1. Is it best to convert in Vegas as I suspect?

My personal opinion is yes.

2. Any personal encoder setting recommendations to yield the best pic quality (size not important) would be recommended.
If you have a lot of stills in your project, use the "Best" setting. Otherwise, "Good" is good enough.
Render the audio & video files separately. The audio gets rendered as an AC3 and the video as mpeg-2 using the NTSC (or PAL) DVD Architect preset. The standard DVD preset has the bitrate settings far too low for most folks. As long as you use the same filename for both, DVDA will import both of them when you select either one.

3. Does Vegas play mpeg2 files from the timeline the same as the appear when burned to DVD?

Vegas doesn't really like mpeg-2 files so don't worry about how it looks from the timeline or your computer monitor. The real test is how it looks on a TV set.

Mike

As you are using DVDA, I think you should be using the "NTSC DVD Architect" template rather than the normal NTSC-DVD template for the best results. Need to change the video quality setting to 'best' as well.

Cheers

gordyboy

Spot,

Thanks and I concur that the final mpeg is only as good as the source you are feeding it. My number 3 comment sort of dawned on me that perhaps Vegas isn't playing back the MPEG file the same way it will appear on the DVD player, but I wasn't using it as an MPEG editor. After my test encoding, I placed all three clips on the Vegas timeline to test and saw little difference in terms of PQ. A final burned DVD is the only way to test I suppose. I'll stick with the NTSC DVD recommendation and I'll burn a DVD to see what it looks like when played back as the viewer will see it. Oh... Trust me, the content sucks. It came from a 1/2" JVC full-size DV camera, but the ceremony was at dusk and is a little on the dark side. I suspect the Videographer had the gain and everything wide open on his camera, so the mpeg encoding is just magnifying the already crunched signal.

I had assumed that I'd have to split the ceremony and reception up, but I might be able to fit the 1 hour 45 minutes ordeal on one DVD using the NTSC DVD setting in Vegas. The last encoder I used was a Pinnacle DC1000 that was a real-time hardware encoder and it did a good job but the file sizes always seemed really big. I guess when I saw the 1.4GB file out of Vegas, I sort of suspected that I might have done something wrong.

Thanks - I'll report back.

Gordyboy and Mike,

Okay, my first Vegas MPG test was with the DVD Architect setting, but it didn't have sound and I figured it wasn't worth the additional hassle of exporting sound separately. I'll export the as an .mpg and then again as an .ac3 and compare it with the NTSC DVD setting. From what everyone has said so far, things will look better after I get the files on a real DVD player.

Side question: how many minutes do people average on a single side DVD using the "good" and "best" settings? Does multipass introduce further PQ loss?

Thanks again.

...fit the 1 hour 45 minutes ordeal on one DVD...

You can (I've done 2 hr. easily) but you'll have to drop the bit rate down to allow it to fit. Either render the file out as an avi and let DVDA do the math for you or use a bitrate calculator like this one or .

Mike

Just a quick aside -- I find Procoder with Stormencoder (Canopus) does better than Vegas at mpeg2 encoding and is in real time (1hr video encoded in 1hr) and does not cost 2K. The result works well in DVDA2 over a wide range of Procoder settings.

Whether it is worth re-investing I doubt