So what setting should first be fiddled with? I've read that the minumum should NOT be lowered. But as for the Maximum and Average settings which one should be fiddled with and by how much?

I did manage to get the 2 hour video down to a size that it would fit on a DVD by changing Maximum to 7,000,000 and Average to 5,000,000. But that was a wild and lucky guess. The thing is that it took over 2 hours to render. It's a lot of time to waste if the end result was a file that was still too big.

I understand the amount of motion has a bearing on the size, however, isn't there some sort of guidelines to go by?

If you do a search, there are some calculators that will help you figure out bitrates for a certain length of material. You might try this site

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/

Dave T2

You can always just do what I do: Render the file with whatever settings you want, (for me NTSC DVD best, and AC3), create the DVD in DVDA, (or Reel or whatever), and if the resultant TS_Video file is too large for a standard DVD-r disk, compress it with DVD2ONE, or DVD shrink. Try it once, I think you'll be surprised by the results.

JTH

i ran across this yesterday. check out issue 7. i would be interested if this chart helps you get the highest quality for your movie length.

http://www.jetdv.com/tts/archive.htm

Is this helpful?

http://dvd-hq.info/Calculator.html

Mark

Another alternative:

Use Vegas CD-burning function to estimate final render size. Here's how.

Open your project in Vegas
Set your project properties to your desired output format
Make a time-selection that covers all your tracks from start to end
Click Tools/Burn CD
You don't have to actually burn, but only to open the burn-CD dialog box
That's where the file size estimate is shown

Hey XPUser2003...

While the feature you referred to is good, it only indicates the size without doing anything in the way of additional compression. In other words, I already know approximately how much video can fit on a DVD by way of time.

In my situation, I already know that my video is too long to fit on a DVD. Your suggestion only confirms what I already knew.

Thanks for the help though.

I'm still checking into the other suggestions.

Ok, managed to get a freeware bitrate calculator. Now my question is, what section do I change within Vegas? For example, the calculator says: "estimate video bitrate=6366 kbps".

Vegas presents 3 places to change numbers. 1) the Maximum field, 2) the Average field, and 3) the Minimum field. Which one to I make changes to?

I found this online calculator http://www.dvdrhelp.com/calc quite simple to use. You can also download it from http://www.dvdrhelp.com/BitrateCalc.zip to use it offline.

I set Audio to 1536 kbit/s, enter the length and then use it's bitrate setting as the Average field - this setting alone seems to solve the 'fit onto DVD' problem. I haven't needed to change Max or Min yet but I'm still learning!