Yet another which HD codec post

[Chris Longley]

I want to render some stuff at 1920 x 1080 using Sony Vegas. The files won't go to optical disc but will play from my computer's hard disk to my plasma via HDMI.

Is there an existing thread (I've looked but couldn't find) that discusses the merits of the various codecs.

Vegas has a bewildering array of Sony and Main Concept codecs. The videos will be mainly photo slideshows (so not fast action sports)

I've used Vegas for donkey's, but have never had to render anything other than Standard Def DV and MPEG-2 for DVD.

Can any of you guys give me a starting point?

[steve]

What is the source material of your edit coded with?

Steve

[PaulD]

Hi
The Apple TV solution for hard drive>large TV is H.264 (as a QuickTime movie) - which gives the best bang for the bandwidth-buck.
And is a parallel solution to the H.264 of Blu-Ray disk>large TV.

[steve]

Chris,

I assume that you will be using a 'normal' PC for playback, so playing MPEG4 based coded video is quite a heavy load. If the footage is rendered to an MPEG2 file, most modern PCs should have no problem playing it smoothly. Try Vegas's 'Blu-ray 1920x1080-50i 25Mb/s video stream to create .m2v files.
The reason i asked about the source material coding is that if it is 1440x1080 resolution (as in HDV or some recorded broadcast video) then there's no point in recoding it to 1920x1080 as the eventual quality can only be worse. In other words, keep it the same, and if possible, avoid recoding, (size, frame rate and codec). 'Re-wrapping' footage (such as converting from transport stream to programme stream) does not present any degradation problems.

Steve

[Chris Longley]

Thanks Steve and Paul

Source material is digital camera stills (so in excess of 1920 wide, but Vegas project settings of 1920 x 1080 then stills are cropped and/or panned on the timeline), other source material from Autodesk 3DS Max rendered natively at 1920 x 1080.

Thanks to both of your suggestions I've saved a lot of time.

I also realise now that a lot of the codecs that I can see in both Vegas and After Effects are just different implementations of H.264, I've settled on Main Concept and I'm tweaking different things. Now need to read up on the Main, Baseline and High Profiles :(