Stitching videos with no compression

I'm hoping you folks can help me with a problem that has vexed me off and on for over a year. I apologize for the lengthy post but I wanted to be clear with what I was aiming for.

Here is what I'm trying to do: I record PC game footage @ 1920x1200 using an application called FRAPS. It uses a near-lossless codec. The recorded video is broken up into ~4 gig files.

What I do currently is to have Fraps encode all my day's recordings overnight (h264.) The next day, I use VDub to splice the encoded files together into ~30 minute segments.

What I want to do is use Sony Vegas 11 to add an external audio file (commentary) and do minor editing. I'd then like to save these movie files uncompressed and encode them via Virtual Dub using h264. I then upload these videos to YouTube for my fellow nerds to watch.

The problem is that I cannot figure out how to save the video uncompressed in Vegas. In VDub, all I would need to do would be to set both Video and Audio to "Direct Stream Copy" and save as an AVI. I've read tons of various suggestions and everything I've tried in Vegas either ends up with a huge file (3-4 gigs for 1 minute) or unacceptably low quality.

The end goal is have the closest to source video quality possible with a reasonable file size. Encoding time isn't a major concern as, ideally, I could do all my editing in one go and then set VDub to encode all of them overnight.

Any suggestions? Or am I going about this all wrong?

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for the feedback. I did some tweaking and am using the AVC with some custom settings. This seems to work pretty well. The only thing I'm not crazy about is that it cannot output a 1920x1200 video. Since I record at that resolution, that is what I'd prefer to output to. Is this a universal limitation, or just something Sony does with Vegas?

Thanks again for your help!

When I try to do that, it gave me an error. I'm not at home right now so not sure what the exact wordage is, but it basically said that Vegas could not output to a resolution higher than (I think) 1920x1080. I have the trial of Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11.

Movie Studio HD does not allow projects or renders larger than 1920x1080 so you are stuck if you need 1920x1200 (16:10 instead of 16:9). However, it will allow you to import video and stills larger than 1920x1080. Vegas Pro allows larger frame sizes but they are normally only used for cinematic post-production.

1920x1200 is not a standard HD format anyway (it would probably get pillarboxed on TV or youtube/vimeo/etc playback), so you might be better off either cropping the footage (unless that chops off your game's status/OSD panels) or setting your game resolution to 1920x1080 and aspect ratio to 16:9 instead of 1920x1200 and 16:10.