D.,

> I took the advice of others here and skipped the MPEG encoder in VV3 and just took the pristine DV-AVI I rendered in VV3 and fed it directly into DVD Complete to be encoded to MPEG-2 and then burned the DVD on a Pioneer A04. The results are fantastic! The best output I have ever put on any kind of disc media. I played the DVD in a Pioneer DV-333 set top player and it's so close to what I actually shot on Mini DV that the difference is negligible. I am very excited about this. Where has this product been all my DV life? <

So, basically you and several others are saying that you like the results of the Ligos MPEG-2 encoder bundled in Dazzle's DVD Complete better than the Main Concept MPEG-2 encoder bundled in Vegas Video 3. This sounds like a serious challenge to me. Since Sonic Foundry "dumped" Ligos in favor of Main Concept, hopefully they can counter this challenge with instructions that work for getting better results out of the Main Concept encoder. Or maybe Main Concept needs to make some improvements.

-- Burton --

DVD Complete does a little "cheat" by default. The default settings are ticked to de-interlace the video & this will make it a bit easier for the Ligos Go-Motion encoder to encode action footage. To be honest though MOST people who view DVD are doing it on standard TVs at home, so the de-interlacing is going to be no loss for them & viewing these DVD Complete authored discs on a 32" set you have to say they do look good.

I notice that Dazzle has a downloadable demo version of DVD Complete. Is it fully functional, or what functions have been removed in the demo? Also, in their downloads section they seem to have some stuff from MGI and from Ulead. Is there some connection there that I don't know about?

-- Burton --

Not sure what else is in DVD Complete. Just thrilled with what it all is capable of doing, and, like someone said before, it's very fast.

I'm not giving up on the MPEG-2 encoder in VV3. Perhaps with future updates it will produce results equally as good, or even better, but right now, I cannot get it to do that. As for tweaking it, I just don't have the kind of knowledge about compression techonology to understand what each tweak might do, and I definately don't have any DVD discs I can afford to waste experimenting. For now, DVD Complete is the winner with me.

Normally, I don't recommend products, since all systems and source files differ, but, if you are starting with nice clean digital video and want to preserve as much of that quality as possible in your DVD, then Dazzle DVD Complete might be for you.

Hmm... I see some people raving about DVD Complete and I'm a little confused. Can someone clear up a few points?

Unless I misread some of the comments can someone confirm you can create a DVD in DVD Complete from just the VEG file? That don't seem possible.

If you are saying you can take an already RENDERED AVI file made with Vegas Video, then do the MPEG-2 file in DVD Complete using their rendering engine that means you are rendering TWICE which to me would seem to defeat the purpose when there are other DVD authoring packages like DVD Movie Factory that already accept the high quality MPEG-2 render from Vegas and in just a handful of minutes burn the project with chapters.

Can somebody set me straight on this?

DVD Complete will accept MPEG-2 files directly from VV3 as well as .avi files. Some Mpeg-2 files are not compliant importing into DVD Complete, but VV3's are. It does NOT accept .veg files, just the finished product. Also, if you have your files spanned into several subfiles because of size and FAT32 limitations, you need to pull them together into 1 file, as DVD Complete does not do chained files from what I have found. As for the Demo product, it is fully functional except that it limits your capture and file making to 2 minutes I think. The only issue I have had using it is that I had a 1:54:00 .avi video I wanted to put onto the DVD and had to play with the VBR settings to try and get it all to go onto 1 DVD. I ended up encoding it in VV3 and importing the Mpeg-2 file into DVD Complete. If I use a CBR too low, I noticed pixelization, same with VBR. Just a matter of experimenting a little. I wish that part of authoring in general was a little easier to do.
What are good acceptable ranges to plug in to VBR if you want to maximize the time on the DVD (i.e. 2 hrs.)? In DVD Complete, I believe I used: maximum - 6 mb/sec, Max avg - 4.5, and min avg. - 2.25, and avg. - 4. I switched to VBR mode 4, as it is from a file and not live capturing. I have used the formula presented here on the forum and it seems to be accurate. One last question, DVD complete talks about a safe area to burn, around 3.9 GB I think. What is the issue if you burn beyond that (4.4 - 4.6 gb)? I don't think that this relates to that particular software.

