Stitching seperate Vegas movies together

NerffJones wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:05 PM
I have multiple movies that I have created individually in vegas 5. I would like them to be stitched together before I bring them into DVDarch, so they will function as chapters of one large movie instead of seperate small movies.

I probably should have made them one large movie from the start, but I didn't want to create too many layers in vegas, because each movie has many different imported images and effects etc.

How do I do this? Do I render them in vegas then stitch the rendered files together? Would that lower the quality of the video rendering it multiple times?

Thanks,
Nerff

Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:07 PM
Just load the AVI files you have already created into a single Veg file...add Markers for the chapter points... then render a single MPEG file from that. No need to re-render these as a single AVI file.
jetdv wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:08 PM
Just start a new Vegas project and add them all to the timeline.
NerffJones wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:27 PM
So JetDV,

You are saying that I should render the vegas files to (?) format and then start a new Vegas file and line these files up end to end?

What format am I publishing it in the first time? And can I put the AC-3 audio end to end as well? I'd like the audio as one long track as well.


B_JM wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:34 PM
vegas is built for multiple copies open at once ...

just open all the projects into its own vegas - and frame serve out each one ..

have a master vegas where you bring in all frame served projects and render ...

at any one time - only two vegas will be really running ...

you can do this also on two machines ...


Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:37 PM
I'm not JetDV (Ed)... but hopefully my answer will be sufficient. My answer to your question was basically the same as Edwards in any case.

I gathered from your prior post that you already have rendered DV AVI files from your other projects?

Just take those files... load them onto the timeline of another new Veg file... and render from here the entire timeline as you would ordinariliy to generate an MPEG2 file for DVDA. It is normal for you to use the DVDA MPEG2 templates which do not include audio. Then you render the timeline again using just the Dolby AC3 template. That gives you two files - one with the video... the other with the .AC3. As long as you named the files the same (apart from the .AC3 and .MPG extensions of course) DVDA will correctly associate the audio file with the video file.

Hope that helps.
B_JM wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:40 PM
yes - if he had already rendered DV files - Liam_Vegas method makes the best way ....

I though the had NOT rendered out avi files yet
NerffJones wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:54 PM
Actually, I have already published all my files as MPEG2's for DVDArchitect

I am just now going back to the Vegas files because I'd like to have them all as one movie.

So when I render these files as AVI's are there any settings I should know about? Keeping in mind that I will be opening these files again in vegas and stitching them together. ( I would imagine just NTSC DV at best quality) Anything else.

Thanks,
nerff
Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:59 PM
NTSC DV at best quality would be fine. If the original project has lots of stills/graphics then you may get higher quality by rendering to the Sony YUV codec as that preserves the color better than going direct to standard DV
rs170a wrote on 3/23/2005, 1:01 PM
If you're planning on burning these to DVD and the total file length is an hour or less, I'd skip the "render to AVI" step and go directly to MPEG-2 & AC-3 files. This way you don't have to go thorough essentially 2 renders. If your total file is something like 2 hrs., then you'd need to use a bitrate calculator to determine correct settings to get the file to fit on one DVD.

Mike
B_JM wrote on 3/23/2005, 1:06 PM
now you have stated they are already in mpeg2 format --



just join the mpeg files together if you want one file for some reason ..

lots of ways of doing that mentioned here
NerffJones wrote on 3/23/2005, 2:07 PM
Thanks for all the feedback,
I understand that there are many different ways of doing the same thing in Vegas or any program. I'm only a month into the vegas/video editing thing, and wasn't sure if I was going about this the wrong way.

The whole NTSC thing throws me, because I don't know if each time I render something in that format if it degrades the original.

Its a long story (started in another post)
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=372375&Replies=6&Page=0

but some of these files are starting in MOV format.
Here is the order things are being done in.

Flash : outputing .MOV files
They are rendered from Canopus ProCoder, as DV NTSC,
Then a bunch of layers of Mpegs and Still images are put in in Vegas 5
These are Rendered to MPEG2 (currently) (another level of NTSC rendering)

So now I will take the Audio files (AC-3)
and the MPEG2 files into Vegas again and Render them (yet another NTSC rendering)

Then it seems that DVD architect does some form of NTSC interlacing as well.

So it seems there are 4 times my file has gone thru the NTSC gauntlet, and I'm just not sure if the final files are totally blurred and über-interlaced by the time they are done.

The don't look too bad, but hardly the sharpness I see in many DVD's out there.


Ryan





Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 2:09 PM
Mike... in this case he has independant Veg files that he wants to combine into a contiguos MPEG for a DVD.

I agree with B_JM - it may be simpler just to "connect" the MPEG files together using a product such as Womble (there are other approaches.. and doing a search will help).
Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 2:12 PM
Definitely would recommend you DO NOT do multiple encodes from MPEG to MPEG. The compression added at each step is quite considerable.

The quality thing is not about NTSC - it's about compression and codec. The Vegas DV codec has been proven to be VERY good at low generation loss between encodes... other codecs are not as good.
NerffJones wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:04 PM

Ok so, I guess multiple encodes from MPEG to MPEG is BAD. I guess my question still is...

How do I get these multiple vegas files to ONE long movie?

I heard something about Womble, other things about AVI's.

Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:08 PM
How do I get these multiple vegas files to ONE long movie?

I think we've given you lots of answers here... pick any one and go with it.

You can join MPEGS together using Womble (do a google for the product).

You can render each of your indivudual Vegs as separate AVI's and combine them together in one Veg and render to MPEG from there.

