I rendered from Vegas to NTSC video only stream like I always do and the whole project is 3.3 gig, 86% of the DVD disc.

15 hours 47 minutes to go.

Any other suggestions? No hurry. I have till midnight tonight.

I used to love my Sonic Foundry, oops I mean Sony but with each passing hour my relationship dims.

Dont' have any suggestions, but did you get any warnings when you started the create disk (yellow diamonds with exclamation points in them)? (When you say you rendered video only from Vegas, I assume you rendered to .mpg with an emplty audio stream and DVDA requires rather than rendering a video stream only file.) DVDA should definitely not be rerendering the size file you mention. Has something wierd happened so DVDA is linking to a different file from the .mpg you imported (check file links in DVDA)?

Don't get too sour on Sonic/Sony just because of DVDA. Vegas, ACID, and Sound Forge are great products, but DVDA is a dog. Hopefully they will fix this mess in the next release.

As to your problem, when the render finishes, check the File -> Optimize DVD dialog and see what DVDA reports. As you probably know, you should see little green check marks next to the video you rendered in Vegas. If you do, it will not re-render them.

There is one well-known bug that involves scene selection. I have had this happen many times. Under certain circumstances (which I cannot, unfortunately, repeatably reproduce), inserting a scene selection menu causes DVDA to treat the video as if it were two different video files. If you go to the Optimize menu I just mentioned, you will see a project size far larger than it should be. In your case, I would expect you would see 6.6 GBytest. The solution is to remove your scene selection menus, check to make sure that DVDA now correctly recognizes the correct 3.3 Gbyte size, and then insert the scene selection menu again.

Lots of people have reported this.

Lots of people don't know how to use software or just ignore what its trying to tell you. There I said it. I feel better. :-)

While DVD-A lacks many features and it has some annoying "bugs" if you PAY ATTENTION you shouldn't have problems. The optimize screen in one such example. Like John said if you see a file that's being reported at 6 GB well duh... something is wrong. Why would you go forward and try to burn a DVD with a know problem?

Also I suspect MANY aren't aware that burning a DVD is a multiple step process. Even if you use DVD-2 compliant files and they fit on your DVD so DVD-D doesn't want or need to do any re-compression, there is the matter of making the image files. Not pictures, that's just what they're called. Vegas can't do that. That's what DVD-A or any DVD authoring program must do. Convert your MPEG-2 files into a format that works for DVD. It takes time. For me, typically about 40 minutes for a loaded DVD. That's on top of any rendering time already done in Vegas.

Well Billy Boy, I did pay attention. I went to optimize like I always do. There were checks next to the video but the one intro wav file needed recompression. The other suggestion that there is a bug in the menu system was interesting, I've never faced that before even though I used many a menu in my DVD's.
After checking everything, the file size was still 3.3 gig, not double the size.

So Billy Boy, I did check everything and went through the checks. The only thing that came up was the recompression of the single wav file.

Oh, and by the way, the render time is increasing. I now have 15 hours and 56 minutes.

After checking everything, the file size was still 3.3 gig, not double the size.

Well, that pretty much rules out my theory.

I would recommend that you use the Support button at the top of this screen, and click on "Email Support" to tell Sony about this. They may have some troubleshooting steps to follow.

Oh, one other question: What version of DVDA are you using? That might be an issue. Also, do you have space on the drive being used for temporary files? If the disk is almost full, you may be experiencing some sort of disk thrashing. This would explain why the problem didn't occur before, but has now just reared its head, and seems to be getting worse. If you have more than one hard disk, you might also try creating the files on a different physical drive from where the MPEG and AC3 files reside.

Hope one of these suggestions helps!

The point I'm trying to make is if you see something odd, STOP.
Obviously unless some serious re-compressing is going on, it shouldn't take 16 hours to render.

The logical thing to do would be to stop, take apart the project one item at a time, start to make a DVD and see what's causing it. That's why they made DVD-RW, to reuse.

Its just a suggestion. It seems pointless to me to let it go for 16 hours, and likely at the end still not have a useable disc. Take a half hour or so, and try what I suggested and you may find the cause.

Thanks John. I've got plenty of disk space on two separate drives and creating the files on separate drives, so that's not it. Latest version of DVDA. Not that. I've stopped the render twice after a half hour to troubleshoot and couldn't find out why it was recompressing. I think it may have to do with a bug in DVDA that someone mentioned regarding the way it reads built chapter files.
I added and named chapters for each of the song and then used the 'scene selection menu' to create the scenes. This is where it gets bogged down. Since I want to have chapter headings, I don't know what else to do if this is a bug. I'll do the email support I guess.

At least I have a sense of humor and although I had hoped to present the finished DVD tonight, that ain't gonna happen. My 11 year old son and I were joking that the render time (which adds and subtracts time in some strange esoteric way) should really have a centuries, decades, years, months and weeks column, not just hours minutes and seconds.

I'll be curious to see what I come up with sometime tomorrow morning.
Good thing this one doesn't have a hard deadline.

