For those not familiar with Sony Vegas, it's thought to be the geek choice for video editing on Windows. It's much cheaper than the heavyweight solutions in the industry, but at the same time very powerful and robust. Let's have a look as to what's new in its 9th version.
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Member since:2005-06-28
I believe that Vegas can re-apply all filters in 32bit when you export, even if you did your editing in 8bit. So, for speed, you can edit in 8 bit, and just before you render out, you change its project properties to 32bit. Then, you export, and Vegas will re-apply all filters in 32bit resulting in less quality loss. However, you can choose to export in an 8bit format (e.g. mp4), or a 10bit one (e.g. Cineform).
From what I know, unlike Photoshop, Vegas doesn't keep a stack of cached data in 8bit, but it re-calculates everything just before exporting. It's not real time like Photoshop is when editing. AFAIK, it wasn't like this in version 8 (it was like in Photoshop).
Member since:2005-07-07
Here's the part that's confusing me. If you're editing in 8 bit, having you already lost 24 bits of data? Then if you export your 8 bit project as 32 bit, aren't you just upsampling 8 bit data into 32 bits? In this case you won't be gaining any advantage at all since the end result is effectively an 8 bit movie pretending to be 32 bit?
Member since:
2005-07-07
It is now suggested that editing can happen in 8bit, but export in 32bit at the end -- which is what matters.
That doesn't make much sense to me. Wouldn't it be better to edit in 32 bit and then downsample the final result to 8 bit for smaller file sizes?
I don't work in video, but when retouching photos I tend to work in 16 bit and then downsample to 8 bit JPEGs when I export.