Anything more you need?
B_JM wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:27 PM
as Liam_Vegas says - we have given lots of answers here - but your criteria keeps changing ..

IF you have already FINAL rendered to mpeg2 for dvd - join them together

IF you have NOT done a final render - go with one of the other methods..


AVOID using lossy codecs as "in between" steps (if you care about quality) , an exception to this would be sonys DV codec, which is very good ...



NerffJones wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:39 PM
Sorry,
I didn't mean to wear out this forum topic. I just didn't understand what your previous post meant.

"The Vegas DV codec has been proven to be VERY good at low generation loss between encodes"

I guess I was wondering what the above mentioned "Encodes" were.
Or what that sentence meant. If there is A LOT of compression doing Multiple *MPEG* encodes, it seems you are saying Sony can do a good job with *OTHER* types of encodes.

If it's just a general statement that sony does a great job with Encoding things, then great, I understand; Sony makes a good product.

I just thought it was something new, like rendering the files in some format previously not mentioned.

But apparently any of the solutions in this forum seem reasonable to the people here. Guess my question was answered.

Thanks.
-nerff
Liam_Vegas wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:47 PM
See if I can make this clearer.

There are two entirely different things we have been talking about.

Rendering a Veg file (that contains different assets as you have described) to a DV AVI format (this is NOT the same as MPEG).

If you start with DV AVI video and you make any kind of alteration to a frame of video (like you do color correction, track motion, pan/crop, overlay text etc etc etc)... then when render that frame of video will be re-compressed. Using the Vegas (sony) DV codec the result will be very good... even if you were to take the output AVI and do more work with it within Vegas and render it again.

But... if your source material is MPEG... then all bets are off. MPEG has a much higher compression and multiple encodes to MPEG result in much larger loss.

Hopefully that clears things up a little more. Or not. I think I need a nap now anyway.
Chienworks wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:49 PM
Nerff, different codecs produce different amounts of generational loss; MPEG is particularly bad in this respect. Also, different bitrates cause different amounts of loss; more bits is better. On top of that, different implementations of the same codec at the same bitrate can produce markely different results! SONY's DV codec (originally developed by Sonic Foundry) is particularly good and generally considered one of the very best available. It uses a much higher bitrate than most MPEG encodes use, so it should inherently be better than MPEG. In fact, it is even better than most other DV codecs from other companies. It has been shown that, after the initial DV compression, there is almost no more loss through 100 more generations of re-encoding! Compare this to the Microsoft DV codec that shows noticeable loss on every generation and is total mush by the 6th generation or so.

MPEG also builds up loss of quality after very few generations. This is inherent in the compression scheme that MPEG uses, no matter which company wrote the encoder. True, a higher bit rate stands up better through more generations than a lower bitrate will. However, most MPEG encoding done for DVDs is around 6 to 8Mbps as compared to 25Mbps for DV.

So, the statement about the Vegas DV codec is aimed specifically at only DV encoding using SONY's codec, not at any other codecs used within Vegas.
Chienworks wrote on 3/23/2005, 4:56 PM
To slightly amplify Liam's comments ...

Assume you have rendered all your pieces as DV .avi files. During those renders all the effects, compositing, titles, filters, color corrections, fades, transtions, etc. will have been applied. Now, you want to join all these together into one large DV .avi file. Place all the .avi pieces on the timeline and render again to DV. On this render, there are no effects or other modifications happening because they were already done in the first set of renders. In this case, Vegas will simply copy the frames bit-for-bit to the new file without actually rendering. The new larger .avi file will contain exactly copies of the pieces in exactly the same quality, no loss whatsoever. In fact, you can render that new output file to another one, and so on, infinitely many times and still have the same original quality.

It is only when you are applying effects, titles, filters, etc. or rendering to a different format that you will incur a quality loss. Sadly, you will get this quality loss when rendering from MPEG to MPEG because Vegas will uncompress the original file and then recompress it to MPEG again while rendering. So even if all you are doing is stitching MPEG files together you will still get a quality loss with each generation.

There are tools that can be used to stitch MPEG files together without rendering, but Vegas isn't one of them. Womble is an example and you can find lots of information about it by searching this forum.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/23/2005, 10:12 PM
I just skimmed this post. I think I understand exactly what you are trying to do. You have a bunch of MPEG-2 and AC-3 files that you created "a little at a time" so you didn't have to deal with long renders, and so you could "incrementally compile" your project the way a programmer does. Makes good sense, I think.

However, you cannot just put the MPEG-2 and AC-3 files back on the Vegas timeline because Vegas does not have a simple MPEG-2 join capability. It should, but it doesn't. Also, it does not read AC-3 files. It should, but it doesn't.

You can do two things, one of which has already been mentioned. The first is to use an external program to join the MPEG-2 files and AC-3 files into one large, glorious MPEG-2 file and one single AC-3 file. Womble has two products that do this, both of which are horrendously overpriced, give the simple thing that they do, but both of which work well. You can also use the cut/join tools in TMPGEnc, but I've never thought it was completely reliable.

The second thing you can do is to just simply bring all your MPEG-2 files into DVD Architect and create your project. If you drop the MPEG-2 files into the main DVDA window, it will create a separate title for each MPEG-2 file. This can create navigation problems on some DVD players (e.g., you can't use the chapter button on your remote to go back and forth between MPEG-2 files). Another alternative is to create a "Music Compilation" and drop your MPEG-2 files into that. This sort of stiches the files together and you end up with seemless navigation. The only downside is that you can't add additional chapter stops within each MPEG-2 file.

More information on Music Compilations used in this way can be found here:

Music Compilation