Is it possible that your DVD burner is dying?
What's the make / model / age?

Mike

Also are you AC3 or PCM. I have never had problems with AC3.

I also burn re-wrtables as first sample.

I'm just rendering a standard MPEG2 template, nothing fancy.

I replaced my burner months ago because my previous one crapped out and died. My current one is just a typical LG DVD burner. I did consider it, but I find it weird that I'll have problems on no matter how many different discs I try (different brands too), and then all I have to do is re-prepare it in DVDA and it works like a charm.

I set up DVDA to prepare my project (which was just a straight video of raw footage, no editing, no menus, etc.) and I left it to run. When I came back, it said it took 30 minutes. I re-prepared and it took only three minutes. I can't remember because it's been a while but I think it's happened before where it takes a ridiculous amount of time to prepare and then it messes up.

I have a ton of cheap DVD+R Memorex discs I will probably test before I use better discs, and I'm fairly confident it'll be fine now, however I don't want to keep running into this problem.

Well, my first thought was the DVD burner. DVDa can be picky and I had the same problem until I found a firmware update for my drive. Everything has been right as rain since then.

On the other hand, you say that you re-prepare the project, it takes just a minute or two, and the burned disc is okay. My guess is that DVDa is rerendering on the first half hour prep, and for some reason it screws up the disk immediately after that. You could try prepping without burning, and then restart DVDa to see if that works.

The other point, though, is that you should be able to make MPEG2 and audio streams (2 files) out of Vegas that don't require a half hour of preparation by DVDa.

Rob Mack

Well in this case I had actually prepared it then burned it a couple of days later. The second prepare that took 3 minutes or so had the same skipping problem. I did it a third time which took 14 minutes and it was perfect. So I'm pretty much at a loss.

smashguy37, you'll find that most of us don't use DVDA to do the actual burning.
Instead, we use DVDA to prepare the disc and than another app (RecordNow, Nero) to do the actual burning.

Mike

I did have some T. Yudan discs that I burned which the audio skipped on a friend's (2) DVD players but played ok on others. This worried me so I remade the project in Reel DVD which never gives me problems. I'm not 100% confident in DVD Architect myself.

Marc

Try burning at 8x instead of the maximum and see if that makes a difference.

That matches what I was seeing before doing a firmware upgrade on my drive. Most discs wouldn't play but a few would.

Rob

I burn in DVDa. No problem now, but DVDa seems to be fussy about the burners it supports.

Rob

Most of us? I don't think so.

I make my MPEG and AC3 files in Vegas then prep and burn the discs from DVDA.

I also use DVDa to burn with.
The interesting problem I have is that after I prepare to a folder, then burn from previously prepared folder, the first DVD I burn takes 3 to 4 times longer than than the next one. After that I can burn as many within a much shorter period of time.
Does anyone else see this problem?

Ted

I have had the best results (both with Vegas and Proshow slideshow
software) if I use it to create an ISO file then use the free
imgburn utility to burn as many copies (and verify if checked) as
I need. Makes it very easy to create additional copies also since
you already have the ISO. Going to an ISO first seems to skip
a number of problems.

mikey