Q about DVDA + Rendering Times

ad869 wrote on 3/14/2004, 4:29 PM
I'm a DVD-Architect newbie, tho I've been using Acid and Vegas for years for simple tasks like adding titles/logos and editing together internal educational lectures to VCD and streaming files.

I put together a DVD of three 1-hour segments of lectures and documentary that I had video taped. I used DVDA to create a basic front page menu and scene selection menus. I clicked prepare and burn... at 7am this morning, and its almost 7pm now and its still rendering/preparing, estimating the time at 13 hours. Is this typical?

Setup/Background: PC=Athlon 1.2G 256Mram, 80G HD, Win98SE, IBM pic-1394 card, video input = ATI AIW 128 16M AGP. This old ATI card + system can't handle full resolution mpeg2 resolution without dropping lots of frames, but it seemed to be able to handle 1/2 resolution (352x480) ok using NeoDVD as the capture program (it came with the LG-GSA4040B DVDRW, fw:302). According to Mediostream support, 352x480 (the 'better' setting) and has a variable bitrate of 2776kbps-7200kbps, which seems within DVD spec.

When I have created similar DVD's using the NEOdvd authoring program, it has rendered and burned a similarly captured and compiled disc in an hour. Its menu capabilities are extremely limited (the oem version that ships with the dvdr is crippled), so I wanted to try DVDA. (the pc is signed-out for the weekend from work, where, alongside the avid we use for intra-corporate productions, we have a PC with Soundforge, Acid, Vegas 3.0 and now DVD-A that usually gets used more than the avid for minor bookending dv-dumping tasks.)

The menus seemed to render fast, but its re-rendering all the video, and this appears to be taking about 4 hours per clip. Each clip is 1 hour long and the raw files captured to mpeg-2 format from NeoDvd was between 1.46 - 1.57G in size. I had to set the optimize in DVDA to 3.2MBS, which gives me a 98% full disc - it still has not burned, but is rendering.

Is this normal? Is there a way I can speed up the setting - does DVDA have to parse/re-encode every video segment, or can I set it to ignore it? (I'm assuming the files are compliant since Neo captured them and rendered them to successfully playable files.)

It took my much of the day to get the feel for DVDA's GUI and the 'logic' and capabilities of the software - its nice, its stable, and I haven't seen the results yet, but I assume there is alot that can be added/improved for the 2.0 version in terms of ease of use, functionality, user options, and maybe encoding?

Thanks,

AD from Canada

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 3/14/2004, 5:29 PM
If your input to DVDA is DV AVI, you should be able to render at about 2.5x real time (i.e., 2.5 hours to render one hour of video). I base this on the fact that I can render pretty close to real time (from Vegas, but DVDA should be similar) on my 2.8 GHz Pentium P4. The menus shouldn't take much time.
ad869 wrote on 3/14/2004, 10:00 PM
Ok, here's an update:

- it took 14hours 34minutes to render a 3hr video.

- using the global optimize, it downsampled a the video to 3.2 mbps from 4

- I learned that menus only "last" as long as their audio loops if set to loop mode during creation - so if the audio loop is short, so is the menu, and the cursor resets to the first position each time.

- on my main menu, which shows menu links to parts 1, 2, and 3, the cursor defaults to defaults to part 3, not 1 as I would prefer. Is this because the link to part 3 was the last one I created? Also, in auto play mode, my set top dvd player plays part 3 automatically. Not sure how to set that to 1.

- wow, computer screens are deceptive - what looks crisp and clean and legible on a pc screen can look tiny and illegible on a TV - gotta keep that in mind when I rebuild the menus... and re-render the thing again (yawn)...

- any wisdom anyone has is appreciated. thanks! AD



johnmeyer wrote on 3/14/2004, 10:05 PM
Ahh, you're going from MPEG to MPEG. That might take awhile. Best to start with a DV AVI file and then encode that to MPEG.
ad869 wrote on 3/15/2004, 1:33 PM
Oh yes, sorry - I should have qualified: the ATI AIW card is an analog video input card, and I was importing the files via the analog vidso/audio straight into mpg format (most of our source are still Hi-8 analog).

I take then that recoding an MPG to MPG is more complicated than DV to MPG, and based on the times you specified (2.5x realtime for encoding on a pc thats 2x as fast as mine seems to indicate that the encode time's I'm seeing are normative). The quality of the 3.2Mbps picture was ok, though it was not as sharp as a good 4+Mbps, which is as I suspected.

I will try the next run without optimizing the individual files and see what happens. Thanks for the feedback.

AD
Baylo wrote on 3/16/2004, 10:23 AM
For what it's worth, I find that Vegas renders slightly faster than DVD Architect. I have no idea why this should be so.

I have a number of shows captured from TV direct to an MPEG file using a capture card. I then use Vegas to recompress the MPEG file into something that will fit on the DVD disc. Only downside of this route is that 1) you have to do some maths to calculate appropriate bitrate, and 2) you have to do another render for the ac-3 audio.

There's supposed to be a script to automate 2), but I've never got it to work properly.

Mark
bStro wrote on 3/18/2004, 9:53 AM
What capture card and software do you use? Most let you define what bitrate to encode at. Setting the original capture to be at whatever bitrate you plan to ultimately use, you can skip the step of having Vegas re-encode.

If you intend to edit the file (read: take out commercials), there are porgrams like Womble's MPEG-VCR and MPEG Video Wizard that let you edit MPEGs without reencoding the whole file. This is something Vegas won't do, and you lose quality everytime you re-encode and MPEG.

Rob