Codec transfer--Sony Vegas

[Carlton Rahmani]

I recently acquired Sony Vegas 7 as an upgrade from my previous consumer-grade editor. One problem I quickly discovered was that Vegas doesn't do well with importing AVIs--I found out it's a problem for a lot of people who have Vegas--that I get from one of my cameras, and have stored on my hard drive.. (It's a pretty crappy digicam, with 640 x 480 resolution, I think; but I like it for it's uber-portability and ease-of-use, and for some of the cheesy 'effect' its low-tech nature provide.)

To compensate--and even though it can be a little cumbersome--I have taken some of these AVIs and imported them into my old editor (Magix Edit Pro 14, just fyi), then exported these into mpeg-2s, which Vegas can recognize.

But here's a couple of problems:

As an experiment, I went through this process, and what happened was an avi of 1.23 megabytes (it's an extremely short clip) was exported as an mpeg-2 of 2.14 MB. And trying other codecs only result in even greater increase of file-size--but that's besides the point.

What am I missing out on, here--particularly considering the fact that mpegs are a form of compression which I presume are supposed to also result in a reduction of file size?

Another concern for me is preserving as much as I can of the original avi's fidelity. . .so I'm curious to know if, through transferring to mpegs this way, am I also losing some of this fidelity, given that I am COMPRESSING the video, even though the result is a file of a larger size?

The cumbersomeness and worry with all this is becoming a daunting factor that I'm trying to get over. . .insight, referrals, whatever would be appreciated.

Thanks.

:blink:

[Peter Moretti]

Carlton,

 

AVI is a wrapper, not a compression scheme. So just b/c the file is an AVI does not mean it's uncompressed. And in you case, it almost certainly is, since as you pointed out the files size increased when compressing it to mpeg-2.

 

There is a free program called GSpot that will tell you what codec a file is compressed with.

 

Vegas actually works quite well w/ AVI's (well compared to how it handles MOV's). I believe Vegas 7 came with a free copy of Cineform, which is a very good codec.

 

 

HTH ;).

[Carlton Rahmani]

Carlton,

 

AVI is a wrapper, not a compression scheme. So just b/c the file is an AVI does not mean it's uncompressed. And in you case, it almost certainly is, since as you pointed out the files size increased when compressing it to mpeg-2.

 

There is a free program called GSpot that will tell you what codec a file is compressed with.

 

Vegas actually works quite well w/ AVI's (well compared to how it handles MOV's). I believe Vegas 7 came with a free copy of Cineform, which is a very good codec.

 

 

It's still boggling to me. . .Vegas will work with certain AVIs, but others, like the one of my crappy digicam, aren't showing up. What's unusual is that my old consumer editor (Magix) can still import the videos--which I will then re-render as something Vegas can read (it's all on the same computer--but it's a cumbersome process, and the Why this is the case remains a mystery for me.

I've been working on a group project with videos rendered off of other NLEs. . .couldn't get any of the video from a Quicktime HD, even though I can work with other quicktime media. Conclusion I came to is that there has to be some embedding of the codecs, including their available sizes, in order to get it work with your own NLE, whereas before I thought that there was a standard established that made ALL digital media readable by the professional NLEs. (If I'm wrong about this, correct me.)

Eh. . .short from getting any answers, I went ahead an purchased Burt Waggoner's "Compression for Great Video and Audio", and am hoping this might give me some real insight into the matter.