Video Sequence for a Dummy

HochJim wrote on 9/22/2007, 6:27 AM
Okay I spent 30 years in the Audio Industry but I am New at Making a Movie. I want to make a short 20 Min or so DVD from these clips.
1. I have captured in HD about 2 Hours worth of Video from my
Canon HV20
2. I have saved and labeled each clip to my E: drive (SATA) ****.m2t
I have .jpg stills Custom MP3 music and the video clips.
Should I do my editing in the m2t format or Open a new project insert them edit etc then save as a *******.VF file, then render to a AVI file and edit it? There seems to be too many choices.
Would someone be kind enough to give me a quick step by step. I would like to end up with a High Quality DVD.
I'm using VMS Platinum 8b With a very powerful and fast Computer.
Thanking you very much in advance.
Audioman

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 9/22/2007, 11:16 AM
I wrote a newbie's Vegas tutorial the other day:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/09/19/crash-course-on-sony-vegas/
For the videos, you just use the .m2t files as is. You only render them to another format when you export to mpeg2 for the DVD at the end. You also make sure you save your project regularly (that would be a .vf file, just give it a name), and also make sure you select the right template from "project properties" otherwise preview playback will be slow.
dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 5:29 PM
Eugenia, thanks for the quick tutorial!! Perfect for me, as my projects are pretty much all "convert home movie from Hi8/Digital8 to dvd, adding a little glitz."

One question about encoding to MPEG-2, though. I have the CCE Basic product, which does a great job of encoding MPEG2, and I set it to 2-pass VBR. With the built-in VMS MPEG2 encoder, I can't tell whether it's VBR/CBR and how many passes, so I don't know which approach will yield better quality:
(a) export using the VMS encoder
(b) export to uncompressed AVI and then use CCE to encode to MPEG2

Again, thanks for the quick tutorial!
Eugenia wrote on 9/23/2007, 6:04 PM
It's one pass, cbr I think, but it looks good. It's also the quality of the encoder itself you see, not just the extra attributes.
dogwalker wrote on 9/23/2007, 8:10 PM
Well, I have read good things about that encoder, so I'll definitely give it a try. It would be nice to drop CCE out of the loop, just to shorten the workflow.