I am currently working on a gaming "frag highlight" video. My objective is to put some slow-motion effects at some interesting parts of the video. I attempted to use Sony Vegas 5.0 to do the slo-mo as I heard it was one of the best programs for that purpose.

I was playing around with the program (first time using it) and this is what I produced so far for one clip. I used velocity envelopes (slow parts at 24%) to create the slow-motion and also made supersampling 2x at the slow parts. I uploaded the video so click this link to check out what I did (only 1.34MB), http://s88274840.onlinehome.us/test.zip .

Two problems however:

1. The slow motion parts arent really "slow", instead it feels like lag. It's playing frame by frame which is NOT what I want. What I want is to play certain parts of the video slowly and smoothly like you see in sports replays.

2. The quality of the video is relatively garbage and the size is an enormous 4.15MB for only 14 seconds! I rendered the movie as an .avi using the DivX 6.0 codec at 640x480.

I really have no idea how to fix problem 1. I was told to add supersampling but it seems like there's no difference with or without it. I was also told to record my gameplay at a higher FPS (this one's using 60) but there's still no difference (used 30 before).

What can I do to create better slow motion effects and get better rendering quality with a smaller file size?

I've had this problem before. - Any video if you slow it down too much will start to lag or jitter as if playing frame by frame. The best solution is to slow it down to a point thats smooth, render that off, bring the rendered clip back in and follow the same process untill you get desired effect. - It can be long winded but you can get things super slow but super smooth.

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Won't the quality degenerate each time then? I mean, you saw my sample video already, it's hard to see anything in it :\

Right - I just had a quick look at the test vid.
First off - Camputers I believe use progressive frame rates - The video rate changes to get the best performance so it can be running at 40fps one second then 15fps the next. This may affect the out come but it depends on how you are captureing it. - If you are capturing it at a constant 25fps then you should be fine.
Assuming this is the case try the following - It's a slow process but should do the trick.
I tried this with a bit of video myself - With your original source use the Velocity envelope to bring the speed of the movie down to 70% and no more and render. Then do that a few times and it should be lurvely.
Once you get down to a certain point it will start to jitter - No way round it.

The proper way to do slowmotion is to capture at a stupidly high frame rate - When you see those nature programs thay have careras that run arounf 400fps - so when played at 25 its smooth.

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Thanks.

What should I render as everytime? I'd like to use 640x480 but Im not too clear about the settings. DivX 6.0 or XviD MPEG4 codec? Draft, preview, good, or best quality?

Until you have it nice and smooth render as an AVI and use the Vegas preset: DV PAL. - This is all uncompressed aviso there should be no compression quality loss.
Once you have yhe desired speed render it as you like

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