Best video format to use in Sony Vegas?

[xPiikanyaa]

Okay, so I've been searching for a good format to use in Vegas Movie Studio 9. At the moment, I'm using the old WMV videos I used in Windows Movie Maker, but the quality is crap, so it's time to use a different format. Which is best for using in Vegas? I need something that has fairly good quality, dosen't have to be perfect but needs to be good. Don't say .AVI or .mp4 because they don't work! I can watch them in Windows Media Player but when I drag them onto the timeline, only the audio track shows up, so it's no good. I can't even import them into Movie Maker to change the format to WMV. Please help!

[Kariudo]

There is a difference between (container)format and codec. Xvid-encoded stuff in the .avi container won't work (technically it can, but it is a very bad idea.) Lagarith encoded footage in .avi on the other hand will work.

What you are looking for isn't a container so much as a codec. For editing purposes, you want to be editing with losslessly encoded footage (done with a lossless codec, such as lagarith or huffyuv.) There are other editable codecs that aren't lossless, but lossless is just that...you don't lose any quality.

Lagarith and Vegas are best friends

Be aware that lossless=big, you don't want to encode entire episodes losslessly unless you have a lot of free space (and time) on your hands (a single lossless dvd ep at 720x480 is about 2-4 GB)

lastly, Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides Lovingly Overhauled Largely by Zarxrax</a>. The amvapp should have everything you need and the guide goes over how to do footage prep, project/render settings and encoding for distribution

[Mastamind]

.AVI or.mp4
In all seriousness, avi is usually the best to work with, one of the reasons is because most all editing programs support it. Don't tell me vegas doesn't take avi files. You might just have a codec like h264 or divx which vegas has trouble with. And in the end when you do get around to using avi, use lagarith as the codec. Big files, but perfect quality
aw kariudo pretty much summed up my post
oh well.

[xPiikanyaa]

I downloaded an MKV file to see what the quality was like (I'm not gonna use it in my AMV, don't worry) and it's got the best quality I've seen, but it dosen't work in Vegas. Would it still be high-quality if I converted it to a different format, or would it lose quality?

[Kariudo]

That depends on what codec you used to re-encode that mkv.
Lagarith = Lossless = quality doesn't degrade
xvid = lossy = quality degrades

at any rate, the quality would degrade after you export from Vegas when you encode for distribution

[royportal]

That depends on what codec you used to re-encode that mkv.
Lagarith = Lossless = quality doesn't degrade
xvid = lossy = quality degrades
at any rate, the quality would degrade after you export from Vegas when you encode for distribution

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Ahaaaa Now I get it.