How to edit x264vfw videos

In my 1080p60 article it was clear that x264vfw was the best codec. However, at the end of the article I mentioned that editing the videos were really laggy in Sony Vegas. One of my readers informed me that the editing procedure in Premiere Pro was even worse.

I decided to do some research and figure out how you could use x264vfw but still retain editing capabilities that were close to the other lossless codecs. I am no expert in video encoding but from what I understand, the editing is laggy is due to not enough Intra (I) frames (also called key frames) in the video file.

We can fix this by changing the --keyint default value of 250 in x264vfw. After trying many values I just settled on --keyint 1 (so all I frames). This should make working with the videos much easier as it gives frame perfect seeking.

Click to enlarge

One issue that concerned me initially was that I frames hold all data of the frame where as P (predictive) frames just track the changes from the previous frame and thus compress much better. I thought that incorporating all I frames would hurt the compression and it does but not to a large degree. If the hike to --keyint 1 is too much you may want to experiment with --keyint 10 or similar. Happy capturing and editing with x264vfw!