Does Sony Vegas Lower the Quality?

[Drabaz]

When you render a video into .avi, .wmv, or whatever does it lower the quality of the video file you're using as bad as Windows Movie Maker does?

I just did a lot of editing on a short clip and instead of having a million video tracks for the short clip I was hoping to save and render that short clip so that it's just one video and will only take up 1 video track. But if that clip will end up being of lower quality than the rest of the video, I don't think it will be worth it.

By the way I'm using Sony Vegas and making an AMV......obviously

[VegettoEX]

It has nothing to do with the program... it has to do with the codec you're exporting into.

I have never used Vegas before, but in Premiere (and After Effects, and VirtualDub, etc.) you can select which compression setting you want to use in the export settings. If you don't want to lose a single thing, use either HuffyUV or Lagarith (both of which come as a part of the AMVapp). Also make sure you're exporting to the same frame rate, window size, etc.

[Eclipse]

No, definitely not. WMM exports only into wmv as far as I'm concerned. You can play around with the settings to give your encode a higher quality, but that's about it.

Now, Vegas (which I use) has a wider range of codecs to use. Loseless codecs (like Lagarith and Huffyuv) are good if you want to retain quality, which is what you should save as when you finish your AMV (Then you use a program like VirtualDub to compress to a smaller format). But as long as you use the right settings, your video should come out looking as good as your original footage themselves.