Final Rendering Settings With Vegas For DVD

i c e wrote on 3/17/2009, 11:09 AM

Hello all,
I have 7 projects that I have finally brought to completion and will now be doing final renders.
They are all AVI files used in the projects and I will be rendering to MPEG2 for DVD Architect 4.5 and obviously want the absolute best quality, I don't care how long render times take as I can do them all night.
Here are my settings if someone could just look over them and let me know if there are things that I could change to get better results.
IN PROJECT PROPERTIES:

NTSC DV Widescreen (720x480, 29.970 fps)
VIDEO
Field Order: Lower field first (Is this right?)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.2121 (NTSC DV Widescreen)
Pixel Format: 8-bit (What even is 32-bit floating?)
Full Resolution rendering Quality: Best
Motion Blur type: Guassian
Deinterlace Method: Blend Fields
AUDIO
Bus Mode: Stereo
Number of Stereo Busses: 0
Sample rate (Hz): 44,100
Bit Depth: 16
Resample and Stretch Quality: Best

IN RENDER AS:
Save as Type: MainConcept MPEG-2
Template: DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream
and the settings under Custom (the ones in question) are as follows.....
I-Frames: 15
B-Frames: 2
'insert I-Frames at markers' checked.
Profile: Main
Level: Main
Field Order: Lower field first (again, is this right?)
Video Quality: High 31
'Insert sequence header before every GOP' Checked (Good Old Party?LOL)
'Constant Bit Rate' Unchecked
'Variable bit rate (bps)' Checked
Maximum (bps): 9,500,000
Average (bps): 6,000,000
Minimum (bps): 192,000
I have no idea about Advanced Video settings so I won't mess with all that... but if I should...let me know.
Audio
I am rendering the audio separately. I saw some thing that said that if I do AA3 File it won't play in most PAL players (something that I was hoping might be possible). So was going to do a WAV file instead....but then DVD A has to convert it again to something else..

I know this is asking for a lot, but i really appreciate the help. This is very important to me... This is the main area of Vegas where I am really clueless..

Thank you so much,

Josh

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 11:18 AM

Everything looks fine in your project properties except that your audio needs to be set to 48,000. I have no idea why Vegas defaults to 44,100, it's simply incorrect for video. And, yes, lower field first is correct.

Secondly, in terms of total playing time, how much video do you want to fit on a single DVD? This is going to determine the bitrate and whether it should be CBR or two-pass VBR.

Most current PAL DVD players will play NTSC discs with AC3 audio. This is not as much of a concern as it once was.

FuTz wrote on 3/17/2009, 11:46 AM

Like John said, go with 48,000 for best audio quality.
A quick fact: audio quality concern is more important when you speak of "48k vs. 44,1k" than it is by "24bit vs.16bit" in most post-prod audio houses.

i c e wrote on 3/17/2009, 12:34 PM

Thanks guys,
I will be putting about 1hr30min on the DVD plus the menu.

So what does this mean?

Continued help for you and other forum users would be appreciated (I just don't want to have to go back and re-render that much video on 7 projects the night before I board the plane, you know?)

Thanks again,

Josh

Terry Esslinger wrote on 3/17/2009, 1:15 PM

For 90 minutes Google a bit rate calculator. It will tell ou what the optimum bit rates are to fit it in a SL DVD. If you are doing DL DVD no problem.

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 1:31 PM

OK, render MPEG2 out of Vegas using the "DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen" template. Hit the Custom button and on the "Video" tab, select both "Variable Bitrate" and "Two Pass" and change the bitrate settings to:

Maximum: 8,000,000
Average: 6,590,000
Minimum: 3,952,000

Then render the audio separately as "Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro" selecting the "Stereo DVD" template. Hit the "Custom" button again and set the "Data Rate" to "192kbps" and the "Dialog Normalization" to "-31db", then go to the "Preprocessing" tab and set both the "Line Mode Profile" and the "RF Mode Profile" to "None." You might want to save this as a custom template.

When you render the audio, give it the same name as the corresponding video file and DVD Architect will automatically load this audio file when you load the video file.

Using these settings will pretty much fill up the DVD and give you the maximum quality possible.

rs170a wrote on 3/17/2009, 1:43 PM

John, you neglected to give Josh the link to the bitrate calculator you have on your site :-)
Note: the link is to a zipped file.

Mike

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 1:49 PM

Oops, thanks, Mike.

It should be noted that the calculator on my site can be set in the preferences to either use 1024 or 1000 bits as a "kilobyte". For Vegas, it should be set to "1000" so that if it says "6824" you would enter "6,824,000" in Vegas.

i c e wrote on 3/17/2009, 2:40 PM

That was fast guys, thanks so much!
John I really appreciate taking the time to help me out with this.... I assume that you put all my calculations into that Bit rate calc. so I don't need to do it again. I saved a custom template in Vegas so i can use it each time with those settings. So that's really nice.

Again, you guys are so helpful,

grasias mucho,

Josh

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 5:51 PM

Josh,

Just to be clear, in the future, your bitrate values will change depending on the length of the video you are trying to put on a DVD. That's what the bitrate calculator is for.

The template that I suggested that you save was the one for the AC3 audio. That one won't change from project to project.

John

i c e wrote on 3/17/2009, 6:05 PM

Uh.....okay I think that would explain my next question.
I have 7 projects totaling 1hr30min But each project is much less. So then I will need to use the bit rate calculator for each video?? But I don't want to render each video to fill the DVD. I'm sorry but I am confused.
I understand that I will not want to use that setting for every video but I thought i could use it to render each video for this DVD and get the perfect setting.... But now I am thinking that I must certainly be wrong.
Especially because when I go to render a Video that took less than a few hours the first time now is estimated over 13hrs!!!

So if you could help me with this some more that sure would be nice. Sorry I'm so lost,

Thanks man,
Josh

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 6:13 PM

If all seven videos are going on one DVD, then, yes, render each of the files with the bitrate settings I gave you in my previous post. After rendering, all seven videos will fit on one DVD with a little room to spare for the menu.

If you are putting each video each on a separate DVD, then use CBR with a bitrate of 8,000,000.

i c e wrote on 3/17/2009, 6:34 PM

That was fast.
Yes, they are all going on the same DVD and the estimated time dropped to the usual time after it finished the Pro Titler titles (man, those things are huge!)

I will also burn each of them separately for individual masters. I will use the 8mil bit rate for those, so thanks for that bit too.
On that same note.....
I have dreams that as we travel through out South America (in two weeks) I might bump into (drive to the office of) some local networks that be able (I will beg) to broadcast some of my films. Who knows? I just wondered if there is anything that i would need to do for them to be able do this...

thanks

Josh

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 8:53 PM

It's possible that they may be able to play them straight from the DVDs. You'll just have to ask what they want in the way of masters.

i c e wrote on 3/17/2009, 9:16 PM

Thanks again John,
I completed the render and the quality is quiet noticeable. It looks much better overall. the only thing is that it seems a bit more grainy in dark areas but it might just be my eye. Could anything I did effect this?

Thanx so much,

Josh

rs170a wrote on 3/17/2009, 9:28 PM

Josh, the biggest problem with creating DVDs is that there's always a degree of compression involved.
The longer the final project, the more compression needed to fit the project onto a single-sided single layer DVD.
In your case, there's roughly 5:1 compression (compared to the original AVI files).
Something has to suffer and, unfortunately, it's the picture quality, especially in the dark scenes, that you notice first.
Did you do a 2-pass encode as John suggested?
This can help in dark/noisy scenes.

Mike

rs170a wrote on 3/17/2009, 9:31 PM

For Vegas, it should be set to "1000"...

Thanks John. I didn't know that.
I've always set mine to 1024 (can't remember why though).

Mike

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 9:39 PM

No, it's probably not anything that you did. Depending on how you're viewing the renders and with what player, the black levels may be slighly different which could reveal the noise in the dark areas which may have always been there.

