MP4 Playback / Flash drive problems

[sabre2135]

Hi, I wonder if any of you can advise. I recently used Sony Veg Pro to edit short movies with music tracks (7-10mins) & burn to DVD in a short space of time (normally aprox 15mins from start to the finished. rendered DVD (the rendering and burning of the DVD normally took around 4-5mins)), the emphasis being on the speed. Recently I changed from DVD to memory sticks using MP4 format as it allowed for higher resolution (1080p). However, the rendering time on Vegas was excruciatingly slow (25-30mins at best, sometimes longer). To this end I have tried various other editing software such as Power Director, Adobe Premiere Elements etc. These programs do render very quickly but the editing screen and overall ease of use was nowhere near to the standard of Vegas. An example is that the music track on the timeline is either very small (so you cannot make out the various parts of the song, or it was very large and could not be seen in the same screen as the movie track (which makes it extremely difficult to cue part of a music track with a particular part of the movie. Additionally, any movement (left or right) of the music track would throw the start of the song back to centre of the screen. Despite trying to work through these problems I found many other difficulties, such as difficulties overlapping movie clips or songs, and just cannot find another system like Vegas. Does anyone have any ideas on this?

At present I am using Movavi, which is based on IMovie (without the need to render video footage before editing it). On the face of it, it is quite a good editing program but it is very flawed and I have found serious problems with it:
1. There are only three options to render to Mp4: Good, High or Highest. Good seems to downscale the footage and High seems to upscale the footage. (I record on the Sony X3000 (MP4 1080p, 50fps). My point here is that there is no option to render it at the same quality as it is recorded in - which then causes juddering problems when played back.
2. Again, playback - Rendered using any of the MP4 formats, when played on a PC it is fine. However, played on a TV the music and audio seems to largely play out of sequence.
3. I use the MP4 format as I believe this to be the most standardised / generalised / playable format which will play on most TV's and media players, which I ideally need it to be able to do. Any advice on this too would be very much appreciated as I am finding the transition from DVD to Flash Drive a bit of a minefield thus far.

Thanks very much in advance

[jagabo]

I suspect your main problem with playback is that 1080p50 is not supported by the Blu-ray spec. So many Blu-ray players will not play it properly, even from a flash drive. Try encoding at 720p50 instead. That is supported by Blu-ray as long as you don't exceed other Blu-ray requirements (too many B frames, too long GOPs, etc.).

You may be able to find faster encoding settings in Vegas. I don't use it but I know it supports some hardware h.264 encoding by the GPU. Or you can probably find faster settings for its software encoder. That will deliver lower quality or larger files but you may find it an acceptable trade-off.

[sabre2135]

Thanks for the reply, I'm resorting back to Vegas as we speak and trying various options. That being said, basically I'm open to change editing software if anyone knows of one out there that can render quickly into a format that will play consistently on most TV's / Blu-ray players (the most common format if there is one) via flash drive. Again, something with good editing ability is required - some of these other programs I've been using are terrible.