because I have to render it in vegas then I put it in to DVDA and it does a little bit of a re-render on it or something - plus it would mean that I save time having to dig around etc... - but hey it's not a GREAT amount of time always - but it would save me some, I'm sure.

Dave

I actually e-mailed sony about a year ago suggested they do this. It would be great because you wouldn't have to render it as an .avi file to get the fit to disk option. I know you could use a bitrate calculator to skip the .avi step but when you have complex menus, it makes it a lot harder to calculate.

If you use a good bitrate calculator then you can define the number of menus etc.
Not that I want to deny anyone having anything, it's just letting DVDA do all the work doesn't save anytime really. The video still has to be rendered to feed the encoder then it has to be encoded and then muxed. All this has to happen no matter how it's done. Problem with an all in one solution is twofold. If you want to make changes it's likely the whole process is done in it's entirity wasting more time although I think DVDA has become a bit smarter lately. But for me more importantly you miss out on things like 2 pass encoding and other encoding optimisations.
Also at times I prefer to render to a new AVI and PTT so I've got a backup in case I need to reauthor or reuse material later.

We at times make a LOT of DVDs, using the batch render tool in the Veggie toolkit makes life very smooth, we can have one machine capturing, one editing, one encoding overnight and authoring/burning next day.

Bob.

Well, to each there own, but I use a bitrate calc - and I render MPG2 and It still re-renders everything for some reason (not sure why). But if nothing else - it would be nice just so that it didn't require so much room - cuz it still has to have the file that I'm rendering and then room for the temp directory and the project etc...

Just a thought.

Dave

If DVDA is really re-rendering your MPEG then you've probably not used one of the DVDA templates for rendering the MPEG from Vegas. if you go to the optimize screen in DVDA it will tell you if it's going to re-render and/or re-encode.

Now, this should not be confused with the "building the video object" phase - when DVDA builds video objects it's taking the video stream and multiplexing it with the audio stream to create the VOB file.

--Scott

Thanks I'll check that out. It could just be the building of the video object like you said - but it sure takes a long time to get through the "render" fase - so I guess I just figured that it was re-rendering it or something. I did a custom bitrate to fit it to the DVD - but that's all the changes I made to it.

Dave

I did a custom bitrate to fit it to the DVD

If you did that within DVDA after you had rendered from Vegas then that is what is going wrong.

Either hand DVDA3 raw AVI files and let it do the "encoding" (with fit-to-disc option if appropriate) or else you must estimate the bit-rate required to maintain quality/fit to disc when you render from within Vegas.

You can render the ac3 files before you send things to DVD-A. It's actually better if you want to optimize your sound anyway. Then the only rendering DVD-A will do is making the VOBs and the menu. (fairly quick, like about 20 minutes or so, depending on how long it all is.)

I calculated the bitrate and rendered in Vegas.