It's true, you should be able to get it to work. You ARE rendering to AC-3, not MPEG audio, RIGHT? For DVDs audio should be PCM or AC-3, otherwise the authoring program needs to convert it and this could cause the audio problems you are having.

Ulead DVD Movie Factory 3, right? I have some experience with that using the trial version before I settled on Vegas5/DVD-A2. I found it to be far inferior to DVD Architect. If all you want to do is throw simple DVDs together quickly, then it's okay. But if you want to do anything cool or have real artistic flexibility in your tools, you won't find it there. I believe ULead has a higher end DVD authoring product that may do more, but for me I'd never trade DVD-A2 for DMF3. To be fair, I believe DMF3 is about a $100 product, while Vegas+DVD list price is about $1000(you can do much better than this, price wise, though)! So, perhaps it's not fair to compare; they are in different target markets. It depends what you want and need.

Both DMF3 and Vegas+DVD are available in free trial versions that contain most of the features. I say try them out and make your own decision. DVD-A2 however will not produce output DVDs in the trial version; it will only preview the final product, so it's not much use. But, I can vouch for the fact that the final product DVDs out of DVD-A2 are just as good as you would expect from the trial.

Not to mention, the people in this forum offer EXCELLENT support. Sony should be paying the people who post here more than their own employees because they really are a great support team. Note that I'm not trying to include myself in this group as I am not expert enough to consider myself a valuable forum reasource, but there are many professionals here who use Vegas and answer questions quickly and helpfully.

As for your comment on burning though, I have to be honest, I personally have not had a lot of luck with DVD-A2 as a DVD burning software. It is great at producing the DVDs, but not at burning them. I use Roxio(just because it came with my DVD drive) to do the actual burning after DVD-A2 creates the output folders. It's a little annoying, but it's not time consuming and I really don't mind. I certainly would not sacrifice Vegas and DVD Architect over it.

Hope this opinion helps.

-Jayson

Hammer,
I'm using DVDA-2 with Vegas 5 and have had no problems. I burn using a Sony 510A. The only issue is DVDA-2 won't close the carriage after it completes the burn and opens to offer the DVD. I have to use another program to close the tray. I'm sure that will be fixed soon as it's not a big deal but just annoying. Others have the same problem but I don't know if it's just with Sony burners. Anyway, like Jetdv says, it's probably just a matter of picking the right template to render to. Good luck.
Randy
Hawaii Vegas Users Group

thanks for the feedback guys. Is it a stand alone program that can be used on a different machine? Up to now i've been using the DVD NTSC setting which uses mpeg layer 2 audio. I haven't really had any problems with it up to now. It does seem like the default NTSC setting would produce either PCM or AC3 doesn't it;) My needs are pretty simple, just home movies.

Is it a stand alone program that can be used on a different machine?

Yes.

Rob

If you use NTSC DVD template and get MPEG audio, one of two things will happen:
1. Your DVD software will leave the audio as it is, and it won't play in many DVD players as MPEG audio is rarely supported in set-top boxes(although PCs can often play it).

or

2. Your DVD author software will re-render the audio to PCM or AC-3 to be compatible with a normal DVD player. In this case, you have the quality loss associated with re-rendering the same signal multiple times. Also, you waste time doing 2 separate renders(although audio render times are a small fraction compared to video render time).

Bottom line: Render the audio and video separately, video as NTSC for DVD Architect template, and audio as AC-3. It's slightly less convenient but it's the right way to do it.

-Jayson

Thanks guys. I tried to render to AC3 tonight for the first time and discovered I have to buy it?? I thought it came with Vegas 5?

AC3 comes with DVDA2 (not Vegas 5). You do have DVDA2 right?

His first post in this thread implies that he's trying to decide whether or not to get DVDA.

Rob

Yes, you have to have the Vegas+DVD package to have the license for AC-3; otherwise you can get it as a separate add-in for Vegas. You can, if you want to bypass this, just render your audio to linear PCM(WAV) which should also be accepted by DVD-A2. However, I don't believe you can do surround sound with this; only stereo is supported for PCM.

Remember that these codecs are not just ways for Sony to charge you more money. I believe in most cases they are licensed from a third party(like MainConcept MPEG codec), so Sony must pay for every license they hand out. I believe this is why they won't include this stuff in their trials; they don't have the rights to do so. I think this is also why network rendering does not allow remote rendering of MPEGs: Sony is completely within their right to let you run 3 instances of Vegas for your license since they own the software, but they can't authorize you to run 3 instances of MainConcept's MPEG encoder. Unless of course they paid for 3 copies of the MC codec license with every copy of Vegas+DVD they sold, and they aren't THAT generous.

-Jayson

Thanks, I understand they have to cover their cost. I just incorrectly assumed it was part of Vegas 5 like (mpeg2). For somebody who just wants to do cool birthday movies the cost of the products really adds up;) I think i'm probably going to just have to bite the bullet and go for it. I don't see a way to use separate video/audio streams with MoveFactory. It expects a mpeg with embedded audio.