Song Vegas Video Capture MPEG quality setting

[jim cornetet] "I'm pretty M.A.D. at Sony for not setting the default to as high as possible."

Why would you be mad at Sony? They set it to a reasonable setting between speed of render and quality of the video. 15 is a good setting for most video.

You can make the same argument about the project preference for full-render quality. The default is Good but it also has Best. Unless you are resizing large still images, you don't need Best which is why Good is the default.

Just because every knob goes to 10 doesn't mean it's best to set them all there.

[jim cornetet] "Question: whats the difference when you set this setting to 31 instead of 25?"

Why don't you render two videos at those two settings and see if you can see any difference. if you can't the Sony engineers were right... you only needed the lower setting.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

after further research I come to find out that this setting is for analog video capture. since I'm using IEEE1394 Firefire, the firewire capture "supposedly" captures the video off my miniDV tapes bit-for-bit.

as to the question of why shouldnt I be happy with the middle-ground Sony Engineers have set up....

I can understand wanting to back down some settings in order to render a project quickly so you can see the project for errors. But I dont understanding why settings arent max'ed out.

As a fictional example: How would you feel after 12mos of driving your car you could have got 32mpg instead of the 24mpg you have been getting if only you changed a setting on your dashboard? from some setting from "average fuel economy" to "high fuel economy". I trust my car's mfgr has already max'ed out my fuel economy.

To me it only makes perfect sense to have the settings max'ed with the ability to choose lower if needed.

I think it would be good practice for Sony to have ALL their hidden and obsure settings max'ed out in case someone didnt have the knowledge to know the difference. i'm a vegas user since vegas4.0 and i was two years into video editing before I even knew there was a difference between the render set at Draft vs Preview vs Good vs Best. I felt bad for all my customers who i rendered projects at the default "draft" render quality that Sony made by default. I was embarrassed I didnt know to max it out at "Best" render for best video quality. Here all along I thought I was providing teh best video..

Well, every one will have a differing opinion on this matter. I'm jsut glad to know that you CANT trust default settings that you must look at every settings to make sure to max it out right before that last and final render....if you want the "best"