OK, but are you re rendering or not? Obviously yes if you import AVI, but if you import a Vegas created MPEG-2 file, then does DVD Complete just add chapters and in a few minutes (just burning) you got a DVD or is it again doing another MPEG-2 render?

I'm rendering to DV-AVI from the VV3 timeline first. Then I am feeding that AVI into DVD Complete to be encoded to MPEG-2. Might seem like an extra step, but I don't mind. The MPEG-2 encoder in DVD Complete is giving me better quality. If quality were not the main goal (and for whom is it not?) then I could encode the VV3 timeline to MPEG-2 using the MainConcept encoder and then feed that MPEG-2 to DVD complete to make the DVD. In my early tests with the encoder in VV3, I was not happy with the MPEG-2. It was by no means a bad file but was not as bright and crisp as I wanted. On the other hand the DV-AVI that VV3 renders might as well be called lossless and it is that file that DVD Complete seems to really preserve when it converts it to MPEG-2. What it comes down to is which MPEG-2 encoder gives the best results. I'm not running an assembly line so a little extra time does not bother me one bit. I want to stick that DVD into my player and be awed. That's what happened yesterday.

I use a combination of products. For a simple DVD, DVD Workshop to a Title Set then burn with Prassi Primo DVD.

For a complicated one, I render a video stream and a wave file. I convert the wave into AC3. I use DVD Junior to mux the AC3 and M2V together in a VOB. I import the VOB into Roxio VideoPack and then author the DVD.

I had the exact same results with the VV MPEG2 encoder UNTIL I changed some of the settings. The main change seems to be the "Video Quality" slider on the first tab - by default it was set to 15. The manual suggests it should be set to 31. Try changing that setting and using the highest possible bitrate and see if you still get poorer results. Another change I made was setting the DC coefficient to 10 bit.

I guess we're back to square one again. So, some guys still think some encoder other than MC MPEG-2 is better ie, giving "brighter/crisper" output. I'm not arguing if that is true or not since we're well into the perception and subjective realm. I just wanted to be sure we're not talking apples and oranges.

Just to crawl way out on a limb, as anyone rendering a Vegas created DV AVI file, turned around and re rendered it using the MC MPEG-2 render engine on it after that? I really don't see the point other than a AVI file will be much larger and just perhaps armed with those "extra" pixels maybe the final result is "brighter/crisper" looking????

B.B., I think you are correct in that I think it does a rerender, but not sure. It seems to a few hoops when importing the Mpeg2 file from VV3 before letting you author it. Can I assume that unless the encoding reates are exactly the same for both programs, that it would render to what DVD Complete is set to?

dave

You can bring MPEG-2 files to DVD complete or .avi. I don't believe that it does re-encode your MPEG-2 material the loops it does do are to demux if you brought in multiplexed stream & it also creates it's own small project reference files for your input. You can bring in seperate streams yourself but it does not support AC-3 audio unfortunately & at the price range it is set at that is not likely to change due to the large licencing fees for Dolby. It's final output will support PCM or MPEG 1 layer II audio.

Setting chapters are really easy and you can import several movies into your project. From your movies it will create a root menu with motion or still buttons if you wish & it will also create motion or still buttons for your chapter points. (you can set the loop duration for the motion buttons from 5 to 30 seconds I think.)

It also allows upto 8 overtures (the intro video that auto plays when you insert the disc) & even supplies a couple for advertising what audio etc you are using on your disc.
I use the formula below to work out the max bitrate I can fit on disc with time of movie. With DVD complete you can't use AC-3 audio but if you are in PAL land you can use MPEG 1 layer II audio which you can set similar bitrates for.
In NTSC land (unless your or your clients player supports MPEG) you are going to have to use PCM audio

The safe, useable size for Video and Audio is 3.6 gigs. As shown below in the formula:

DVD: 36096 Mbits of safe useable space
Space for AC3 audio (at 192 Kbit/s)= (number of seconds in your video*192)/1024
e.g. audio for 2 hours, (7200*192)/1024 = 1350 Mbits
Remaining space can be allocated for video, 36096-1350 = 34746 Mbits
For 2 hour project: video data rate = remaining space/number of seconds in your video
e.g. 34746/7200 = 4.825 Mbit/s
If using PCM audio, substitute 1600 in place of 192 in the audio calculation.

