VV4+DVDA = Confusion

rstein wrote on 2/10/2003, 12:17 AM
Granted I'm a newbie to the wonderful world of DVD authoring, and not an expert with Vegas (though I've used it for over a year). I just purchased Vegas 4.0 and DVDA, and I'm confused about rendering a project from Vegas with the intent to author and burn a DVD with DVDA (to taking advantage of Vegas' rendering AC-3 audio).

On the templates for rendering, when I switch to MPG file type, I see the usual DVD NTSC and one that references DVD Architect.

However, that one is for a VIDEO STREAM only. It's my understanding that one of the desired goals when rendering from Vegas is to have Vegas do the AC-3 encoding during render so DVDA doesn't have to. The "usual" NTSC DVD template just creates the pedestrian PCM audio.

I just cannot for the life of me see how to do that. Is it significant that I installed DVDA first (I had VV3 on my system), then Vegas 4.0? I didn't see a caveat to which to install first.

Thanks,
Bob.

Comments

Ron Lucas wrote on 2/10/2003, 7:13 AM
From what I understand, you have to have DVD-A installed to get the AC-3 render capability in V4. Once you've got that, you then need to render twice in V4 - once for the MPEG2 like you did for DVD-A and another render for the AC-3. Or like you said, you can just render once in V4 to a DVD NTSC and get a single MPEG2 file. I belive someone at Sofo wrote a script that will automate the dual rendering.

Ron
rstein wrote on 2/10/2003, 1:02 PM
OK, that is not very intuitive.

Further, I thought that the video and audio HAD to be "muxed" together in a single .MPG file for DVDA to support. It seems what you describe would create two files, and that isn't supported by DVDA.

So what's the story then?

Bob.
vonhosen wrote on 2/10/2003, 1:34 PM
I believe that it's not that DVDA requires a muxed MPEG file in the true sense, it's that it won't accept an elementary .m2v file.

What DVDA requires and gets with the MPEG for DVDA template in V4 is a MPEG-2 video file with no audio & it has a .mpg file extension. This is required because the .mpg file (& not the .m2v) contains header information needed in DVDA for things like chapter marks from V4.

So what you should be bring in is a video only .mpg file (from the "for DVDA template" - not elementary .m2v)
& an AC3 audio file.
rstein wrote on 2/11/2003, 1:32 AM
OK, thanks for the clarification. I'll give it a try between work and school.

Bob.