Vegas users: How do you render your movies with 5.1 audio?

[futon88]

I'm a relatively new Vegas user, and the first hurdle I encountered when I made the switch is that it appeared there was no way to render a video stream with 5.1 audio. I could render a high bitrate H.264 file with stereo audio, but not six channel surround. At the same time, it's happy to let me render a 5.1 PCM audio stream without video. My workaround has been to render the audio and video separately ("Sony AVC" for video and "Sony Wave64" for audio with a 5.1 PCM profile). I then mux the two together while encoding the audio to AAC.

Is that how you do it? Have I overlooked something, and there's actually a way to render H.264 with six channel AAC direct from Vegas? I'm using version 18 Pro.

Personally, I don't mind the workaround as 98% of the changes while iterating are just to the audio, and it only takes a few minutes to re-mux the streams and review the changes*.

Is there a better way?

*The downmix option in Vegas does not give an accurate representation of how things will sound, so rendering it out and listening in a proper player seems to be the only reliable way to really know what people will experience.

 

[The Scribbling Man]

I render video and audio separately. I tend to work in lagarith AVI and render a lagarith AVI video file, which I then compress to my liking with handbrake. The audio I normally work with is a Wave64, which I (depending on the edit) will either render out with Vegas' ac3 option (still sounds good and does the job for edits where i'm not concerned with pristine audio quality) or I render out as Wave64 again. I then will likely use MeGUI to convert the Wave64 to FLAC and mux with the video into an MKV. Because FLAC is not always translated well on everyone's devices, I will also often provide a high bitrate AAC option.

 

[futon88]

Interesting. My version of Vegas has profiles for AAC and AC3, but they are all limited to stereo. The FLAC profiles are also stereo only. The only 5.1 profiles I can find are under Wave and Sony Wave64 (plus an oddball 128kbps option under Windows Media Audio V11).

 

[The Scribbling Man]

Interesting. My version of Vegas has profiles for AAC and AC3, but they are all limited to stereo. The FLAC profiles are also stereo only. The only 5.1 profiles I can find are under Wave and Sony Wave64 (plus an oddball 128kbps option under Windows Media Audio V11).

Yup. I am also using Vegas 18. As mentioned, I render out in Wave64 then convert to FLAC with MeGUI.

 

[futon88]

Sorry, I misunderstood. It sounds like I'm doing it the right way. I just had this niggling feeling like maybe there's just some hidden toggle somewhere that would I allow me to expose more 5.1 options, or maybe the profile would need to be built by hand, or purchased, etc.

 

[The Scribbling Man]

Yes, it doesn't sound like you're doing anything wrong when I first starting processing video and audio separately it seemed inconvenient, but pretty soon I realised it was a way for greater control and I'm used to it now. I also like to provide multiple audio options, which kind of requires stuff to be processed separately anyway.

 

[asterixsmeagol]

I just started using Vegas and had the some problem, but it turned out that I was just using the wrong template. Try using one of the Sony AVC/MVC templates labeled "Internet" and then set the resolution and frame rate to match your project. You can then switch over to the audio tab and pick the 5.1 AAC option.

 

[futon88]

I just started using Vegas and had the some problem, but it turned out that I was just using the wrong template. Try using one of the Sony AVC/MVC templates labeled "Internet" and then set the resolution and frame rate to match your project. You can then switch over to the audio tab and pick the 5.1 AAC option.

Yup, there it is! Thank you, I'll play with that the next time I want to render out something short in 5.1.