How to get any video to work in Sony Vegas
How to get your videos to work in Vegas Pro when they are rejected.
Edited: 2016-12-19 03:37
There is a problem in Vegas Pro were adding media to the timeline or to the project media, triggers a none of the files dropped on Vegas Pro could be opened error dialog, this is really strange considering that Vegas is a professional NLE.
Whenever i buy something i also expect it to work with the file formats that i am working with, and Vegas Pro is one of the programs that are very expensive, so surely can also afford to invest the necessary time to make it work with popular video formats and codecs. They may very well have a good reason, as of why this has not been done so far – but luckily there is a solution, and it is also free!
How to get any video to work in Vegas Pro
The answer is conversion, you will have to convert your video to a format that Vegas Pro accepts. But before i tell you about the software, and what settings you should use, i will just tell you something very important before we start, to hopefully save you the trouble of installing stolen software that does not work, or software that costs money, is half broken, or whatever.
When it comes to video conversion, in my experience, free software is just far superior to the converters that you can buy. In fact, sometimes the converters you buy is just stolen and re-branded copies of free open source alternatives, and they are also often not up-to-date. The people who do this are obviously scammers. They have rarely added anything of value to the software, and they are usually being dishonest!
I recommend that you use FFmpeg to convert videos, which is cross-platform, open-source, and very powerful. It converts to almost anything! Many beginners may find that this is rather complicated, and that is why i recommend either HandBrake or FFmpegYAG, which are really just GUIs that include ffmpeg and some other tools.
Links are also provided at the bottom of the article.
Format and settings
Personally i found that the H.264 (x264) setting – located under the Video tab in handbrake – has allowed me to drop the videos onto the timeline in Vegas Pro. I also set the framerate as same as source, and i use the MP4 container format.
If this does not work for you, you can instead try the MPEG-4 video codec, just remember to set a high bitrate, preferably 5000+ – or even as high as 10k – it depends on what your requirements are. For anything below HD quality, around 5-10k should suffice. But this also depends on the video codec you are using.
To put things in perspective, if we used a codec like XVID or DIVX, then we would often be able to go with as little as 1k in bitrate, often without the quality suffering visible harm. A lot of people do not realize this, so that is why i mention it!
The disadvantage of the formats that Vegas supports is that file sizes can get huge, even just for a few minutes of video. I do not know if there is any reasonable explanation, as of why they do not seem to support editing of popular codecs, but hopefully there is, because otherwise they are just being evil.
A warning against the Super (c) Video Converter
One of my favorite converters in the past was Super (C), which was also just a GUI that relied heavily on other tools. I do not remember why i choose it, but today i would not install it, as it's installer is filled with adware, hijackers and other crap. It used to be a good converter, but then their developers apparently decided to bloat it with dangerous adware and browser hijackers.
You used to be able to de-select all the junk in the installer, but now it installs anyway. I am not sure if it is a mistake by the developers, but either way, even the fact that they are stupid enough to include all that junk is enough reason for me not to use it. Besides, now that i have gotten used to handbrake, i actually think it is far better.
Tell us what you think: