I haven't upgraded from V2 to vegas 3 yet. The making of VCDs does tempt me. I haven't heard much about it lately. Is it very complicated and it worth the upgrade? Thanks for the info.
Tinklady
I have been using Video Factory to make VCD's. It is very easy with the templates, but the results in relationship to the quality have been less than satisfying. VCD's are supposed to be VCR quality, but I have had a lot of pixelation and 'digital' looking scenes. I think it has something to do with the MPEG-1 encoder, but I hear VV3 has newer encoders that are supposed to turn out better quality renders. In the mean time, I am doing research into SVCD's, but I've had no luck with the Video Factory renders for SVCD. (It doesn't have a template for that, so I've been trying to enter my own settings). I hope VV3 has a template for SVCD.
While some people might make this statement, I wouldn't. VideoCDs use the MPEG-1 format, which is not all that great, no matter what plug-in you use. It's ok, but don't expect miracles.
Vegas 3 does have templates for SVCD, but we do not burn those directly (you can use Nero or a comparable product to do the actual burning). SVCD uses MPEG-2, and the output is quite a bit better than VideoCD.
Vegas 3 also renders very high quality DVD-compliant MPEG-2 files. Getting these files on to a DVD disc requires a DVD burner and DVD authoring software, but the quality is really good.
I haven't tried it, but I was under the impression that using the Tools | Burn CD | Burn Multimedia CD menu option, selecting MPEG-2 output, and the SVCD NTSC template, would create an svcd CD. Is this note true?
I have to agree with darr. The quality is terrific! The gripe I have with it is that the burning routine does not support CD-RW disks and it only supports IDE drives. I have had a couple problems with this feature. If you cancel the burn before it completes the rendering, it will continue to burn the CD-R with the incomplete rendering. However, the disk is playable. I would have expected the whole process to terminate when I cancelled it. Also, the "test first then burn option" doesn't. It just writes the MPG file out. I have only been playing with it for a few days so it could have been something I did wrong or not understanding. The documentation is very general.
I'm not going to pop for a DVD burner until the prices are a couple hundred dollars lower. While waiting, I've had very good success making VCD, SVCD and XVCD disks by just exporting finished AVI files out of Video Factory, then using one of the templates in TMPGEnc which allow a lot of tweaking, (set bitrate, double pass, etc..) You can burn the resulting files with Nero 5.5 or later.