Sony Vegas

[Dichotomy]

 

any hints, tips, work arounds, etc to ensure good film and sound quality would be greatly appreciated

[JOACH1M]

Lepape showed me this very helpful When your done


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6FEniyaqqQ

[Dichotomy]

Thanks bro that was actually very informative and could have saved me an hour or two earlier. 

[BoilerDown]

I'm still buffering up his second video, but two things I didn't agree with from the first video:

You don't need to keep it at 30 Frames Per Second in the render.  15 FPS looks practically the same and will cause the file to be half the size, which means it buffers easier on YouTube or is a smaller download if you're making a file available for people to save on their hard drive.  A video looks much better with a higher resolution and a lower framerate for the same size file.  I've actually done some experiments in my WoW videos, and they look ok down to around 12 FPS, under that gets a bit too low.  I prefer to keep it around 15, or perhaps render in both 15 at medium quality and 30 at high quality and offer both versions for download.  

One additional note, you'll want to know what framerate you originally captured your video at, and use something that is an easy multiple or division of that rate, or else Vegas has to interpolate things, and I find it does that poorly.

The second thing he got wrong is that you only need the Vertical dimension to be 720 for YouTube to give the HD link.  The Horizontal can be anything, it does not need to be 1280x720.  1200x720 or 960x720 work fine.  My WoW videos typically used 1152x720 because that is 2/3rds of my computer monitor resolution.

[Krusty]

The difference at 15fps can be picked up quite readily and the difference between 15 and 30 fps is worlds apart. Heck you can even spot a bit of difference between 24/25 and 30 fps.


The issue with dropping down to 15fps is it looks stacatto, it looks choppy. It breaks you out of the immersion. In absolute need for saving space/bandwidth it works fine, but when that's not an issue (such as with streaming video sites with plenty of both) why hurt the quality of your work that way?

[BoilerDown]

The difference at 15fps can be picked up quite readily and the difference between 15 and 30 fps is worlds apart. Heck you can even spot a bit of difference between 24/25 and 30 fps.


The issue with dropping down to 15fps is it looks stacatto, it looks choppy. It breaks you out of the immersion. In absolute need for saving space/bandwidth it works fine, but when that's not an issue (such as with streaming video sites with plenty of both) why hurt the quality of your work that way?

I realize you just post for postcount++, but...

First of all, this is nothing like framerates in-game, other than they use the same unit of measure.  In a video 15 FPS does not look staccato, choppy, or whatever you want to call it, whereas in a game it most definitely would feel choppy.  In a video its fine and its a great way to reduce filesize by half.  The OP asked for Sony Vegas tips, and this is a great one.

As an example, in this video the author elected to use a "standard" high FPS, but then to keep the filesize down rendered the video at a high compression and low resolution.  If instead he had cut the framerate to 15 and increased the quality, the video would have looked 4x better.  Lowering framerates should be in anyone's "bag of tricks" for video making with Vegas, particularly if you're concerned with download size.

[BoilerDown]

I did a little test now that all but one of my summer classes are over.

Screen resolution: 1680x1050.

Fraps capture settings: 30 fps, full-size, hide mouse, record sound, force lossless, version 3.4.5.

Film Viewer settings: 1/4th speed with varying external views, full screen, 1024 textures, most but probably not all other settings maxed out.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.0 Platinum render settings:
Save as type: Windows Media Video V11 (*.wmv)
Video: Quality VBR, Windows Media Video 9, Image Size custom (either 1152x720 or 1728x1080), Frame Rate: 15 or 30 fps, Seconds per keyframe 3, Quality 97%, Pixel aspect ratio 1.0 (square).
Audio: Quality VBR, Windows Media Audio 9.2, VBR Quality 98, 44 kHz, Stereo VBR.

The audio was done in one run-through in the internal view with the video muted, the video you see were all done in multiple run-throughs with various external or chase cam views captured at 1/4th speed and sped up 4 times in Vegas, with the audio muted.  Much of the challenge was in mating the video to the audio.

The test involved varying the Image Size or the FPS.

Here's 1728x1080 at 30fps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjc01DZfjNk
Here's 1152x720 at 30fps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyp_U6r3yw
And here's 1152x720 at 15fps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-vTioD9Ejw

One thing I learned is that capturing in film viewer at 1/4th speed and the compensating in Vegas by speeding up the film 4x didn't work perfectly, the audio recorded at real time was slightly faster than the video.  And in Vegas you can't speed up the video by more than 4x.  So I had to constantly swap views and fudge things in order to make the video match the audio.  In certain scenes I let the video be ahead of the audio in order to simulate the speed of sound for distant explosions.  I tried not to let this happen for anything happening close to my aircraft.

So next time I guess I have to capture with film viewer set to 1/3rd or 1/2.  The problem is that I couldn't get it to register a perfect 50% on the slider, but I could get 25%, but I guess there still was some rounding error at 25% or else it would have matched up perfectly.  I wish they'd let you type in a value, sliders in general suck for this kind of thing.

[Krusty]

I realize you just post for postcount++, but...

Boilerdown, keep the insults to yourself, please.

I said what I meant and I meant what I said. I have some experience with a number of different programs. 3D animation across several software packages, Flash animation, countless non-linear editing exporting of WMV, MPG, AVI, and other file formats. Even way back when I was just animating GIFs.

When I say 15fps is choppy I'm talking about playback, not in-game.


Your link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-vTioD9Ejw

It's choppy. Just looking at it. It looks like when people try video capture on slow low-end systems and each frame is a jump from the previous, rather than a smooth motion. There is a noticable improvement to the 30fps link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyp_U6r3yw

The problem is that unlike true film you cannot adjust the SHUTTER when you slow down the FPS rate. On film, if you slow down the fps you can still get motion blur in any individual frame of the footage. When played, they are slower but they make up for it by bridging the "jumps" with the motion blur.

You don't have that in digital media. Some 3D animation packages can do it, and when you do it gives very nice results. As far as Aces High footage and Sony Vegas, I don't think it's possible. Because of that 15 fps is choppy.

If you're concerned about poor compression, you should also be concerned about poor fps. You cannot reduce file size without some loss of quality. You can choose whatever area you want to sacrifice to keep the file size down (or just find a host that allows more storage?), but if you cut the FPS folks will call you on it. It can ruin the enjoyment of video playback because it pulls you out of the moment. It makes you aware of the medium. I believe that's called breaking the 4th wall. Things can look bad as long as they play smoothly. That is my experience. It applies to more than just video compression, too!

[Zeagle]

I tend to agree with Krusty on this one. Having experience rendering with Blender (which CAN do motion blur) and Vegas, FPS needs to be high.
Playing around with different compression algorithms and sizing can generally get the file size to where you want it. FPS is factor as well. It's all  trade-off. But I try to keep my FPS high (like at least 24-30) and trade-off the other stuff.

[guncrasher]

you guys do realize that we you "chopiness" has a lot  to do with your computer also.  if your cpu/vc is getting maxed out there will be stutters and that will show up on your video.  video editing takes a lot out of your puter and if it cant keep up then there will be problems.  so if somebody posts that at 1/3 it's better than at 1/4, that mostly applies to his/her computer.  so take that as advise to make it work on your own pc.

I can record with fraps while playing the game with everything on at 4096 shadows.  it makes some fricking jumbo size videos  , but I play with full fps and every once in a while there will be a stutter.  of all the things it only happens while up in the air, not at tree level which would be expected.

semp

[Krusty]

Gun, there's a difference between the playback choppiness and the recording.

One is intentional, done in editing.

He's saying you can take a 30fps file smooth as silk and cut it back to 15fps in the "export" to save file space. Technically he is correct and in some instances this works. In full video playback with gameplay action, it is not ideal and hurts more than helps. (IMO)

The end result makes it look like a hardware issue (where you get low fps in-game) but it isn't really related. 2 different things with similar results.

[grizz441]

I get some significant choppiness when I am playing back films in the film viewer, whereas my game play is completely smooth.

[Krusty]

Might be worth a post in the technical forums, if so. Should be less of a strain than running the game.

[grizz441]

Rgr

[JOACH1M]

I get some significant choppiness when I am playing back films in the film viewer, whereas my game play is completely smooth.

You can lower the play back speed allowing for some glitch effect to be removed, the lowest I'd go would be .95 without notices a slower effect