DVDa will re render your work if it feels that it is not "compliant". In other words you must know what a "compliant" video is and export it properly from Vegas.

Titles and buttons themselves also need to be rendered (technically that's "encoded"), that's perfectly normal.
If your actual movie itself is being re-encoded then most likely it's not compliant with what's needed for the DVD.

Bob.

I know the lesson in a "compliant" video may be hours long but could you point me in a direction? If i could start there alot of it may fall in place.

In the menu i created in DVDA had alot of buttons so i see where there were messages before the render stating this, so i am aware of some of my mistakes but my question is: Did i render incorrectly in Vegas and wouldn't Vegas give me some type of error or warning?

Thanks a mill!!

I am pretty much using whatever was default when i installed V8. I did not change anything seeing i need to learn more of what these changes do.

Will the defaults for rendering carry me for a while until i get through the learining curve???

Whatever you do in Vegas has no bearing whatsoever in menus and buttons and titles in DVDA. If you create something in DVDA, overlay text, make a menu, add a button, or whatever, it MUST be rendered. The only thing that DVDA can handle without rendering is material that's used straight as-is in DVDA without anything additional added to it.

So if i read your original question correctly, you're doing everything right except understanding how DVDA creates menus and titles.

"Will the defaults for rendering carry me for a while until i get through the learining curve??? "

No!
For example if your video is NTSC 4:3 and you want to make a matching DVD you need to select a matching template for the mpeg-2 encode. Ideally one would tweak the bitrate to get an omptimal fit to the DVD.

When you're in DVDA you then need to select the right project settings.

Once that's done in DVDA under File > Optimise you can see if your various assets comply or need to be re-encoded by the ticks next to them.

I know it's all a tad confusing at first but do your homework and you'll soon be wondering why you thought it was so hard.

Bob

So if i am thinking of this correctly; DVDA does not render anything from V8?!

The general guidelines for avoiding recompression in DVDA are:

1. Use an MPEG2 template that includes "DVDArchitect" in its name.

2. Make sure the rendered file is not too big to fit on a DVD along with your Menus. You do this by changing the Bitrate under Custom settings. Normally this becomes necessary once your video gets up towards 90 mins or more.

Peter, I'm thinking if you change the bitrate to be different than the file you are brining in from Vegas DVDA has to rerender it to get the new bit rate, right?

Timpolo & srode, download Vol. 1, Issue 7 of Edward Troxel's newsletters as it goes through the DVD authoring process.
Although written for earlier versions of Vegas & DVDA, the basics still apply.

Mike