Why AVI

TielBr wrote on 12/1/2004, 7:53 PM
I have been playing w/ Vegas 5 and DVDA2 for a while now, and have noticed that there are many references in these forums to using the AVI file format. Most of which speak to the fact that DVDA will re-render the file anyway...

This sort of conflicts with my findings that if I render from Vegas into 2 elementary streams: Video - MPEG2 w/ 2 pass VBR, and Audio - AC3 file formats, DVDA is not actually re-rendering anything with exception to the menu pages, which appears to be necessary regardless of format due to the need to create a new composit of all of the elements in the menu...

I was just wondering if, with all of the talk of the AVI format, there was some benefit that I am not seeing yet... I'm willing to change formats if there's a benefit, and I am just curious....???

Brian

Comments

cbrillow wrote on 12/2/2004, 5:12 AM
The primary advantage normally cited for using AVI is the ease and speed of editing, because each frame is a separate entity. That's not the case with MPEG files, which are encoded into compressed groups of pictures that have to be reconstructed as they're being worked-on by your editing software. Editing MPEG is a resource-intensive process that can significantly slow down your system, and, potentially, cause a number of problems. It can work, but AVI is generally considered to be a more edit-friendly format.

Your rendering observations are valid, provided that MPEG-2 files created are DVD-compliant and short enough so that they don't exceed the capacity of the DVD that you're writing. If you have too much program material length, DVDA2 will need to recompress it to fit on your DVD.