Well, I realize there won't be any degradation in the traditional sense, but what about digital degradation? By that I mean, if you peform lossy compression on the same image repeatedly, eventually you will degrade the image, correct?

I'm not entirely sure how the scheme works, so I'm interested to hear if anyone can explain how this works in detail.

The Vegas codec is very good in this regard.

Your process is just two generations of DV. You will not see any degradation. Some folks have testing Vegas and rendered 100 generations. The end result was the first few dozen generations did not have noticeable degenerations.

it is very good and holds up great. I think Spot did some tests, do a search and you should be able to find the link.

But I just saw somehting and I am wondering...hmmm.

This has to do with a problem I am having with the new version of the stand alone Main Concept MPEG encoder so to skip most of it - I have been looking at every DV codec on my system just to see what is causing a problem with the enocder. So I look at the Main Concept DVC-PRO codec and than a bit later I am in the Vegas folders and looking at the DV Codec - and guess what I see? Yup - the DV codec in the folder is the DVC-Pro codec. Same size, same file info. Different name. hmmm...ok, so someone tell me - this means what exactly? That Vegas should be able to read/render/capture DV, DVC-Pro 25 and/or DVC-Pro 50? But it just isn't implimented?

sections of the timeline that have only 1 event of video should be copied without *any* rendering.
if you have text, transitions, or effects, there will be rendering and recompression.
by far, the Vegas DV codec is the best i've worked with. but don't take my word for it. just do a couple tests for yourself with some other codecs, particularly the microsoft dv codec (which is absolutely horrible).
-nate

http://www.vegasusers.com/testbench/files/generations/

Demonstration of re-rendering 99 generations with the built in Vegas DV codec vs. Microsoft's codec. The result shows that even after 99 generations SONY's codec is better than Microsoft's after only 1 generation!

Bottom line: don't worry about it.

Make sure you read the previous posts carefully. In your second "render" if all you are doing is putting the three AVI files on the timeline in order to combine them, there will be no additional degradation at all. The bits are merely copied. 100% fidelity.

If you render these three files to MPEG2 format, then you will have gone through one additional render (to the AVI file) compared to having combined all three projects into one VEG file and rendering them directly to MPEG2 (skipping the intermediate AVI file). However, the previous posts, and Spot's excellent test some months back, prove that the degradation of one DV AVI render using the Vegas DV encoder is impossible to see.

However, if you still don't buy all this, and on principle just want to say that you got the "ultimate" quality, you could instead render each VEG project to its own MPEG2 and AC3 files and then use Womble's MPEG Wizard program to combine these together (lossless, no quality degradation).

I'd sort of thought along the same lines until I gave it some more thought and there is a subtle difference. On footage that's already DV25 then the second step isn't going to make a shred of difference as Vegas isn't rendering at all, just copying the ones and noughts.
But, generated media doesn't start out as DV25, Vegas performs all its calc on uncompressed frames. So generated media goes straight to the mpeg encoder as uncompressed frames, same applies to still.
So if your project contains any of these and you render it out and then encode from that then you have taken a quality hit on these segments. Just how noticeable it will that be, can't really say but you must loose something as the mpeg encoders work in 4:2:2 but you've taken the media down to 4:2:0 or 4:1:1.

I'd suggest if your project contains a LOT of FXs and transitions and generated media or HiRes stills you'll get better mpeg-2 by going straight from the T/L to the encoder as Vegas decompresses the frames, applies the FXs and then sends the frame without further compression to the encoder. If the frames aren't compressed to start with then you're even further in front.

As an alternative, I thought I read somewhere that a .veg file can be placed on the timeline, so you could put all three there and render the whole thing once.

A project can *not* be placed on the timeline in *.veg form - however you can open that project and frameserve it to another instance of Vegas and place that on the timeline. Nesting would be great - and that is where placing multiple veg/projects on a single timeline would come into play. Vegas does not do nesting however.