Converting MKVs for Vegas Importation - Is there anything I'm missing?

[Ochinchin AMVs]

So... okay, I'm a bit tired now and can't write everything but I can provide more detail if needed. I'm in an IC for a competition on Facebook that ends in a couple days so I'm on a time crunch and I need to obliterate this learning curve. I've slowly banged my head against the schleps of this process and I figure it's time to get some help and encouragement here. I swear I've never encountered something with as many steps to it as video editing, but hey that's what makes it fun right, the challenge. So here is Part One in a litany of queries that I could probably answer if I was willing to spend another painstaking hour for each of them...

I've got about five different anime series stored as MKV's on my computer (the one I need to work with is Future Diary so I'll use that as a specific example). Most if not all of them are 10 bit.
I'm working with Sony Vegas 11.
I've got (most of? I'm not sure if all of the programs downloaded?) the AMVPack. I've also got Handbrake.

*yawns sleepily* Earlier I tried converting - I think with VirtualDub - one of the mkv episodes for Danganronpa into an avi, and it came out as projected to be 22 GIGABYTES!? No way Jose! And now, I'm...
I'm retrying it with Future Diary...
And...
Crap.
It's working. It looks to be a much more reasonable size ~100x smaller than 20 gigs.
I mean, that's good! But now my whole post is kinda moot.

Uh, well, what's the next step? I just need to queue them, convert, save to a destination - and then wallah, I can import to Vegas?
Is that all? Is there anything I'm missing?

[Ochinchin AMVs]

Whoops, I'm back to square one. After converting an episode and importing into Vegas, only just then did I realize there was no footage in it, just audio.

I think forgot to go to Compression in VirtualDub and select UTVideo YUV420 BT.709 VCM. When I do that, it saves the footage like it should but now my file is loony tunes big... How do I get a small file? Do I need to recontainer/mux (whatever the heck that is )?

[Scintilla]

You don't want a small file, you want a lossless one -- otherwise the lossy conversions will add up and your finished product will end up looking unnecessarily poor. And UTVideo YUV420 is about the smallest you'll get while still remaining lossless.

You can save some space by disabling the audio track in VirtualDub before saving the new AVI file. But other than that, all I can say is that hard drives are so cheap nowadays that 20 GB episodes are far easier to deal with than they used to be.



(I'm not mentioning AVISynth with FFMPEGSource or LSMASHSource because you said you were pressed for time, so introducing more complexities to the workstream is probably not a good idea.)

[Ochinchin AMVs]

Unfortunately I've spent way too much time dilly-dallying and figuring out file conversions as it is, as they say The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good so I'll make do with MP4. I've used it in the past and my *untrained* eye has not noticed it. I'm not making this for a convention-level competition, just a preliminary audition for a Facebook event. I realize this sounds sacrilegious and stupid in this community... Nevertheless, my video is going to have more Suckage in it due to my editing ability than footage, so given my constraints I need to focus on that. I do see that my footage in Vegas is jerky at times, I'm guessing that's due to it being MP4 from what I've read.

You're right, every time I've read about AVISynth etc. in the past I've gone slackjawed. I'll get there eventually, one step at a time...

So all of the editors I love and admire have terabyte-sized harddrives with 20 gigabyte files for each episode? I just feel a bit skeptical due to the size, it seems unwieldy. Is that around the size you edit with? And can Sony Vegas handle that?

I realize this is idiotic, but I have to make tradeoffs in my floundering idiocy.

[l33tmeatwad]

Unfortunately, lossless is the only real option for not losing quality when attempting to handle 10bit source unless you are using Adobe software since it supports 10bit AVC (h264). Not only is the conversion faster to lossless, but they work more smoothly with most editing software. What many editors do to get past the limitation of size when it comes to lossless so they can work with better quality footage is they get an external hard drive with plenty of space to use just for editing.

[Mol]

Well you can also pick your scenes beforehand in vdub, though it kinda depends what you like. Spending some hours picking scenes instead of whole episode in virtualdub can be boring, spending time in your editing program for me seems to be more fun these days , tbut thats how i did it for quite some time. Results vary but it saves quite a bit of space .