[TUTORIAL] Video Encoding & You!

[prometheus]

Copy/Paste of my thread from GENOSCOMMAND

THINGS TO ACQUIRE BEFORE COMMENCING EDITING BATTLE:
Sony Vegas Pro
The easiest editing suite you can get that doesn't sacrifice quality. It's got a really simple interface and its quite powerful. Just make sure you get a PRO version and NOT the shitty family pack platinum thing.

StaxMedia - link
This is the program you're going to be using to convert your video to it's final stage, the mkv container.
This awesome thing is straightforward and will automatically download all the necessary codecs needed to make things pr0.
HandBrake is good as well, but I find StaxMedia to be far more user friendly.

Lagarith Lossless Codec - link
This is the lossless codec you will be using to export your final avi before you put in the Stax to get mkv'd.

WHAT TO DO:
** THIS WILL TAKE LOTS OF SPACE, HAVE SOME **

1. Maek video in Vegas, then proceed to step two.
2. Once you're happy with how the video is looking export the audio. Select the entire timeframe, even if there isn't any audio. This is to make the audio file the same length as the video file (you do this for video too).
3. Render out the selected region of audio as a WAV file.
4. Render out the selected region of video as an AVI, but make sure you don't include audio AND switch the video codec to Lagarith.
5. Wait a decade to render tbh.
6. Open up StaxMedia/Rip, and plug in the video and audio in the appropriate boxes.
7. Pick yo settings then start the job and VOILA


Thats it, if you have questions about the actual Vegas/Stax settings to use feel free to ask me, but overall its pretty straight forward.
With that said, I don't recommend making a 1920x1080 mkv. Many people will have playback issues with their puny underpowered excuses for computers.
If you ARE going to do a 1080p video, make sure the profile you pick in Stax is a two-pass process.

[Takon Orlani]

Awesome! If I ever get fraps to work I may do this for my corp.

[Al Simmons]

Meight what's wrong with windows movie maker? Elitists up in my Eves, well I never.

[Anxiir]

I was wondering what you used to transcode. I tried Super©... what a piece of garbage. Used Handbrake (basically the same thing as StaxMedia) last time and its pretty damn good. I should have did a 2 pass, would have been perfect.

[Shiroi Okami]

Delicious (And helpful) COPYPASTA

[Girt]

+1

I might give this a try.

[Tordin Varglund]

After having spendt 4-5 months gathering footage and editing my first eve vid, several weeks with lolerrors and bullshit from vegas when trying to render i tried something similar like this.

Result: Vegas managed to corrupt 450gb of fraps, aka all my footage from february -> june was wasted..

Im not saying its a bad way to do it, i know it works when-you-do-it-right. Im just whining and making sure i remember why ill never touch that vegas piece of shit again because it sucks. (aka im bad).

[prometheus]

You are indeed bad, there's no forseable reason as to how/why vegas could/would corrupt raw video footage.
Vegas PRO is a great program and should not, in any way, be modifying your original footage. The only thing Vegas will do is add a reference *document* of sorts to accomodate for keyframe, thumbnail, and sound information. It's not a critical file and can be deleted whnever you want, it'll just have to cache everything again.

I recommend you set your scratch disk / temp space to a hard drive with lots of room

[Lex Fasces]

thankies prom this is awesome =)

[EntroX]

added some glue~

[Smuggo]

Maybe I'm being blind but I couldn't figure out how to render the audio and video seperately on vegas pro 9. Any help appreciated.

[prometheus]

when you do "render as", change the file type to wav to do audio.
when you do "render as", change the file type to avi, then disable the audio tab by clicking the appropriate shit in the "custom" window.

[Smuggo]

Niceone, cheers.

[haack]

everytime i render the video, it moves shit like the box to block out chat channels and stuff, fades end up fucked as well

[prometheus]

are you talking about the render from vegas or the render from staxrip?

[Yankunytjatjara]

Why rendering twice?
What video size to render to if the original is at 1280x800 - it's a somewhat weird ratio. How to choose the ratio, to avoid the text being all fucked up?

[prometheus]

Vegas doesnt render out into the *good* codecs, and the ones it does use are far more generalized, meaning I can't give you a setting to use and expect good results.
As for the second question, change your project settings in Vegas to either that of your EVE footage, or a smaller/larger resolution of the same aspect ratio.