Vegas and rendering options

ehoskins wrote on 1/13/2005, 8:08 AM

I'm thinking of using Vegas as part of a new set up for moving home video tapes into a DVD video format and have spent the last few months putting everything together. Because the tapes are sentimental and high quality I plan to use the Cinema Craft SP Encoder to do the encoding. Some of the edited material in Vegas could be up to 3 hours in length - loooong movies. The only way I can see of getting the material to Cinema Craft is to render the DV material in Vegas to a standard AVI type 2 file and then drop the rendered file into Cinema Craft to do the the MPEG2 conversion. However, I have calculated that the AVI Type 2 rendered files could be as large as 50GB.
My question is am I going about this the right way? I mean is it feasible to manipulate files this large on a PC (assuming the drive is large enough and formatted as NTFS)? Or perhaps I should break the files up into smaller chunks as Cinema Craft can handle a load of files automatically and join them into one file after the conversion. Can I tell Vegas to batch convert the timeline to AVI as a batch of sequential smaller AVI files?
Or maybe there is a technique of going straight from the Vegas timeline to Cinema Craft MPEG2 encoding without first rendering to an AVI file?
Any advice is appreciated as i'm still learning this stuff.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/13/2005, 9:20 AM

Do a search on this forum for "frame serving". This is a method by which Vegas can feed other programs the video stream a frame at a time. If Cinema Craft can pick up this sort of stream then there would be no requirement for an intermediate file.

However, let me be so bold as to say that if your source material is home VHS tapes, you probably won't see any improvement by using the Cinema Craft encoder. The Main Concept encoder that is built into Vegas is darned good! It's probably capable of producing much higher quality than your original tapes are.