Media import/export specs

• "Modern" media specs
• "Legacy" media specs

"Modern" media specs

This is my current "media spec" that I use with Blender (since that's all I use these days).

Reference footage usually I get off of yt-dlp. They might be in webm, which is fine (except, I think, in 2.79), but when I process these with other sources I render it out as an MP4.

I process the sound track separately, usually with Audacity. I apply the usual restoration tricks: noise removal, source stitching (for instance, to combine low frequency and high frequency content), equalizing, and so on.

Vector materials are usually SVG curves exported off of Inkscape.

I try to minimize the use of textures (mainly because I'm lazy) and would prefer to replicate with the Shader Editor. But if I must, I trust OpenEXR textures enough. However I really end up accepting PNG and WebP because that's what the Internet supports. As usual however, 2.79 does not support WebP. At least, last I checked.

1. Rendering as an image sequence allows me to continue rendering where I left off.

2. The use of OpenEXR does not clip color values. Seems like The Right Thing To Do™

3. I don't often find myself caring that much about detail, so I just use DWA(A|B) to hopefully keep the size manageable.

"Legacy" media specs

Now let's see what I could work with when dealing with legacy software. These are rougher notes compared to the "Modern" one, and these can change any time.

Let's see what the old guys can handle. These commercial guys pay patents of course, so what do we have?

So at this point the following is apparent:

• Both can import image sequences fine, although Vegas is limited to just JPEG and PNG as you might expect.

• Vegas 6 can't export image sequences at all.

• Only format I can use with any clarity is AVI. And there had better be usable codecs that don't take a fuck ton of disk space.

So let's try these ones…

The same thing, just a different video container. Vegas is infamously picky, even if x264vfw ~ Xvid ~ DivX, it wants to see an H264 identifier, which only x264vfw can do. The Zero Latency option makes it so that the audio doesn't go out of sync, which it otherwise often does.

When using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg \
  -i SOURCE \
  -c:v libx264 \
  -crf 23 \
  -c:a pcm_s16le \
  DEST.avi

Using the LAME mp3 encoder doesn't work for some reason, despite Vegas recognizing it as "Lame MP3". Using -c:v copy doesn't work, as it will use avc1. Forcing -vtag H264 requires a -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb, and applying it anyway results in a corrupted video stream when opened in Vegas.

WAV as it's in the same category as FLAC. But MP3 for the compression rate—obviously in a high bit rate.

I can export EPS from Inkscape and AE7 seems to open it just fine.

This I think only applies to AE7. I don't know yet what (if any) codec does the EXR export end up using, but I'll probably try something else if it ends up not being Satisfactory.

The old AE7 doesn't have an option to change the audio codec, it will always be WAV.

By the by… I think this is the spec I used back then: