Pinnacle Convert Needs Advice

Lawson wrote on 1/14/2007, 4:42 PM

Hello, I have Pinnacle Studio (8.1) and have many, many .stu compilations that I have saved out to DV tape over the years. I now have purchased Vegas Movie Studio 6.0 and am a couple of projects into it - I like it. For some reason I have never been successful burning DVDs from Pinnacle Sudio, so I am now in the process of making videos out of my Pinnacle timelines so that I can use DVD Architect to burn them onto DVDs. I have been outputting my Pinnacle Studio projects to .avi files, then importing those into Vegas Movie Studio, then outputting those to Architect to do menus and burn DVDs. It's all good, but all the rendering is taking forever. There is probably a better way (maybe output to mpeg from Pinnacle and go right into Architect?), but I don't want to lose quality. If anyone is familiar with the products I describe, could you please tell me if there is a better way to do the conversion / burning? Thanks in advance for your help.

Lawson

Comments

MPM wrote on 1/14/2007, 5:18 PM

For your DVDs you want mpg2 video, & it can be rendered just about anywhere you want -- in DVDA or beforehand and imported. In my experience Vegas is about as fast as anything I've tried, but a lot of folks swear by the separate MainConcept stand alone encoder or one of those published by TMPGEnc.. Actual rendering speed depends on a LOT of variables -- might want to check out the forums at videohelp.com & doom9.org for tips on possibly speeding up your renders. DVDA generally does as well as Vegas, but you miss out on all the customizable controls Vegas offers.

Vegas has templates for mpg2 that are tailored for DVDA. DVDA 4 will accept standard mpg2 video-only streams, but takes a minute the 1st time to go through the file and write out what I guess is a sort of map file for the video. A current quirk of DVDA is that if you drag one of these standard streams to a menu where you've already placed buttons, the buttons will be altered -- click Undo & drag the video to the menu a 2nd time and all is well.

Another quirk is that non-Sony rendered mpg2 video may not play smoothly in DVDA's preview, but the final DVD is OK. Sometimes imported mpg2 will have the bit rate flag set incorrectly & DVDA will want to re-encode -- changing the first header to bitrate = 8 using DVD Patcher fixes it. For versions of DVDA that will not import standard mpg2, you can fake the Vegas templates by muxing the video-only stream without an audio file using mpg tools in TMPGEnc. All of these *fixes* are really minor and take hardly any time.

For quality you only want to encode to mpg2 once if possible. I'd suggest checking the forums above for tips on tweaking your PC for renders, then taking a short clip from your DV tape & running it through Pinnacle, Vegas, & perhaps the trial of TMPGEnc & MainConcept to see what works quickest & best for you. There are a few freeware mpg2 encoders as well you might want to try (see the tools section at videohelp).

Lawson wrote on 1/16/2007, 1:52 PM

Thanks MPM. I will investigate whether I can create an mpg2 file from my Pinnacle Studio 8.1 projects. If so I will cut out the .avi creation step and thus save the Vegas rendering step as well. If not I will probably keep doing it as I am now (the avi files are huge, but the quality seems good) and live with the double-render time factor. Thanks again.

Lawson