Since it’s easier to calculate the minutes, rather than the seconds, here’s the formula:

For AC3 audio:

(36096-(((Length of Video in Minutes*60)*192)/1024))/(Length of Video in Minutes*60)

For PCM audio:

(36096-(((Length of Video in Minutes*60)*1600)/1024))/(Length of Video in Minutes*60)

Your 4.7Gb disc is actually only 4.38Gb (it's a 1000 thing Vs 1024) I say safe useable area as above to allow room for navigation data, menus background audio etc.

Most of my project lengths are about 1hr 15mins.
The last one I did I set it for a VBR mode 5, Quantization Scale 3, max bitrate 8Mbs, Avg 7Mbs , Min 2.25Mbs . I was using audio MPEG 1 layer II bitrate 48Khz 384Kbs (These are the supported rates for MPEG audio in DVD Complete).

This resulted in filling the DVD to 3.92Gb

Good question. When I got my HP 200i DVD burner it came with a crippled version of DVDIt, which would only accept AVI then it went on to do a render at MPEG-2. I then bought DVD Movie Factory which accepts the MC MPEG-2 rendered file as is and then goes ahead to add chapters. Lots faster. Now I see people raving about DVD Complete and I'm a little confused if it only accepts AVI then rerenders as MPEG-2 with its own render engine and ? also accepts MC MPEG-2 and can if you want just add chapters not requiring and repeat rendering.

About that 1000 verses 1024 thing, I think you got it backwards. <wink>

I use a lot of mountable volumes to hold all these big video files. So creating a 10GB container, the actual bytes it can hold works out to 10,737,418,240. At least that's what Windows XP reports under properites.

Also when I burned my first DVD I had 3 videos I was trying to shoehorn onto the disk and the sum worked out to a little over 4,810,000,000 BEFORE any overhead. Also, flipping the disc over you could see only about 95% was burned.

Put your blank 4.7GB disc in & see what explorer reports it as.
It should show your 4,700,000,000 as 4.38Gb

I've tried rendering to MPEG-2 with the Video Quality slider set to 0 and to 31 with a few different test clips and I have a very hard time telling any difference. All other settings aside, the files created are the same size and appear very close in quality. Actually, both settings produce very good results with high average bitrates (6.5-7.5 Mbps).

Explorer will report a blank unformated DVD disc as zero bytes. I'm only saying that the shorthand values like K for a thousand, MB for a million or GB for a billion is based on rounding down to a thousand, so people have a rough idea. A 10K file isn't 10,000 it really is 10,240 bytes. The larger the number the larger the distortion of course. I'm not referring to what X is in regards to Y GB verses Z GB. I'm only saying regardless what value GB you start with you'll get a more accurate estimate what will fit using bytes, not MB or K.

I agree with what you are saying, but if I put a blank disc in my drive (not opening my computer) but go to Windows explorer via program files, right click on my DVD drive, select properties,on the general tab it will show as a blank DVD-R
4,707,319,808 bytes = 4,489MB = 4.38GB (Thus what your disc case states as 4.7Gb will as far as your authoring is concerned allow you 4.38GB of space as your computer & software is working to the binary system)

I only say this so that someone out there doesn't get confused that they make a project of 4.5Gb on their computer and then wonder why it won't go on their 4.7Gb disc.

Correct. The rotating storage industry (floppy, hard disk, and optical discs) typically state capacities where M means 10^6 and G means 10^9. Same with crystal speeds (e.g., 2.4GHz). The RAM industry, and the rest of your computer parts use powers of 2 (M = 2^20, G = 2^30).

There's actually unofficial (or is it proposed?) SI units for the powers-of-two measurements (Mi, Gi, where the "i" stands for "binary" and they are pronounced differently as well, like "mebibytes").

Plan accordingly <g>.

///d@