Vegas 9, and HD hero. Loosing too much quality rendering, need help.

[carl1864]

So I'm new to video editing, but I've spent hours trying to research this before posting, but just can't find a good answer.

The PC I'm using is a quad core 3.4ghz phenom II, 4gb ram, windows 7 64 bit. Using Vegas 9 pro. And editing footage taken with a gopro HD hero. Which takes 1080P 30 fps, and 720p 60fps, h.264 mp4.

I've been experimenting with a little 5 second segment of a clip, its 720p 60fps. but every time I render it with vegas I loose a ton of quality. I've tried rendering in the Sony AVC format, and mainconcept avc and both resulted in a drastic loss of quality. For example leafless trees that I could see all the branches of before, turned into brown blobs, and rows of bolts that were clear in the original completely disappeared. I also tried rendering in avi, and it kept a little more detail but the colors were very washed out. It took a 12mb high quality file, and left me with a1gb reduced quality version. How do I know what codec to use? If I were making an mp4 theres sony avc mp4, mainconcept mp4, ex cam mp4, etc. What's the difference? Which is better? Or should I be using a different codec completely?

Then I tried tinkering with bitrates and templates and other things and ended up with double images. I tried using vlc to see what the original bit rate was, but it would always be different, must be variable or something. (I really don't understand bitrates that well, and couldn't find a good tutorial on them) . How do I know what bitrate I need to use?

Then what about the audio format and bitrate and sample rate, etc. How do I know which to use?

Theres also video rendering quality, which can be "use project settings", or "best", what exactly does this do?

Then theres profile - main or baseline. Entropy coding, and other stuff.

I've tried finding a tutorial on this stuff but couldn't.

All I want to do is just be able to render my final videos without loosing quality, and hopefully keeping similar filesizes. It seems like I should be able to just render them back to their original mp4 format, but it has turned out much more complex than that. Can anyone help?

[edDV]

Are you rendering to 1280x720p/59.94 fps ?

What are your disttribution goals? Web? DVD? Other?

Post a representative camera sample (with action).

[carl1864]

Yes, I adjust the aspect ratio and framerate accordingly 1280x720p/59.94 for the 720p files, or 1920x1080 by 29.xx fps for the 1080 files. That part I understand well.

My primary distribution goal is for high quality playback on an hdtv, and computer(I have a briteview cinetube media player that can play pretty much any format for playing on the tv, and plays the raw files fine), however I would like to also put a copy of it on youtube as well.

I'm attaching a couple raw camera samples one is a skateboarding shot in the 720p 60fps mode. Its actually a portion I clipped out of a longer video using avidemux. Since its my understanding that it clips without any re-encoding, whereas its my understanding that in vegas there is no way to clip parts out and save them without re-encoding.

The second is a clip from the 1080p 30fps mode. It isn't too high quality of a clip to begin with (bland colors, cloudy day), but its the only short 1080p clip I had handy.

[Soopafresh]

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vegas+render&search_type=&aq=f