Hi, as you can probably see I'm new here, as I am to DV editing and Vegas!

I'm having considerable difficulty rendering video at the moment, and I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on the situation.

I have a 20 minute .avi that I would like to use the first 2 minutes of, so I opened it up in Vegas, cropped it to the desired length and went to render. At first I used the default settings, which landed me with a 49.2GB file!

Since playing around with the settings I've managed to reduce file size to 4.2GB, then 1.4GB-still huge for a 2 minute clip. This is the first problem-I'll (hopefully) be making considerably longer videos in the future, with more effects/transitions/sounds etc. and the sort of space they look to occupy I simply can't afford.

The second problem is equally bemusing; when playing the rendered videos, video and sound appear for a fraction of a second, and give way to silent darkness for the duration of the video.

Any help with either of these problems would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Hi Rob, and Welcome,

Sorry about this but we're going to need a lot more info. Exactly what settings are you using? "The default" is not enough - is this default avi uncompressed, avi PAL/NTSC? etc etc. Also what was the source footage from? - cameras produce 720x576 or 720x480, software gmaking movies from games can make frames many times bigger than this.

Be aware that if you're rendering as uncompressed avi this results in MASSIVE files. Even so, by my calculatuions your 42.9GB file is about 25% too big even if you rendered the whole 20 mins (assuming camera footage)

Anyway, let's not speculate. More details please!

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Tim

You're going to want to go to File -> Render As and play around with different codecs. I'm assuming from your post that you don't know what codecs are. They basically compress footage by losing clarity. Some do this better than others. If you're a Mac user, many go with .mov (quicktime) codecs, if you're a windows user, .wmv is the codec for you. There's a whole world of codecs out there, some swear by some.

Once you've chosen a codec, you want to tell Vegas which type of that codec to use. For youtube I use a variation of the 512k wmv codec. For general viewing, I use 4.8mbps codec. For DVDs, I use uncompressed AVI.

Hope that helps.

That might confuse. I presume you mean as an intermediate file. Video DVD uses MPEG2 which is much more compressed than uncompressed DVD and still more compressed than MiniDV. Unless you plan to do something different you're wasting tons of space by rendering to uncompressed avi.

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Tim

With so many options it is easy to get confused.

If you are editing dv, render a dv copy for keeps - I usually do a interlace and a deinterlace version.

I then use the deiterlcae version to make a 1mbit wmv for webcasting / u tube upload.

If I make a dvd I recompile the interlaced dv version in dvd architact.

I only render other tyoes if specifically requested.

There is a guide to wmv compression wot i wrote in the 'guides ' section - seetab up top.