).

[guns1inger]

Sony advice for version 6 has changed. According to them, the Best setting is adaptive. It was designed originally for rendering stills and generated media to stop interlace flicker and scrolling issues. They now say that if you apply it to a timeline, it will kick in only as required, and revert to the Good settings for video only.

I have tested it on a few smaller clips, and I believe that it does a) improve the appearance of generated media and overlays, and b) is not as adaptive as they lead you to believe, as it does slow down over all rendering.

The solution is to create generated media as seperate projects, with the properties set to Best, then import these onto the timeline of the main project. This does seem to give you the best of both worlds, as the Best setting then only applies to the media you need it to, and not the entire timeline.

[King Ghidora]

To me video that had distinct objects against solid backgrounds showed up much better with the best setting. But anything that included a lot of detail looked about the same with both settings. For example a frog against a solid background looked much better with the best setting but a view of a room with several plants looked about the same with either setting. I don't think it was totally cut and dried that only generated media and photos looked better with the best setting. I did video of a football game and rendered it using both settings. The difference was very apparent because it showed distinct uniforms against a nearly solid background made up of grass. But other things it was very hard to tell any difference at all.

IMO it's a good idea to do tests with different scenes. It seems that some things do much better on the best setting but some things look the same even if you use the draft setting.

[guns1inger]

I am surprised at what you saw, only because the Best setting is in fact a soft setting. It is designed primarily to anti-alias generated media (credits, text etc), and therefore actually softens edges. The complaint in the past, pre-adaptive days, was that it softened video too much, and shoudl therefore only be used when you had generated media. It doesn't actually sharpen or improve DV footage.

[King Ghidora]

In some settings the good setting seemed to look better than the best setting. But at times the best setting was clearly better. I even set up a double blind test for my wife to do and she instantly picked the best setting as better in certain circumstances. Maybe an untrained eye just prefers a softer setting. I don't know. I make no claims of being able to consistently pick the sharper image but I will say that sometimes what others consider better I don't.

The bottom line is that I did notice a difference in the two settings. Somethings appeared better with the best setting to me but I'm far from an expert.