It wouldn't surprise me! Could be and I simply haven't noticed.

I was thinking a bitrate calculator would be nice for when I render MPEG2 projects at a certain bitrate to know how much space it would take up on a DVD.

That kind of is already in DVD-A3, and it's automatic.

JJK

JJ, I agree however it would be nice if these feature was available in Vegas 6 as well. Honestly, I dont know why it never was. I understand that a Vegas 6 calculator would have no idea about menu size or extras but at least a guesstimation would be better then blindly encoding in Vegas 6 only to have it be too big for DVDA3 and forcing a re-encode.

There's a billion standalone shareware DVD bitrate calculators out there. There's a nice online one at:
http://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm
You can also download it from the same site.

As for timecode, yes indeedy, Vegas has a little window on the bottom right of the timeline that tells you timecode for in-point, out-point and selection length.

WTCC 2 is a handy little freeware timecode calculator I use all the time:
http://www.sssm.com/tools/tools.html

>>Isn't this kind of already there?

Oh, it is. I use it ALL-of-the-time.

Terrific functionality. You can adjust your region to get exactly the frames you want. Your selection in 00:00:00:00 is shown at the lower right, just under the timeline, I believe. Drag the in/out point to get what you want.

I know it's been in at least Vegas 4, 5 & 6.

What I'd like is a physical calculator, they used to be everywhere around TV stations, mostly custom built looking things. I'd be happy with a desktop Time calculator, no need to get down frames. I've a few clients I'd give them to as presents if they were cheap enough.
Bob.

Actually, for encoding MPEG-2 and AC-3 in Vegas, for use in DVDA, an even better approach than a calculator would be have a simple menu from which you could describe your proposed DVD: how many menus, how many subtitle tracks, how many audio tracks, etc. Vegas would then automatically calculate the correct average bitrate (obviously including some padding for unforseen extras) and automatically insert that into the encoder. You could still override this decision, but it would eliminate having to use an external calculator and would all but eliminate the questions that EVERY new user asks about what bitrate to use in Vegas if they want to create a DVD.

Obviously this doesn't help is you are going to create multiple MPEG-2 files that will eventually be combined in DVDA, and DVDA needs all sorts of enhancements to make such multiple MPEG-2 projects play without creating multiple titlesets (you can sort of do this by putting them into a Music Compilation, but who the heck knows that?).

John,

I thought Playlists in DVDA3 fixed the multiple MPEG thing. Am I mistaken?

It ain't cheep, Bob, but here ya go!
http://www.calculated.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=55

Spot,
compared to the time wasted when my client tries to get me to fit 80 mins of audio onto a 74 min CD it's CHEAP!
They'll be get my order real soon.
Thanks for finding that for me.
Bob.

They've been around a while, all this company does is make weird time devices. I have their MeasureMaster Classic that someone gave me as a gift, and now they send me catalogs every few months. It's very handy for figuring out pixels. I've been tempted to buy the video one, but don't have a huge need for it. I'm interested in hearing your response.

Yeah, I know about the bitrate calculators on Videohelp and the shareware ones. However, it would in fact be nice if the info could be available in Vegas so that I wouldn't have to minimize and go to something else or whatever.

Right now the thing I actually do before I encode my MPEG2 in Vegas is drag the unedited raw footage into DVDA and adjust the end time to the exact time that the edited footage is in Vegas. Then I set the bitrate to see what number I can get without exceeding my allotted space on the DVD. Once I get that I then go back to Vegas and set the bitrate for my MPEG2 and render. It's a nice method and works, but only if I have a single video clip that is at least the length of what my finished project would be since you can't drop more than one video (lengthwise, not counting additional angles) in the time line in DVDA.

Guys, I must be missing something here. You can do the bitrate calculation almost on your fingers:

Overall average bitrate = 600 / minutes

That's it. Throw in how many minutes in your masterpiece, do the division, and the result is the maximum average bitrate allowed in order to fit on a DVD-5. You need to subtract for the audio bitrate, also.

Example: 90 minute video

600 / 90 = 6.67Mb/sec

Take away 0.2Mb/sec if you use 2-channel Dolby Digital.

That leaves 6.47Mb/sec for the average video bitrate. I'd set the max at 9 and the min at 0. Done.