Sony Vegas 9
I have banged my head against a wall over the audio problems with XVID encoding in Vegas for quite some time. If you came across this article by the way of a search, you’ve probably read other articles about audio encoding issues with DIVX and XVID in Vegas. You might have even tried a suggestion or two. Perhaps you have even installed the LAME MP3 codec. Let me save you some time, and tell you that high bitrate MP3 audio is simply not supported in Vegas.
Why not just use another video codec? AVC is pretty widely supported after all. The reason is simple. XVID (or DIVX) with MP3 audio, is possibly the most efficient codec(s) for the AVI container ever developed. Among other reasons, I have a Samsung bigscreen that will play these files directly. A great solution for quick customer demos.
There is a workaround. It’s not ideal, but at least it wont cost you any more money. First of all, you’ll need to grab a copy of VirtualDub. If you’re not familiar with this tool, you should be. Simply render your video in vegas with as an AVI video with the XVID codec. Choose PCM lossless for the audio codec. In the video menu, choose “Direct Stream Copy”. In the audio menu, choose full processing mode, and then choose compression. Choose “Lame MP3″ as the codec (you did install this earlier didn’t you?), and choose your preferred bitrate. Then choose “save as AVI from the file menu. That’s it!
In spite of this limitation, I’d still not trade Vegas for any other NLE.
5 Responses to “Sony Vegas and XVID (or DIVX) enconding with MP3 audio”
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Seems like a lot of work. Why are you using mp3, are you importing audio tracks?
I’m not importing audio into Vegas itself. The audio in this example comes from the video clip. MP3 is one of the standard audio codecs used by both DIVX and XVID. You can however output an XVID video with uncompressed audio. This undermines the whole point, as the resulting file size is quite large.
The point of this process is to end up with the smallest file size, and the highest audio quality.
But why doesn’t Sony support such a popular combination of codecs?
Ironically, Vegas supports more video and audio codecs on the timeline than just about any NLE. I suspect the answer is that in this case, it was probably had to do with rights to the mp3 format.
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