Help needed with post production - editing, encoding and internet sharing

Hi everyone,

I'm a new video virgin with a Canon 60D. I'm having some problems in these areas, and was hoping that some of you could share your workflow and tips on how to have high quality video to share on the interwebs.

1. I am using Vegas Pro 10 which has trouble viewing the H264/MOV files that the 60D produces. My frame rate drops to 1-5fps and it's next to impossible to trim with any accuracy. I learned that I should convert them to an easier format to edit like AVI or M2TS. I've tried that and it works. But I'm wondering if there is a drop in quality due to the conversion?

2. After putting the clip together, I would like to share them on the internet. What encoding options should I use? My source files are 1080p/30fps. I have tried encoding as a MOV file (and also Sony AVC/AVI and lots of other combinations) and a 16 minute video came up to be 2.7GB which is too large for sharing on facebook and youtube.

3. I am now using Vimeo plus, but the quality from the stream isn't as good as it was from my encoded file. Is this because of the extra encoding that Vimeo does? How do I get the better quality when using Vimeo? I see "blocks" in the Vimeo video that I don't see on my source files and also on other properly done Vimeo files from other users.

Here's an example of a short video from my trip that I recently created using the steps above. Thank you in advance!

http://vimeo.com/21191139

[vimeohd]21191139[/vimeohd]

1. I am using Vegas Pro 10 which has trouble viewing the H264/MOV files that the 60D produces. My frame rate drops to 1-5fps and it's next to impossible to trim with any accuracy. I learned that I should convert them to an easier format to edit like AVI or M2TS. I've tried that and it works. But I'm wondering if there is a drop in quality due to the conversion?

1-5fps is very low. What format (codec) exactly are you converting to and what program are you using to do it? Other Vegas Pro users are using Cineform .avi, Sony .mxf or native .mov for Canon dSLR footage in Vegas. See this thread.

2. After putting the clip together, I would like to share them on the internet. What encoding options should I use? My source files are 1080p/30fps. I have tried encoding as a MOV file (and also Sony AVC/AVI and lots of other combinations) and a 16 minute video came up to be 2.7GB which is too large for sharing on facebook and youtube.

 

3. I am now using Vimeo plus, but the quality from the stream isn't as good as it was from my encoded file. Is this because of the extra encoding that Vimeo does? How do I get the better quality when using Vimeo? I see "blocks" in the Vimeo video that I don't see on my source files and also on other properly done Vimeo files from other users.

Make sure "Full Resolution Rendering Quality" set to "Best" in your project properties.

If you use a Sony AVC template such as "Internet 1280x720-30p" it shouldn't be too bad, but set the bitrate 11,000,000 (just overtype it, it works) which will actually deliver about 8,000,000.

You could also try MainConcept 2-pass variable bitrate and set average to 8,000,000 and maximum to 50,000,000. This is probably very slightly better than Sony AVC.

If you really want the web best quality and are prepared to put a bit of time into setting things up, I have just written a guide that covers how to do exactly that. It uses Lanczos3 resize and the superior x264 codec. If you use it, please let us know how you get on.

Also, this should be in the editing forum. Maybe a mod could move it?

Vimeo settings:

Codecs

H.264 / AAC

A codec is the format in which your video will be encoded. Different codecs have different features and varying quality. For best results, we recommend using H.264 (sometimes referred to as MP4) for the video codec and AAC (short for Advanced Audio Codec) for the audio codec. If you're on a Windows machine, WMV3 is a good choice for video codec.

Frame rate

30 FPS

If there is an option that says "current," it is best to just go with that. Otherwise, this is usually 30 fps (frames per second) for USA, Canada, and Japan, while in Europe and rest of the world it's usually 25 fps. If there is an option for keyframes, use the same value you used for framerate.

Data rate

2000 kbits/sec (SD) / 5000 kbits/sec (HD)

This setting controls both the visual quality of the video and how big the file will be. In most video editors, this is done in terms of kilobits per second (kbits/sec or kbps). Use 2000 kbits/sec for standard definition 4:3 video, 3000 kbits/sec for widescreen DV, or 5000 kbits/sec for high definition footage.

