bbrooks wrote:
I am trying to render a project that is about 30 minutes. I chose the MPEG-2 template in Vegas 4.0 to render prior to putting in DVDAC. This is really more of a Vegas question but can apply to DVDAC as well. How long should the render of a project that length take. I got disheartned when it got up to about 3 1/2 hours. Is this normal rendering time for a project that small.

First of all, if you're planning to author with DVDA2.0, you shoud render the video in Vegas as DVDA NTSC video stream. For the audio, you should render again the same project as AC-3 (stereo or 5.1, depends of the properties you chose before). Both files should be named exactly the same. If you do this, DVDA will not have to recompress the video, nor even the audio. This way DVDA won't take a long time for preparing and burning a project. However, processor speed takes a very important role. Make sure you have a powerfull processor.

The other questions:
Also does the stereo audio automatically encode to AC-3? If the audio were 5.1 would it also encode in the MPEG-2 format and still remain 5.1?

-as far as I know DVDA accepts assets (files) such as AC-3. It can recompress from AC-3 stereo to AC-3 5.1 surround;
-as far as I know, in DVDA, AC-3 is for audio and MPEG for video.
:)