Thank you John,

I am new at this and I thought since I had "space" on the DVD that usisng 9800 would be best,

Yes, it does run less than an hour. So I understand that I should render NOT in Default o on MPEG2 (video & Audio) but with DVDA MPEG2 and AC3 separate? and that the "SPIKES" over 9800 are the ones causing that the project won't run on my PC Drives?

Thanks again John.

You'll see that many of the more experienced users here recommend rendering as a two-step process in Vegas, rather than letting DVDA-2 do the work. I tip my hat to these wise folks, having recently adopted that strategy as part of my regular workflow.

Although rendering this way involves a little more preparation on your part -- determing an appropriate bitrate to best fit your project to disc, for example -- you'll also find that you have much more control over the process. In particular, this permits selection of CBR or VBR, and one or two-pass encoding.

Another thing you'll see written is to avoid using that default mpeg2 template when you do render from Vegas and your target media is DVD. For one thing, the "quality" slider in that default setting is set at the 1/2 way point! Maybe it doesn't make "that much" difference, but I prefer to have this paramater maxed-out. As the others have said -- use the Vegas DVD Architect video stream templates and render the audio as a separate step.

I was recently sent a burned DVD-R wouldn't play without pauses in either of my settop DVD players, or in my Lite-On CD/DVD combo drive.
It did play in my DVD burner, though. I suspected that it might be a bitrate problem, and downloaded a simple bitrate viewer tool. Sure enough, the average bit rate was about 9600, with spikes going higher than that.

The picture was gorgeous, but what good is that if you can't play it all? I've since read some articles on encoding bitrates, and have settled on some settings that I'll be using to try to avoid this situation on my own projects. I don't want to start an encoding war here, but the consensus of the articles I read seemed to be that DVDs burned by consumer equipment will probably enjoy greater compatibility if the maximum bitrate for either CBR or VBR is 8000kbps or less. For my own use, I've decided to try a few projects with a max of 7500kbps and see how that works out.

As I said, I hope this doesn't hijack the thread into a decoding argument, when the intent is to help a similarly-inexperienced user understand that too high a bitrate can cause playback problems.

The idea is that the spec says DVD players have to be able to handle up to 9.8, but some have said that burned disks are harder to read than pressed disks, and if a reader needs to re-read a track then it will begin to fall behind if the bitrate is at the upper end of the legal range. I don't know if that's true or not, but in my own experience a test disk had difficulty fast-forwarding a couple of years ago with a disk burned at 9.8.

I never go above 8 average for my VBR encoding, with a max of 9.5 and a min of 0.

OK guys,

I did it all and the whole thing just worked GREAT. However on the final DVD the colors seem oversaturated.

All the previews and test seemed just perfect color, but the final BURNED DVD, as I said, the entire project is oversturated or too much contrast.

Any Ideas?

Thanks, really .......

make sure that:
if you're watching the dvd on your PC - whatever program you are using doesnt have contrast/color settings set in places other than "normal" (or all video effects for the program are OFF).

for the TV, videos often look different on TV than they will on your computer monitor....

A lot of DVD players have several "picture enhancement" modes. On Sony players, for example, the modes are called something like "Normal", "Vivid", "Cinema" etc. Make sure it is set for "Normal" or "Standard." This is true for both stand-alone DVD players and software-based DVD players.

And, as has already been pointed out, TV's and PC's have different gamma curves and do not display video the same way. The only valid way to judge whether the saturation is cranked too high is to use a decent DVD player with any picture enhancement modes turned off and viewed on a television which has been calibrated using something like the Avia test DVD.

John