Those of us who use Sony Vegas Pro, and have had to deliver Windows Media Video files share a common frustration.  Even as of version 9C, encoding of Windows Media (wmv) files are painfully slow to say the least.  Depending on the output resolution, you can expect around 4X to 6X render times.  Very annoying, because Vegas is blazing fast when rendering Mpeg2 files.  One reason is because all processor cores are utilized.  WMV rendering utilizes only a single processor core.

Recently, I was faced with a job that would require delivering over eight hours of video as WMV files.  One final render started late afternoon was still running the following morning, and not even half way through!  Rendering each hour of video would take around four to six hours each.  Instead, I chose to output as HD 720P mpeg2 files, and this did so faster than realtime.  About .8X or so.  The segments were imported into Expression Encoder, and the jobs were encoding at faster than realtime!  Even with the added step, render times were under 2X using a quad core Intel based machine!

I did try this out myself in Vegas Pro 7, and by golly, it works pretty darn well.  A number of presets are included with various looks, and settings to various parameters can be easily dialed around to your taste.  Sure, it does slow down the render time.  Surprisingly, not as much as I thought it would.

NewBlueFX Cartoonr

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.

Update… see the comment post by jellad.tarek.  He’s apparently found a way to get the Lame codec to work correctly with Vegas.

Update2….Jeff Details a different solution in his comment on 1-8-12