A couple of weeks ago, I read several older threads about markers saved in files rendered by Vegas 5. Those threads dealt primarily with recreating markers for DVDA2 after a user had either inadvertantly erased the .sfl file or had forgotten to click the "Save markers in file" button upon the initial render. I found out the hard way that markers saved in an intermediate AVI file are not "cascaded" to an MPEG file being prepared for burning to DVD, and this left me with no markers for my DVD chapter points.

At one point in my experimenting with Vegas, I noticed that I had .sfl files for both the MPG and AC3 versions of the render, and, after creating an MPEG without markers yesterday, I thought perhaps I could make use of that fact to avoid re-rendering the MPG just to create the markers file.

Here's what I tried:

I noticed that selecting the AC3 template as the first render of a file results in the "Save markers in file" box being greyed-out and non-selectable. However, if you select an MPEG template, you can set this switch, enter a filename and then change the render type to AC3, the "Save markers" box remains checked, and it writes a .sfl file in the form of filename.ac3.sfl.

I was disappointed that loading the mpg and ac3 files into DVDA2 didn't provide chapter points based upon the ac3.sfl file, and hitting the "Load Markers" button didn't work, either. I looked at the ac3.sfl file with a text editor, and the correct labels are, indeed, embedded within.

Does anyone know how to make use of this file in DVDA2? Or even what use the ac3.sfl file would be, if it's not meant for use in DVDA2?

Sure would be nice to create useable markers with the relatively short AC3 render time...