Introduction

If you're like me and you enjoy showing off to your friends, then you probably enjoy editing your Counter-Strike clips together and uploading them to YouTube. But have your clips been really boring and brown looking? Have they been in 30FPS and look pixelated? Well I'm here to fix that. This simple guide will ensure all of your Counter-Strike frags the best they can be with a few simple tricks. I'm going to assume you already have Sony Vegas downloaded and know the simple logistics of the program. If not, go play around with it for a while then come back.

Project Settings

This step is probably one of the most important steps to editing and rendering in Sony Vegas. You're going to have to alter these settings in order to comply with the quality of the clip you recorded and how good your computer is. Don't worry, I will explain everything. You can alter the settings to your standard.

The first thing you going to want to do is ignore the 'Template' option at the top of the screen. Now you see the 'Width' and 'Height' options. With this you're going to want to set it to the settings that your clip are in. So if the video is 720p set the 'Width' to 1280 and the 'Height' to 720, but if you're using 1080p clips then use the same settings as the image. Ignore 'Field order' and the 'Output Rotation'. There's no need to mess with these settings, so just leave them the same as me. If you're using HD video clips, which you should be, then you're going to want to keep the 'Pixel aspect ratio' on 'Square' because 720p and 1080p uses a square aspect ratio. Now comes the frame rate. For silky smooth clips you're going to want to set it at 'Double NTSC'. 60FPS makes the clips look extra smooth and more enjoyable to watch. This in an option that depends on your computer however. It will take much longer to render clips at 60FPS as it has to take double the time it takes to render a 30FPS clip. If you want to wait longer but have a nice looking clip, choose 60FPS.

Now for the 'Pixel format' options. If you were a professional and rendering a Movie or Television show, you would want to change this option. But, you aren't. Leave the 'Pixel format' at '8-bit', this is good enough for YouTube quality and will just drain your CPU resources when changing it to '32-bit'. With the next option being 'Full-resolution rendering quality' you will put it on 'Best'. Why would you put it any less? You want it to look the best so leave it on that. 'Motion blur type' should be defaulted to Gaussian so leave it on that, it does nothing unless you edit the tracks anyway. 'Deinterlace method' should be set to 'None'. You can set it to 'Interpolate fields' if you want to, but I don't recommend it as it creates ghosting and makes it look a blurry mess with flick shots. Last but not least, you want to tick the 'Start all new projects with these settings' option. This means that whenever you open Sony Vegas your settings will automatically open up. This makes it simpler for you so you don't have to toggle it all when you want to make another sick frag movie.

Simple things that you NEED to do

These things are definitely needed for you to make your clip not look like rubbish. You will have to do these with every single clip which takes a lot of time, but is worth it in the long run. Now after you've dragged your clip into the timeline right-click it -> properties and then this window will pop up:

Now you can see this window coming up. Don't worry, you don't want to mess with any of these settings except one. So ignore the rest of them because they are already set to what they should be. You see the 'Smart resample' is already ticked, you want to go ahead and tick the 'Disable resample' button. What the 'Smart resample' does is try to make the clip look a lot better and resamples it but while doing this is creates a massive amount of ghosting on the clip, blurring it and making it look abysmal. So quickly disable it with all of your clips so they look as they did when you recorded them. Now you're going to want to do the same thing as you did for video but this time for the audio. So, right click -> properties and another window similar to the one on the left will come up but, with different settings.

So with this window all you're going to want to do is click 'Normalize'. This will make all of the audio from the clip suddenly shoot up. This is because when Normalizing your audio is makes it so that all the audio will be at the 'normal' level. This basically means that it will be of a professional audio level, done for you! So those two things are really simple audio and visual corrections that will make your clip look better already. Now onto the final part. Rendering. Of course, you will have to edit all your clips down, include music but that's the easy and fun part. Of course you can do multitudes of things to your clips such as colour correction and flashy effects. But, this is a simple guide to get your started.

