Great thank you for the reply.
I see the MPEG2, AC3, and DVD templates, I'll render as one of those (any suggestion for best output?).
With the recompressing inside of DVD Architect, when I went to make the DVD it wanted to recompress the audio and video on its own, by default I guess. How do I stop it from doing that?

If you select DVDA compatible formats for rendering from Vegas, DVDA won't recompress. The video and audio need to be in separate files with the same filename stem and in the same folder.

For video, choose the template that best matches your source (normal/widescreen, image size, field order, frame rate)

If you select DVDA compatible formats for rendering from Vegas, DVDA won't recompress.

Unless the duration is too long to fit on the disc at your chosen bitrate.

If the duration is too long, DVDA spits the disc out. It just did it to me because of my sloppy sums.

Thanks again guys.
Now I've rendered the movie as DVDA and it looks to be working fine, but I am still having issues with the program wanting to recompress the audio on my menu which has a stand along audio. Will this be ok?

If your stand-alone audio is anything other than AC3 or WAV, DVDA will convert to one of those two.

I still can’t make a (good) DVD on Architect!
I rendered my movie as an MPEG-2, DVD Architect NTSC video stream file, then rendered the audio as a .wav file = The video quality came out like crap, very pixilated. But sadly enough this was the only file type that DVD Architect would accept and burn to a dvd. Note: The total size of the burn came to about 4 gigs and Architect still wanted to compress my files before I burnt the dvd.?
Then I rendered my movie as an MPEG-2, DVD Architect 24p NTSC video stream file, and I kept the audio as .wav = my video came out great so I tried to burn the dvd, but I Architect reverted back to my original problem, the error message when I tried to burn saying that “the file was an unsupported format”. Plus this time when it came time for me to review my problem messages before the burn, it told me that it was going to recompress the audio and video with a yield type symbol to the left of the message. Why the same audio would work on the last burn try and not this one is beyond me. Note: Even though the 4 files I added to the menu (a jpeg, a shortened song for the menu, and the video and audio I created, all which came out to about 3 gigs total) were slightly larger than the other render, the total size of the burn came out to be 4.6 gigs… I’m not sure where this increase in size came from (I even started from scratch to make this menu) and I’ve even tried .m2ts video file at the size of 3.6 gigs and never got higher than 4.0 total on the burn size…?
Can anyone help me out with this one and help me finally burn my first dvd from this program! This is getting frustrating. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Use an AC3 audio file. Believe me, you won't notice any difference in quality and WAV takes up a lot more disk space.

You can only get about 4.2gigs on a DVD. Keep your bitrate around 8000 or less. IF your video is 30 frames per second (29.97), then don't render to 24p. Render to 29.97.

What is your source material? How long is it?

Dave T2

"You can only get about 4.2gigs on a DVD"

A DVD nominally holds 4.7 GB. I have seen reported that this is actually

DVD-R: 4,706,074,624 bytes
DVD+R: 4,700,372,992 bytes

I recommend that you aim to put no more than about 4.6 GB on a DVD to allow for a bit of slack.

Note that computers often quote amounts of data in kibibytes (KiB) = 1024 bytes, Mebibytes (MiB) = 1024x1024 bytes or Gibibytes (GiB) = 1024x1024x1024 bytes because it is faster to calculate, but unfortunately erroneously given as kB, MB or GB.

Hard disk manufacturers always quote the size of their products in GB etc. because the value looks bigger than the GiB equivalent.

The maximum capacity of a DVD is approx 4.3772 GiB.

I tried the AC3 audio file, but the audio did some weird things after I rendered. During the preview on DVD Architect It would continue parts of audio that were no longer there, the parts that I deleted and were no longer showing on the Vegas time line (This was really strange). Sadly enough, DVD Architect would allow me to burn this file on to a dvd.
The source of my material is digital photos, digital camera videos, and 8mm camera video. The total length of my movie is an hour’s and two minutes.
I’ll try to figure a way to render it in a way that will allow me to burn a dvd. I’m still at a loss.

Well, let's start with the standard and most basic ways. Render an MPEG2 file, and in the templates choose the "DVD Architect NTSC video stream" option. For the length of your video you can choose 1-pass fixed bitrate of about 8,000,000 and it should be fine. Make sure the "quality" slider is all the way to the right, which it should be by default for that template. Now render a Dolby Digital AC3 Pro file, give it the same name as the MPG file, but with a .ac3 extension. We recommend changing the dialog normalization to -31dB but this is optional. It makes the DVD Audio a little louder while the default setting is rather quiet.

