Recompression in one project but not another

Bruhlad wrote on 12/27/2007, 7:34 AM

Any educated guesses as to why DVDA 3.0b labels the same mpg file noncompliant in one project but not another?

In both projects the overall size is less than 4.7 GB. One project has no menus (a blank slate with just the inserted media) and the other has menus with additional background media. This latter project originally had a noncompliant avi file which I replaced with the compliant mpg file, but DVDA still calls it noncompliant. (Even after saving the revised project, closing the app and restarting it, etc., etc.) The mpg file was created in Vegas Movie Studio 6.0 using the DVD Architect video stream template with project quality set to "Best" (as suggested by Sony for high resolution stills).

Comments

MPM wrote on 12/27/2007, 5:26 PM

And it would be just a guess... ;-)

Did you check the optimize window's video tab and see if you could tell DVDA not to do that? Otherwise something might have gotten stuck in the saved project file -- did you try importing the video into another timeline after re-naming the file? [rather than replacing the avi]

As far as stills go, best qual helps when they have to be resized from ideally 655 to 720 width. Is it better than something like Photoshop resizing the images? Try it and see what you think... If it's much more than one or two images, & render time matters, you might see an added speed benefit as well -- just about any NLE is Sloooooowww when it comes to resizing, especially compared to batch operations in a graphics program.

Bruhlad wrote on 12/27/2007, 9:02 PM

I usually resize photos before rendering, using Adobe Photoshop's batch mode, but this time I wanted to see what Vegas could do with them. There are approx. 800 high res stills in this video, and I didn't want to sort through and separate the portrait shots from the landscape shots in order to resize them in batch mode. Also resizing helps reduce interlace flicker, but not as much as I would like without losing even more quality. However, after comparing my latest video with past projects, resizing before rendering appears to be the better way to go. And as you point out, much faster (3 hours vs. 13 hours for a 1 hour video).

BTW, DVDA doesn't give you an option to change its determination of a file's compliance status, at least not in version 3.0b.

MPM wrote on 12/29/2007, 9:34 AM

"DVDA doesn't give you an option to change its determination of a file's compliance status, at least not in version 3.0b"

Based on the full version (don't know how it differs from the one that ships with VMS) in my experience if DVDA really thinks the file is non-compliant, then it will not give you a choice on whether to (re) render the mpg2. I have had it once or twice stick at it's old setting, and after replacing a file allow me to change from re-compress to no re-compression -- sometimes settings stick like the set duration of a title or whether to render or not... Other times (as in a recent thread) DVDA's project file apparently just gets garbaged up I guess, and the only solution is to re-create the project.

If you're still having problems, & since it won't let you turn off the mpg2 encoding, is there maybe something else that you set in the project, like default bit rate that may be causing DVDA to think it has to re-render?

RE: your photos, it might be worthwhile to check out the tools section at videohelp.com . There are a couple of apps I think, foto2avi is one, that are free and designed for slideshows. I can't give a lot of info -- having connection problems at the moment and can't reach videohelp, or many other sites -- so I'm forced to go by memory... I *think* many if not most of these free programs use avisynth and other, linear processing tools so they might give you both speed and ease of use, and if you created your slideshows in an avi format like mjpeg or huffyuv etc., you could still use Vegas' reduce interlace flicker option rendering to mpg2.