Rich....a few things for your observations.

1. If the file doesn't need to be reoptimized/squished - then you don't have to do it (or said a different way ...yes you can override it). But if it needs it - it needs it. Then there is no way to override it - since it has to be done.

2. The filesize estimation is not wrong. It's the bitrate that it is 'defaulting' to that you are looking at. If you changed the optimazation slider - you will see the size shrink or grow accordingly.

I have started out with a 1.5 gb MPEG file that I created in Vegas, brought it in to DVDA - Optimizing says that it will take (something crazy) like 4 gig. But slide the slider down-and I can get it to go down to 200 mb.

I tested a 200 mb slide job once - looked like crap. So, when I have to optimize, I take it as low as I can while still fitting the other videos I want.

Normally a 1.5 gig file down to about 8 or 900 mb. End result is - the video still looks sharp and clean.

Hope this helps ya some

If you don't need a menu, add them all to a "music compilation" and they will play back to back.

>1. If the file doesn't need to be reoptimized/squished - then you don't have to do it (or said a different way ...yes you can override it). But if it needs it - it needs it. Then there is no way to override it - since it has to be done.

*Required* squishing is indicated how? And if its not required, how would I do it? I don't see anything in the "Optimize DVD" window that gives me these options. Is it somewhere else?

>2. The filesize estimation is not wrong. It's the bitrate that it is 'defaulting' to that you are looking at. If you changed the optimazation slider - you will see the size shrink or grow accordingly.

I'm confused by this too. I know the bitrate of the file and I know the file size - they're consistent. Its the estimated size of the file in the "Optimize DVD" window thats wrong. (Not news to this forum, of course.)

>I have started out with a 1.5 gb MPEG file that I created in Vegas, brought it in to DVDA - Optimizing says that it will take (something crazy) like 4 gig. But slide the slider down-and I can get it to go down to 200 mb...I take it as low as I can while still fitting the other videos I want.

Right, so you see the crazy initial estimation as well. Then you adjust the slider and it corrects itself. I'll try this. I know the original file should fit, but if I can nudge the bitrate slider back to sanity, I could continue.

I'm actually not worried about the quality. Its a slide show with pan/crop rendered at 6Mbps avg and 8Mbps peak. It could take a significant reduction and still look fine. My problem is my own fault: A very old and slow computer. My wife and daughter will kill me if I have to take over the computer for the new 50+ hrs. Basically I went to great effort to render "chapters" in overnight sections. An "optimize" just isn't practical.

Appreciate the help.

Aside: I've actually written a test DVD using John Meyer's hack to play one chapter after another. It works great, but I did discover two things: (1) Up to 4 chapters, everything is fine. At 5+ chapters, IFOEdit (last two versions) starts complaining that there is a file size inconsistency. However, if you ignore the warning, everything works out fine. (2) The DVD hard drive "grinds" and takes a second between chapters. So its not a perfectly seemless transition.

IFOEdit (last two versions) starts complaining that there is a file size inconsistency.

I've never seen this one.

The DVD hard drive "grinds" and takes a second between chapters. So its not a perfectly seemless transition.

Yup. This one is unavoidable and is the nature of using multiple titles.

Hopefully, if and when Sony adds "end actions," they'll be smart enough NOT to just provide navigation between individual files. Instead, they should be smart enough to seemlessly join multiple files together prior to authoring. This way, you will not get that 2-second hesitation as one MPEG file finishes and the next one starts. Like I said, this is a function of how DVDs operate when the movie is on separate files.

Thanks for everyone's comments. Hold off on responding for a bit: I may have found the key.

1) Use the latest version of TMPGenc.
2) Join the files using the "MPEG1 (automatic)" setting in the TMPGenc dropdown.

I haven't yet been able to attempt the final test (had a few failures along the way), but partial tests have worked, i.e., the result is a file that DVDA doesn't flag as requiring "optimization". OTOH, its also possible to generate a file that DVDA doesn't even recognize, and I'm having problems importing the demuxed result (the audio portion is blank) I'll finish it up tonight and report back.

One additional note: Joining mpeg files has been known to cause the video and audio to get out of sync. So this approach is not for everything. However, my particular case is music and slides, so sync is not critical. Or, you should be able to re-import the joined mpeg back in Vegas, sync up the audio, then render just the audio.

>>IFOEdit (last two versions) starts complaining that there is a file size inconsistency.

>I've never seen this one.

It was 100% repeatable with me on the one test I tried. Caused me fits. Literally, it worked fine with 4 files and gave the error message with 5+ files. I'm certain there was no error in my code. OTOH, if I ignored the error and continued on (ignoring the error message in Nero as well), my Apex DVD player played it just fine.

This was also a simple test with one main screen, one menu, and x files to join. I didn't attempt it on my current project because I have a more sophisticated menu structure and didn't want to risk the difficulty of figuring out which file is which (linking some files, leaving others alone, one menu plays the sequence of files, other menus play just the chapters, etc).

I use IFOEdit 0.96, and have "fixed" titles that have over 20 separate MPEG files. However, it is freeware, and hasn't been updated in a long time, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few glitches.

As for TMPGEnc and audio/video sync issues, I have not used versions beyond 2.5. However, I found that TMPGEnc has many problems joing variable bit rate MPEG files, including the sync problem. If, however, you encode your MPEG as constant bit rate (CBR), TMPGEnc does a fine job joining.

Finally, since DVD is MPEG-2, I always use the "MPEG-2 Program (VBR)" option (actually, I now use Womble's MPEGVCR, which works much better than TMPGEnc, but is not free).

Still no joy, but an update:

1) Joining the files using the "MPEG1 (automatic)" setting in the TMPGenc dropdown is related to the horizontal-squishing problem. Its not 100% repeatable (doesn't happen on every test file), but for my full-size file, using this setting always causes DVDA and Vegas to interpret it horizontally squished.

2) Joining the files using the "MPEG-2 Program (VBR)" setting eliminates the horizontal-squishing problem.

3) The TMPGenc version isn't an issue.

4) The series of source files are video-only mpgs. TMPGenc joins them into a video+audio mpg. I can import the video+audio mpg into DVDA. It tells me that the audio will be recompressed. However, I need to replace the audio with the correct ac3 audio file. When I do this in DVDA, it tells me the video needs to be recompressed. When I demux the joined video+audio mpg file in TMPGenc, DVDA refuses to import the video-only portion.

The remaining thing to try is to demux the joined video+audio file in TMPGenc, mux the video portion with the ac3 file, then try to import that into DVDA. I'll try that tonight. Otherwise I'm SOL. I might also try some other joining apps.

No guarantee this will work:

Mux a dummy short audio clip with the video so that you wind up with the program stream for the video. Create a completely separate audio clip as PCM wav or ac3. Load those into DVDA- might work...might not. Worth a shot at least if you have the time.

SonyEPM, in the sleuthing world, any advice is better than no advice, even if I think I've already been there when I read and reread it :-) Your comment triggered the thought that ac3 support is new and hence suspect, and I also remembered a thread in the audio forum where someone had rendering issues when the ac3 file contained blank portions. (Their render took many times longer than normal during the blank portions.)

For the first time I started wondering if the audio file was bad rather than the video file.

Short answer: The ac3 file was corrupt in some way. I managed to create a good ac3 file. Problem solved :-)

Now for the interesting observations:

1) I imported a video+audio file. DVDA said it was fine. I tried to replace the audio with another ac3 audio file that contained some kind of fault. DVDA accepted the audio but now said that the *video* needed to be compressed. (SonyEPM, I won't call this is a bug, since its wacky input causing wacky output, but it does suggest you take another look at this part of the code. Could be something interesting there.)

2) The ac3 corruption occurred because the last 5 seconds of my Vegas project had no audio. To make it clear with an example, say the avi was 60 seconds and the wav file was 55 seconds, both starting at time 0. I rendered a 60 second mpg file and a 60 second ac3 file, so the last 5 seconds of the ac3 file had no audio. *That* caused the corruption. (And when I selected only the 55 second portion and rendered the ac3 file, that worked fine.)

2a) If I have two audio files and blank space in between them, there are no problems. Its only when the audio *ends* with a blank portion that there is an issue.

It would be nice if someone could verify this, although I've been through such a convoluted path I would not be surprised if everyone else's system works just fine.(*) That would be the universe having another little joke on me. SonyEPM, if you have anything you'd like me to test for you, make your request quickly because I'll be archiving and moving on soon. Unfortunately, each full-scale test takes 2 hours for me to complete and the files are all 100MB-3 GB, so its not really ftp-able.

(*) Other Vegas issues I had but that (probably) turned out to be irrelevant: (a) During project development I had several "unknown errors" that caused the undo to become corrupted and Vegas advised me to save my project under a different name and shut down asap. I didn't always do this; sometimes I just trusted my bak file and saved over the original. (I've also been seeing 1 BSOD per day as well.) (b) I added the joined mpg file to my project so I could verify the audio timing. It added the dummy audio stream as well but I canceled the peak calculation for it, then deleted the audio track. Later I removed the mpg file, but not until after a save, and I forgot to remove it from the media pool. So it was there when I first rendered the ac3 file. (c) This last week (perhaps after (b), but I cannot remember) Vegas decided it needed to rebuild my audio peak files *every* time the project was opened...it did the recalculation but never actually changed any of the peak files on the hard drive. (Some other guy in the video forum is also seeing this recently, and its not the daylight savings bug like before.) I've just been hitting the peak calculation cancel button, but I've had trouble in the past after doing so, and I suspect that the "clean-up" after hitting the peak file calculation cancel button isn't precisely clean. So all in all the project has been living dangerously and is now showing a little senility.

Whew. SonyEPM, hope some of this information is useful to you.