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I've been trying to upload a video to Youtube which had been created in Vegas Movie Studio HD 11 and rendered as an MP4 file. You may notice the text has become sharper and the watermark is now almost impossible to see:

Video on PC (Played in Quicktime)

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Video on Youtube

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The entire video is affected by not just the first slide. I have tried to increase the colour settings in Sony Vegas and with Youtube's built-in editor. I have also tried using the built-in Vegas Youtube uploader.

Video Properties

  • Created and rendered in Vegas Movie Studio HD.
  • Rendered as HDV 720-25P (Matches project settings)
  • Audio: 384 Kbps, 48,000 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, MPEG
  • Video: 25 fps, 1280x720 Progressive, YUV, 18.3 Mbps
  • Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.000
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  • What does the contrast look like in Vegas itself? QuickTime displays files incorrectly to start with, and as such makes it difficult to judge the actual colour and contrast of a movie (it shows everything as slightly washed out). – Oliver G Jun 26 '12 at 14:15
  • @OliverG The contrast in Sony Vegas is the same as the rendered file in Quicktime. – Ambo100 Jun 26 '12 at 14:21
  • Do you have the ability in Vegas to set the gamma of the output file to 2.2. – DoktorHauser Jun 26 '12 at 19:28
  • @DoktorHauser I couldn't find the option to do so in the Render As... dialogue. In the Video FX preset the gamma value is set to +1 and limits at +2 (which is too much in my case) – Ambo100 Jun 26 '12 at 19:52
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I worked out a satisfactory solution to this problem. It involves adding the 'Computer RGB to Studio RGB' Video FX to each video track in your Vegas Studio project. This effects the rendered file and project quite a lot but appears normal when uploaded to Youtube:

Quicktime

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Youtube

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It's possible to disable the track Video FX whilst you work on your project so you don't have to deal with dimmed video. The effects will need to be be re-enabled before you render the project.

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The reason you are losing contrast is because of the codec you are using to export to.

YouTube (as well as Vimeo, and practically every other video website nowadays) works using the H.264 codec. Here are YouTube's instructions for how they'd like videos to be encoded for upload.

The TL;DR version of that page:

  • Container: .mp4
  • Audio Codec: AAC-LC
  • Video Codec: H.264

When you upload the incorrect codec - like HDV (mpeg?) you are using above, YouTube has to re-encode your video, resulting in the loss of quality and contrast you have been experiencing.

Now the bad news. From my quick Googling, people have had trouble exporting to H.264 from Sony Vegas. However, Vimeo has a page dedicated to encoding instructions. Here's their tutorial for Sony Vegas 11.

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