You'll now have a .mpg file and a .ac3 file which should work perfectly fine in DVD Architect with no reencoding necessary.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

It looks like the .ac3 (Stereo DVD) file will not go into the time line inside of DVD Architect, or attach automatically, like I've seen it do before with .wav files? I have both the video file and audio file named the same and inside of the same folder. The .ac3 file does kind of look like a quicktime file incon, if that helps anyone out. Plus I also notice that the DVD Architect NTSC video stream with 1-pass fixed bitrate of about 8,000,000 doesn't have as high quality as the DVD Architect 24p NTSC video stream, why is that?
Does anyone know of a tech support line that I could call for free, to get help with this problem? I've been working at trying to make my first dvd for almost 2 weeks now.

Is your original video 29.97 or 24p?

You should keep it the same frame rate. You are making this way harder than it needs to be. Do exactly as chienworks says and you will have the best DVD possible with Vegas and DVDA.

If you watch a progressive vs. interlaced video on your computer, most of the time the progressive will look better because Computer screens are natively progressive. But NTSC TV is normally interlaced. If you re-render your 29.97 video to 24p, you are losing quality in your video because it is discarding lines of video information.

If you are starting with 24P video, then you should render 24p video stream.

Dave T2

Great, sounds good. I'll go with the non 24p.
Now, as I was playing around I found that when I try to put a .wav file on my menu to add some music , I'll get that error message and wont be able to burn a dvd. But strangely enough in the same DVD A project if I have no .wav file on the menu but have my video plus audio (as a .wav) file linked to the menu, the burn process works??
Then also, I am still having a problem adding a .ac3 file to the DVD A timeline, it wont accept it.

There are different types of WAV files. Use mediainfo again to compare your menu music to the rendered WAV file for your video and see if they match properties-wise. It could be the wav you are trying to use for the menu is not a Windows WAV file.

Dave T2

You don't need to add the AC3 file to the DVDA timeline. If it has the same name and in the same directory as the MPG file, then DVDA will automatically bring it into the project.

Making DVDs with DVDA is really simple. You encode the video in Vegas using the appropriate DVDA template, then you encode the audio in Vegas using the same root filename.

Open DVDA and drag the MPG file to the Project Overview window (DVDA will also load the AC3 file though there is no visual indication of it) and you're almost done.

I rendered the .ac3 file with the same name as the video file in Vegas. Once i dropped the video file into DVDA the .ac3 file would not follow. I tried to manually drag and drop it into the time line and the program would not allow me. So I went back to the .wav file and it dropped in fine.
The problem I have is that .wav files will not go on to the menu without causing an error. I'm not sure why, I render the audio as the same .wav file type. I even tried the same audio file on the video and on the menu. The time I tried the burn without the menu audio it worked, then the time I tried with the same audio it wouldn't?

Update:
I tried rendering the audio as a:
.mp3
.ac3
.wav
.wma
.aif

and none of those file types would allow me to burn a dvd in DVDA, as long as I had that audio in the menu. I kept receiving and error when I went to burn.

"I rendered the .ac3 file with the same name as the video file in Vegas."

Is it in the SAME folder?


"Once i dropped the video file into DVDA the .ac3 file would not follow. I tried to manually drag and drop it into the time line and the program would not allow me"

That's because this is not the proper workflow. You do not drag and drop to the timeline in DVDA. And, how do you know the audio file didn't also load?

Drag & drop is how we add secondary audio tracks. It is also how we add a music bed to the menu. Are you dragging the audio files to the media timeline or to the menu timeline?

If you use Preview you can play the DVD and confirm if it has audio. If you followed Steve's instructions, it should.

Ok, with the menu audio; I found that if I made a picture/ video with audio as an mpeg and added it to the menu as a mpeg video, DVDA would accept it and burn the dvd. So, that will work for me.

New problem: I burnt the dvd and played it on my dvd player after about 26- 30 minutes the video got all messed up and froze. I could not get it to go past that part, so I played it on a computer. I started the video around the same place that it froze on the dvd player and it played fine, but then in about another 26- 30 minutes the video got all goofy again and froze. Whats going on? I even tried another dvd player and it seemed to freeze in the same places.
Could it be that my 62 minute video is taking up too much memory or something? Do I need to break the video in to chapters (and how would I do that)?
Oh, how the problems continue. So before I wrote this I decided to take some other smaller videos that I created years ago with Vegas 5 and burn them to a dvd with a menu that had audio and it worked as advertised.

I never burn DVD's at the max burn rate. Never. Back down a step. (If the max rate is 12X, I select the next lower rate, 8X in my case)
I also never get any coasters.

There are those who will disagree with this logic, but, I repeat - I also never get any coasters.