Resolution

640x480 (SD) / 1280x720 (HD)

640x480 for standard definition 4:3 video, 853x480 for widescreen DV, and 1280x720 or 1920x1080 for high definition. If you have the option to control the pixel aspect ratio (not display aspect ratio) make sure it's set to "1:1" or "1.00", also sometimes called "square pixels."

From: http://vimeo.com/help/compression

A 2-3 min video usually comes out at about 90Mb for me. I used to use the Apple TV format straight out of MPEG Streamclip (free), now I use the Premier Pro preset for Vimeo.

I tried various NLEs for my 7D. In the end all were inferior to Premiere Pro CS5. With the mercury playback engine it's awesome, and with the GPU hack and a NVIDIA GTX460 I'm getting brilliant playback/effects with no transcode to other formats. It was killing me transcoding to avid or similar simply to edit.

The video card was the best invest I've made in a long time, but you can even get cheaper ones that give the same GPU acceleration capabilities in CS5.

Nick, thanks for the very helpful information.

The 1-5fps I was referring to was the playback of the MOV file in the Vegas trimmer. Even in Quicktime, the MOV files stutter on playback.

I suspect I might need more RAM, so I'm going to go get 8Gbs of RAM and run Win64 to see if it will make a difference.

When you say

Other Vegas Pro users are using Cineform .avi, Sony .mxf or native .mov for Canon dSLR footage in Vegas.

Does it mean I will have to convert the native MOV files to one of those formats? What's a good converter? I've tried MPEG streamclip, but I've read that it's not very good for converting MOV to avi.

Thanks again for your help

Here is what I do.

Old computer here still, 2008 - Quad 2.4 gig - Win 7 64 bit with 3 x 22 inch LCD's.

Import raw 7D or 60D or just about what ever into EDIUS bin.

Edit the raw files and build my timeline in real time at full resolution.

Render out a MPEG 2 @ CBR of 15mbps file and a few minutes later load to Vimeo.

Here is one I did with HDV 1440/1080 50i footage

http://vimeo.com/22187355

Rendering out MPEG 2 files is much faster than a heavily compressed QT H.264 ones and easier for the servers to convert once loaded.

Does it mean I will have to convert the native MOV files to one of those formats? What's a good converter? I've tried MPEG streamclip, but I've read that it's not very good for converting MOV to avi.

As others are successfully working with native dSLR footage in Vegas Pro 10 with a full framerate preview, I'm wondering what it is that is giving you such a low framerate. Firstly make sure you're following these guidelines that are quoted from John Meyer's post in the Sony Vegas Pro forum:

1. Match project properties exactly to your source footage. Use the "match" feature to do this. Failure to have these settings correct is the biggest reason for slow timeline playback.

2. Don't use higher preview resolution than necessary. Use Auto instead of Full, and use "preview" or "good" instead of "best," especially when smooth timeline performance is more important than being able to see every last detail.

3. Turn off "scale video to fit preview window." This doesn't make a huge difference, but it helps.

4. Make your preview window smaller.

If you find you still need to convert to an intra-frame format to get full framerate preview, here are a couple of good options...

You could buy Cineform Neoscene and capture/convert with that. You can buy it for $99 from Videoguys.

But another option that might work well is to convert the native dSLR footage over to the free Avid DNxHD codec. This is an intra-frame Quicktime (.mov) codec that is truly cross-platform and avoids the gamma shift issues of other Quicktime codecs when files are transferred between PCs and Macs. It's a really great codec. Download it from here. Make sure you get the 2.3.2 version there and not the older 2.2.1 version which is easy to click by accident.

I don't know if MPEG Streamclip can convert to DNxHD after it's installed, but instead you could batch-convert clips to it right inside Vegas Pro. For this I would install the Proxy Stream 1.5 script. I've batch converted thousands of clips to .mov using that script.

There are a few flavours of DNxHD, so you have to make sure you use the right one. They're accessible under the Quicktime render options in Vegas Pro. If you're not sure which one you would have to use but you would find the answer by searching the official Vegas Pro forum.

And finally some users are using the Sony MXF codec, which you could also batch convert to with Proxy Stream. But I think I would use DNxHD first.

If you need more help I would ask for it on the Vegas forum or the Vegas forum at dvinfo.net.