22 hours 54 minutes into the render
12 hours 57 minutes to go

Oh, by the way. Its only using 14% of CPU? Does the render and compression mostly happen in memory?

Time is relative at this point.
BB

LIke I said in my earlier post, you should contact Sony directly. While DVDA is a dog, it usually works for simple projects. When I have created the MPEG files in Vegas, the preparation time (to create the VOB and IFO files) is usually only about 10 minutes on my P4 2.8 GHz machine. I don't think I've ever waited more than 20 minutes.

I HAVE had big problems with disk thrashing while "scrubbing" the timeline in DVDA (during the process of locating points for new chapter stops). However, even on these problem projects, the prepartion usually goes pretty darn fast.

I'm afraid I'm stumped.

Thanks John. I've NEVER waited for a render for more than a couple of hours on my 2.8 either. I think you're right about the chapter markers. I won't be able to do much until it finishes because I would like to have an actual finished product some day. Maybe Billy Boy is right and it won't even work at the end. But I'll find out in a mere 9 hours. Hmmm...I added another two hours in there somewhere...

What happens if you just drop your mpeg file into DVDA and go right to the prepare step without adding menus?

Check the optimize window. Files without a green checkmark will be recompressed. If your MPEG files are not compliant for passthrough, they will not have a green checkmark.

If you have a bunch of animated motion menus (say many buttons with moving video inside), this could explain the long render time.

Wav files always get compressed to either MPEG audio or AC-3 (user specified).

That's got to be it! When I put in the chapter sub menu, I am pretty sure they were all animated. I don't want to really close it all down to find out now but will do so when it finishes this Herculean task.

I was hoping to wake up this morning to a finished render but NOOOOO. It still has 7 hours and 46 minutes.

That's 37 hours and 9 minutes. Good thing I don't need the studo computer for a few days whilst on spring break here.
Now its just letting it play out to see if I can set some sort of DVDA render length record.

Who has the record by the way...

I'll try all the suggestions when its done. And by the way, as I mentioned several times in the thread, it was all optimized except for the one small wav that was to be played when the menu opened.

I suppose if you didn't limit the animation in the menus, and had them go on for half an hour each, you could end up with some serious rendering times. Usually you are supposed to use a clip of 30-60 seconds.

I am also "rendering" for an extremely long time (11 hours, with 8 more hours to go) in DVD-A. (same config etc. has always worked very fast)
Using mpg/AC3 dvd-a compatible files from vegas....

it's rendering the 40 or so animated thumbnail scene selections - I've never used so many in the past.

How can I limit the length of each of the thumbnail animations?

How can I limit the length of each of the thumbnail animations?

One sure way to do it is to create the exact clip you want to use for each thumbnail in Vegas. Trim it to the length you want and then render that clip to a small MPEG or AVI file. Then, bring those small files into DVDA and use as your animated thumbnails. The other advantage of doing this is that you can create "seemless" loops. In Vegas, just put a dissolve at the end of the video clip, and then copy the same instance of the video after that. Then, do a dissolve between them. Finally, trim the beginning of the first instance of the clip and the end of the second instance of the clip so they begin and end respectively exactly one frame apart. You will then have a seemless loop with a nice dissolve when the video repeats rather than an abrupt jump.

I think what may be causing all the problem here is using long video clips for the thumbnail animation. DVDA must then render AND resize the entire lenght of each of these clips. Even if the same clip, when used as a movie, doesn't need to be rendered, because it is already in MPEG format, when it is shrunk to icon size, it will need to be re-rendered. Thus, if you don't limit the size of the clip in some way, and if you have a dozen animated icons, each using a portion of your main one hour movie, then DVDA must render twelve one hour movies.

Bottom line: If you want to use animated icons, you only need 30 seconds to a minute of video. Render what you need, and import that into the Thumnail box and then click on "Animate Thumbnail." If you have already rendered your main video and audio, then the prepare should happen in ten minutes or so (on a fast system).

Thanks John, that's a creative and interesting idea. It's a bit too much work for the particular project I'm doing now, particularly with so many scenes, but I'll keep it in mind for the future. So for DVD-A v2, we need the ability to specify the length of each thumbnail and "smooth" transition effect for looping...

The smooth looping takes time, but the cutting is trivial and is something you pretty much HAVE to do if you want to avoid those "idiotic render times."

ok, will consider...
thanks...

Thought that those of you who have followed this might want to know the final result:

Final Render time: 52 hours 37 minutes!
Did I set the record?

Burn time about 15 minutes.
DVD worked and looked GREAT. Until the last song where the video got scrambled and the scene froze up. ):

No worries. I'm gonna redo the menus and rerender without animated menus. I expect it will take the usual two hours.

Interesting experiment. Glad I had the time and CPU allotment to let it go and see what happened. Thanks for advice and concern along the way.
Bill

No worries. I'm gonna redo the menus and rerender without animated menus

If you follow my suggestions in my previous post, I think it will prepare in pretty much the usual time, and you can still have animated menus.