Last night I took some massive .avi's that I captured off my Sony XDCAM PDW-330 via Virtual dub from the GTR and Waterloo regional and made H:264's out of them and the files were so small yet I could not see the difference in quality.

Then I took some generic news video that I captured and rendered in Vegas movie studio 9 as mpeg-2 and rendered at H:264 and I could see the loss in quality.

Keep in mind this was first time practice and I haven't read the manual yet, definitely I will be thoroughly exploring this software more towards this weekend as things slow down for the holidays and I may even go back to hard capturing in virtual dub and rendering in H:264.

With this new 3.5G Telus network here in Ontario small files in broadcast quality is something I am really interested in now.

From a job security angle I need to perfect this, make it work perfectly every time via ftp and make it all very fast and then make it seem so complicated that they (stations) will never figure it out and of course think I am actually of some value and worth keeping for a few more months

mark