Best rendering settings?

[Jessie-kun]

After restoring my computer due to a virus, I've lost my previous rendering settings, and they worked pretty well. I have horrible memory when it comes to these things. I rendered in MPEG2, and that's all I can remember.
But, that aside, I'd like to know what are considered really good rendering settings. I need VERY good quality, as I'm entering a couple amv contests, and having a 640x360 blown up on an enormous screen can destroy quality as it is, let alone what it'll look like with pitiful settings.
Any help would be appreciated.

[NS]

For my final encodes I export out of Vegas In Uncompressed AVI, set to The Higest video quality. Then I encode to MP4 with Zarxgui which you can find inside the AMVapp.

[Nya-chan Production]

Uncompressed .avi in lagarith, with the Best setting chosen. Other than that it's all set by your project, there's no point in upscaling if you edited in 640x360 all the time.

You better just edit in higher resolution, 480p (848x480 and 640x480) is kind of minimum standard today.

[kickass331]

vegas has a more compatible and industry standard professional H.264 Codec built in. If you have H.264 Professional encoder, such as CoreAVC on your PC, Vegas will detect it. Use that at level 4.2 at your projects settings with correct framerate and progressive scan. 3mbps should be optimal.

[Nya-chan Production]

vegas has a more compatible and industry standard professional H.264 Codec built in. If you have H.264 Professional encoder, such as CoreAVC on your PC, Vegas will detect it. Use that at level 4.2 at your projects settings with correct framerate and progressive scan. 3mbps should be optimal.

So in one sentence Vegas has a codec built in and in the other you need professional encoder installed?
Does not compute.

Also, the internal encoder in Vegas, while not fail completely, can never be up to date and stuff. AND 3mbps is ridiculously large when you don't even know what is the guy's frame size, in 480p 1500kbps is usually totally enough unless it's some super-high-speed action.

[kickass331]

vegas has a more compatible and industry standard professional H.264 Codec built in. If you have H.264 Professional encoder, such as CoreAVC on your PC, Vegas will detect it. Use that at level 4.2 at your projects settings with correct framerate and progressive scan. 3mbps should be optimal.

So in one sentence Vegas has a codec built in and in the other you need professional encoder installed?
Does not compute.

Also, the internal encoder in Vegas, while not fail completely, can never be up to date and stuff. AND 3mbps is ridiculously large when you don't even know what is the guy's frame size, in 480p 1500kbps is usually totally enough unless it's some super-high-speed action.

I mentioned CoreAVC since the built in encoder is outdated, and I said 3mbps because I do 3mbps since I fucking hate even a single block or 1 frame that has banding. It's a personal thing. You can encode to MPEG-2 and convert to H.264 but I use CoreAVC Professional since Vegas doesn't recognize x264.exe builds or xvid builds, I also get DivX Professional. Also, I always use Vegas Professional, even if a newer version of Vegas is out. For audio however, I mux in a lossless or lossless -> AAC transfer right from the CD. I import in vegas as FLAC, (8.0 supports it and probably 9.0) and then I export as AAC 320k, ATRAC 352k, or PCM, and sometimes FLAC if the option is there, whatever is most reasonable.

[Nya-chan Production]

Yeah, and I again ask - why encode straight when you can render and then encode and get better result? No problem with banding at all, unless you fuck up majorly. All that you need is more time |:

I am talking about Pro all the time.

Why do you use flac, btw? Nothing against it, but why bother with flac and not feed it wav directly?

[kickass331]

Yeah, and I again ask - why encode straight when you can render and then encode and get better result? No problem with banding at all, unless you fuck up majorly. All that you need is more time |:

I am talking about Pro all the time.

Why do you use flac, btw? Nothing against it, but why bother with flac and not feed it wav directly?

it's called efficiency. WAV takes up more space than flac or wavpack, Lossless takes up more space than MPEG-2, encoding is about compression. From now on my source files will be made with the latest H.264+ encoder from H265.net, self-compiled. That way I can put useful files on my harddrive like lolicon, which, by the way, I do not transcode and get in PNG when possible. also music, like Danger Doom FLACs. Ape is not very compatible, and WavPack isn't as popular or mainstream as FLAC, muse, shorten, true type, etc. are all defunct, yet I use foobar2000 to transcode those to FLAC or WavPack if I'm not utilizing them in Vegas.

[Nya-chan Production]

it's called efficiency. WAV takes up more space than flac or wavpack, Lossless takes up more space than MPEG-2, encoding is about compression.

(the rest is just you boasting, so I omitted it)

Not that much and you can lose quality or make mistakes in that process. Also saying someone cares about space with today's prices of HDDs (most of editors I know have TBs of space) is nonsense.

[kickass331]

it's called efficiency. WAV takes up more space than flac or wavpack, Lossless takes up more space than MPEG-2, encoding is about compression.

(the rest is just you boasting, so I omitted it)

Not that much and you can lose quality or make mistakes in that process. Also saying someone cares about space with today's prices of HDDs (most of editors I know have TBs of space) is nonsense.

lose quality? FLAC is Lossless, PCM is Lossless, FLAC Compression levels are for optimizing in silence and low waveform amplitude. PCM is not an Adaptive encoder, it is linear. Also, I generally prefer FLAC because it sounds cooler and is open source. And so what if the space you save is negligible, Whenever I archive material, I put it in non-solid ultra inefficient 7-zip containers that take 10 times longer to open and only open with 7-zip. Why? Because of distribution purposes. Sure, physical media is rarely limited, but cloud and infastructure media relies on efficiency. If youtube streamed lagarith, do you think millions of people would go there every day? I think not, for client/ server bandwidth, storage, decoding, upload time, and in addition transcoding the lossy uploads into futile lossless streaming videos. The information age is defined by the amount of data complexity you can preserve. Codecs were designed with the intention of efficiency as the very top most priority. this applies as well in commercial industries such as broadcast television, in fact interlacing was developed for efficiency, and interlacing is one of the most discussed topics on AV forums universally. That's my bowl of nachos.