How do you render your video in 720p HD (1280×720 dimension) in Sony Vegas Pro 12? Today, I’ll be showing you how to render your videos in 720p HD quality, using a custom rendering template and settings to produce excellent video quality and also optimize the final product for YouTube uploading. Also, I’ll be showing you how to change slight settings to help reduce the video file size for a very small and almost insignificant decrease in video quality!
Make sure to follow the easy-to-follow video tutorial embedded below to ensure that you are following the correct procedure to render your video!
- The first step we’re going to take, is to actually make sure that your project is saved as a .veg (Sony Vegas Project) file in case you want to come back and work on your project further, or change anything. To do this, what you need to do is go to the File drop down menu at the top left corner of your screen, and simply click Save As.. . Now, enter a name referring to your project (e.g. – “My Video Project”) and click the save button. *(see end of post)
- Now that we have our project backed up, we’re going to want to Render it. Now, go to File , Render As. You’ll now see a window pop up with two drop down menus, “Save as Type:” and “Template:” .
- Firstly, lets start with the “Save as Type” drop-down category. Click on the drop-down menu, and select “Windows Media Video V11″ , it should be towards the end of the list.
- Now we’re going to move onto the “Template” drop-down. This section is slightly more complicated, so we’ll split it into more steps, keeping it simple. However, we’re not going to choose a pre-made template, in fact, we’re going to create our own custom 720p HD template! To do this, we need to select a random .wmv pre-made template and click the “Custom” button besides the Template category !
- Once you click Custom, another window will open up. Here, the template is split up into Audio, Video, Bit rate, Index/Summary and Project. We’re going to be going through each of these with custom settings, so make sure you read carefully!
AUDIO TAB:
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Audio
Attributes: 64 kbps, 48 kHz, stereo (A/V) CBR
VIDEO TAB:
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Video
Image Size: Custom – 1280×720
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.00
Frame Rate (FPS) – 30
Video Smoothness – ~90-100
BIT RATE:
Internet/Lan: ~ 4M – 8M
(The higher your bit rate, the higher quality your file will be, but also the size of the file increases with bit rate.)
PROJECT:
Video Rendering Quality: Best
You have now successfully created a .wmv 720p HD Custom template for your videos. If you want to render your other videos with these settings, instead of trying to remember all of these settings again, you can simply go to your File > Render As, select .wmv from the first dropdown menu, and NOW on the second drop down menu for “Template”, you can find your custom template under the name you saved it as, eg, “720p HD Video Template” !
*IMPORTANT NOTE:
(One common misconception is that when you Save your file using File > Save As.., you are now ready to play it back or upload it to the internet. However, this is not the case. This creates a .veg file, which is only accessible in Sony Vegas, as a project file. To make your clip playable you need to RENDER it, this is explained at STEP 2 above!)