Rendering your clip

The final piece to the puzzle. The render to rule them all! Here we are at the end of the editor's journey, where they have to render their clips into a fine-tuned masterpiece. On the top left of your screen you will see 'File'. Go ahead and click that. Look down the list and you will see 'Render'. That is the second thing you should click. Now this box that looks really scary and has a million options will pop-up onto your screen. No worries, this is quite simple to understand and you will want to ignore 90% of the options on there. Find the drop down selection called 'MainConcept AVC/AAC'. This is the perfect template for our clips and is .mp4, so it doesn't take long to render and it is also fast to upload while maintaining a good quality that YouTube will like. Now find the one that fits your clip. You're going to want to pick 'Internet HD 1080p' or 'Internet HD 720p' depending on what you chose at the start. For this I will be showing you the 1080p option but all of the settings are the same except for the resolution.

The settings haver already changed for me because I have previously edited it. Now if you don't want to learn anything, simply copy what I have on the left and finish the render. But if you want to stay along for the ride and learn some new lingo and information about rendering, then read ahead.

Now it should already be ticked but make sure the 'Include video' option is ticked because without that well, where's your fragmovie? All joke aside I actually had that unchecked once and just rendered music with sounds of a Desert Eagle in the background. Now for the 'Frame size'. Of course, if you're using 1080p leave it on 'HD 1080' and if you're using 720p make sure it's 'HD 720'. It'sas simple as that. Your profile should be set to 'Main'. This is the old broadcasting standard and is perfectly fine for YouTube videos. It has a perfect bitrate and size, whereas if you used High it would have a much higher bitrate and take a lot longer to render, with little to no use because YouTube compresses your video anyway.

Frame rate should be set to 60 with what looks like a thousand 0's. Or you can just type 60 and it will do the same thing. As previously stated, 60FPS makes your videos look super smooth and nice looking. You can use 30FPS if you like, but it won't be as enjoyable to watch. Your 'Field order' should be the same as your project settings, which in turn should be 'None'. Same goes for the 'Pixel aspect ratio', which should be set to 1 as in the project settings. The reference frames should be on 14. This is standard with this setting and basically it uses frames in the video to match one another so the video looks the same quality all the way through instead of dipping in and out. Leave the 'use deblocking filter' option checked because it makes your video look sharper and increases the visual quality of the overall video.

Now the bit rate is the hard part to understand. YouTube does compress the video's bit rate down. There is a guide that YouTube has posted to determine the bitrate of your video and it's recommended that 1080p video uses 8mbps when rendering and that 720p video uses 5mbps. You can take this how you like and mess around with the settings yourself. Because I don't mind how long it takes me to render a clip, I leave it at 22mbps mainly because I like to make it the highest quality as I possibly can. 'Number of slices' should be left alone unless you're a professional. It takes a literal slice of the clip and then encodes that slice alone, this is so a decoder has an easier time decoding the images on the screen. Basically leave it alone at 4 and everything will be fine.

Encode mode is all up to you. You can either render using only your CPU. If you have a powerful CPU like an i7 or i5 then this will be perfectly fine. However if you have an Nvidia graphics card you can render using CUDA cores. If you have an AMD GPU you can render using OpenGL. It's all up to preference and deciding whether or not you're going to want to use a lot of power on your graphics card or a lot of power on your CPU. Personally I prefer CPU, mainly because it means I can still play games in the background while waiting for my clip to render.

The audio settings are very simple and you only need to make sure that the 'Sample rate' is at 48,000 Hz and that the 'Bit rate' is at 384,000. This is what YouTube recommend users to use, so I kept with what they said because well, they're the ones that compress your video anyway.

Final thoughts

As with most tutorials you can take all of what I said with a pinch of salt. I have included below a clip that I rendered earlier to show you how clean and nice the settings are.

Remember, these are the settings that I like to use and have had perfect results when using them. Of course this is all through trial and error and if you didn't get the results you wanted, try all the settings out for yourself. Messing around with the settings for a day and rendering out multitudes of clips is what makes editing fun.

As always, have a good day and thanks for reading!

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