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 9:42 PM

I typically set mine to "1024" also, but that's because I use Canopus Procoder for my MPEG2 renders and it considers a kilobyte to be 1024 bytes. Vegas deals with it in actual bits, hence the "1000" setting.

rs170a wrote on 3/17/2009, 9:49 PM

Thanks again John.
Is this (1000 vs. 1024) in the Vegas or DVDA manuals anywhere?

Mike

John_Cline wrote on 3/17/2009, 10:40 PM

"Is this (1000 vs. 1024) in the Vegas or DVDA manuals anywhere?"

No, I don't believe it is. Vegas deals with it in bits per second, so the "byte to kilobyte" conversion doesn't apply. The bitrate calculator on my web site deals with it either way, a 1024-byte kilobyte for programs which deal with kilobytes (like Procoder) and 1000-byte kilobytes for programs like Vegas which deal with it in bits. Now that I think about it, even though DVDA deals with megabits, I'm pretty sure it deals with it in base-10. i.e. 8.000 megabits/sec is 8,000,000 bits/second. This isn't strictly correct, although if you set the bitrate calculator from my web site to "1000" it will be correct in Vegas or DVDA, you just need to move the decimal point.

The whole kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte thing is a "bit" confusing because it's base-2 not base-10.

A Kilobyte = 1024 bytes.
A Megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes (not 1,024,000 bytes as one might expect.)
A Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes (Neither 1,024,000,000 nor 1,048,000,000 as expected)
A Terabyte = 1,099,511,627,800 bytes (also not a base-10 multiple of 1024 bytes)

Curiously, hard drive manufacturers calculate everything in base-10 because it makes their hard drives seem bigger. A megabyte is 1 million bytes and a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes and a terabyte is 1 trillion bytes.

rs170a wrote on 3/18/2009, 6:44 AM

Vegas deals with it in bits per second, so the "byte to kilobyte" conversion doesn't apply.

How am I supposed to know this?
I'm aware of the 1000 vs. 1024 issue which is why I thought I was supposed to set the bitrate calculator to 1024.
Oh well, I continue to learn something new every day.
The good news is that setting it to 1024 gives me a wee bit more of a safety margin for my encodes.

Mike
waiting for his head to explode with everything he's expected to remember :-)

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 3/18/2009, 7:02 AM

Hi,

John wrote:
Then render the audio separately as "Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro" selecting the "Stereo DVD" template. Hit the "Custom" button again and set the "Data Rate" to "192kbps" and the "Dialog Normalization" to "-31db", then go to the "Preprocessing" tab and set both the "Line Mode Profile" and the "RF Mode Profile" to "None." You might want to save this as a custom template.

This belongs to one of the major pitfalls why the out of the box experience (OBE) is not what is should be! Guess how many DVD's I burned with the audio level very low, before browsing this forum and finding this advice (about 2 years ago).

Nothing can be found in the documentation. I claim that at this very moment the are a lot of Vegas users unwillingly burning DVD's with too low audio levels... Why can't this be already as a standard (template)???

This just learns us a lesson that you have yourself monitor all render settings, and understand what they mean. To get at least decent results. I wonder if the "lighter" non-pro versions of Vegas suffer from the same problem?

Christian

rs170a wrote on 3/18/2009, 7:32 AM

Christian, I've never used it (I found out about the AC-3 "tweaks" a long time ago and created a preset for it) but I'm wondering if the new Dolby Digital AC-3 Studio with AGC preset would do the same job.

edit: Knowledgebase Answer 2716 addresses the low level issue.

Mike

i c e wrote on 3/18/2009, 11:14 AM

Thanks again y'all for getting back to me.
I think your right that the quality is improved and thus shows the grainy areas more.

Another question, I noticed that when i play the DVD on a 4:3 TV and it puts the letterboxes up there they are not 100% black. Maybe 70-80% black. I don't know if it is my video or my TV. has anyone else ever had this same problem?

peace,

josh