I want to transfer Betamax video tapes to Blu-Ray. I have 150 tapes and want to end up with movie files that are equal in size to a normal DVD film. I use the Blu Ray format just so that I will not have to use so many discs.

I know that the source format should be kept as long as possible. Is the compression done during rendering in Vegas, or is it done in DVDA? When I experimented with Vegas and DVDA there seemed to be two renderings, is this correct? It should be enough with only one compression I would think for the video and sound respectively.

Mike, Unless you have fancy hardware, Vegas captures from an analog to DV convertor in DV format. This is mild (around 7:1) compression . The captured files are still big so you prefer to compress them further - in your case, to DVD format (MPEG-2) rather than BRD (MPEG-4). You can render your DV files to MPEG-2 either in Vegas or DVDA, but since you appear to be backing up for archive rather than immediate viewing there is no point in using DVDA at all. Your best choice is to render using the Mainconcept MPEG2 DVD template rather than DVDA template (to preserve the audio stream) and burn as data to BRD.

Thank you. Yes the capture format is DV. Your answer makes me wonder this:
1. Why MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-4?
2. I thought an MPEG-4 file allows for better quality than a similar sized MPEG-2 file, is not correct?
3. There seems to be several MP4 formats to choose from in the save as dialog, how do I know which one to choose?

Hi Mike,
I mentioned MPEG-2 only because you said you wanted equivalent to DVD film. MPEG-4 is indeed much more efficient (around twice as) than MPEG-2. MPEG-4 refers to a suite of standards for implementing H264 compression. Various codecs use various standards and additional features, hence the varying formats of MPEG-4. BRD video as in DVDA is MPEG-4 but at higher resolution which is the main reason I said don't use DVDA; what you gain by better compression you lose by having to bump resolution. The Mainconcept AVC at around 8MBps VBR will give you good results and may best suit your purpose, but remember MPEG-4 (and MPEG-2) is lossy and if you are more concerned about quality than space to preserve maximum quality and still save some space your best option is a lossless codec (such as Huffyuv or Lagarith if you want free- Google for them).

Ok, tank you very much. I think I will make two test clips, one with MPEG-4 and one with MPEG-2 at around 8 MBps. If the difference is not big enough for me to see on my CRT-tv then I will probably stick with the Mainconcept MPEG-2 since it seems to have pre-settings that are more geared toward DV-capture than the other. I get the feeling that there are also other features that I am not familiar with and therefore it seems safest to go with an alternative that seems geared toward DV-capture.