Sony Vegas Guide

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Sony Vegas Guide
Topic Started: Jan 21 2009, 03:38 PM (154 Views)
Calindor	Jan 21 2009, 03:38 PM Post #1
No Lifer Posts: 2,406 Group: Admin Member #5 Joined: December 10, 2007	Just thought I'd post a little guide here on how to Render high quality vids with Vegas...I'm not going to get into effects or transitions or anything like that...those are more of learn as you go along type things...and there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do pretty much every effect in vegas...lots of great youtube videos aswell...but its hard to figure out how to render a video properly for video games...and you can be missing out on a lot of quality if you aren't doing it the best way. If you are using Windows Movie Maker or something like that...just stop because its garbage, and you can get Vegas for free from any torrent site. Normally it costs something like $600, and its only purpose is for video editing. When you first start it up, press file, then properties, for Template you'll choose custom, and you enter in all the info like resolution and stuff like that...it should look like this: http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/1910/37740118tb3.png Set your resolution to whatever resolution you play the game at...for example i have 1280x996...which is what I play L2 at (windowed mode with my task bar showing). Then you'll start adding your video's and doing all your effects for making your movie...but DO NOT add any audio yet...whether its music, or in game sounds...leave them out for now, this is because you're going to render your video with 2 passes, and you don't need audio for the first pass. 2 passes will give you better quality, and a smaller video size. When done doing all of the video editing and the movie is complete, you start to render. Before you do this, for the best quality/size, you need to download a codec if you don't already have it. Vegas comes with a few decent ones like X-Vid4, but the best one, and the one I use for this tutorial is x264...its the same one HD youtube uses...its open source and fairly new. You can get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/ Once that's installed, back in Vegas press File, then Render As...when the save window comes up, down at the bottom, beside Template, click Custom. When that window opens, you'll have to pick custom frame size, and enter your resolution again. In video format select the x264 codec, and make sure all other settings like like this: http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/8178/14934931dn8.png In the Audio tab, uncheck the box that says "Include Audio". Now for the codec settings, back in the video tab beside where you selected x264 in Video Format, you'll hit "Configure"...Leave everything at default, but select Multipass - 1st pass. For the bitrate, thats basically the video quality, it depends on how large your video is. 3000-3500 is really high quality and 2000 is medium. For a vid under 10 minutes I'll usually do 3000 or 3500, for a 15 min video 2500, and anything over 20 mins will be 2000 bitrate. If you don't care about size, than 3000 or 3500 is fine...in a 20 min video 2000 or 3000 is probably like a 500mb vid versus an 800mb vid or something like that. It should look like this: http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/719/95549599sa4.png Once you made all those settings, you should save that template since likely you'll use it again, and wont have to go through all of this again. Now you can save/render the video. Once the video is completely rendered, you won't be able to watch it yet...it will come up as just a blank screen if you try open it in a media player...this is because you only did the 1 pass. Now, you'll add whatever audio that you want, and once that's all done, you'll go back to File > Render As... and you have to use the same filename/location as you did before, just select the video you just made...go back into configure, this time put a check by "Include Audio", and in Video Format, goto configure again, and select "Multipass - Nth pass"...this just means any number of passes after the first...each pass you do will make the video higher in quality, but for a video game movie, there's no need of more than 2 or 3...they are all the same except the first pass is different. http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/3364/39149306it5.png And like I said, when you render it again, make sure you select the file from the last render you just did...and there you have your movie. Also its a very good idea to try rendering just 20-30 seconds of your movie first, doing both passes, just so you can check the quality of the video, and if you dont like it, you can lower or increase the bitrate. Rendering takes a long ass time to do, so you want to make sure everything is perfect before you start...Also before you render even the first time, you should go through all transitions (where you go from 1 video clip to another) and watch them in the preview window to make sure they are all perfect...cause you dont want to spend hours rendering a video just to realize you did something wrong. Hope that helps, I am nowhere near a pro at video editing, but I did my fare share of L2 movies with Vegas...also if you want to try making some cool flash style intros (not like CGI stuff...but maybe "Tempest" appearing in a cool visual way, you can get a program called CC Particle World...I don't have much experience with that, but I've seen people make some pretty cool intro's with it, and I'll definitely be using it once I start making movies for Aion.


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