Quick DVD-RAM to DVD -- Tutorial

musicvid10 wrote on 2/23/2008, 6:42 PM
This is the fastest route I've found for a simple transfer:

1) In Vegas, choose File -> Import -> DVD Camcorder Disc -- This saves an .mpg file to hard disk.
2) Drag the file onto the Vegas timeline.
3) Render as AC3 audio -- use the same name and folder as the .mpg file.
4) Open in DVDA and make DVD.

Looks great, plays flawlessly, of course you can get more involved with chapters, etc. if you want, but for simple transfers from TV recordings, it works great!

Comments

Harrie_G wrote on 2/26/2008, 9:40 AM
For simple transfers from TV recordings I tend to use Nero Recode and choose recode main movie.

When using Vegas-DVDA for a simple transfer, why do you render the audio to AC3 first, when DVDA recognizes the original audio in the mpg file and recodes it when authoring the DVD?

Harrie
musicvid10 wrote on 2/26/2008, 6:05 PM
"...when DVDA recognizes the original audio in the mpg file..."

It doesn't.
cbrillow wrote on 2/26/2008, 6:48 PM
If you're using DVD-A 4.5, you can probably rename the .mpg file to .vob and the audio will be recognized. This is the very same issue that Vegas 8 had with mpeg-2 files with AC-3 audio, and it was fixed in 8.0b.

Sony or Main Concept finally got their stuff together for Vegas, but weren't forward-looking enough to fix it in DVDA.

And Support has ignored my question about it, too.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/26/2008, 8:03 PM
If the audio in the original VOB is AC-3, DVDA will not re-encode that audio. If it does, then it is probably because there is more than one audio channel or because the audio is 5.1 and you haven't changed project settings.

Or, if you have different audio types in each audio clip and you put those into a Music Compilation or something else that tries to combine them into one VOB, then the audio has to be consistent. Fortunately, the MPEG-2 compression rate does NOT need to be consistent, so you have more flexibility on that score.
musicvid10 wrote on 2/26/2008, 9:31 PM
You're right that if I name the file to .vob, the audio shows up in DVDA, while Vegas 8.0b doesn't care what you call it. Hopefully they will fix this annoyance in the next version.

That being said, I'm going to stick with my original method for a couple of reasons.
First, it's convenient to be able to normalize the audio in Vegas.
Second, DVDA is going to recode the mpeg audio anyway, so no time is really lost by rendering it in Vegas and giving DVDA a file it doesn't need to recode, as John mentioned.
Third, I really don't know what settings DVDA uses to encode audio to AC-3, whether it uses redundant AGC, etc. . . In Vegas, I have full control.

So, the standard advice for video ("Render in Vegas, not DVDA") probably applies to audio, as well.

Now, if Vegas would stop insisting on rendering all night after I cut the commercials from the timeline, my life would be complete . . .