HDV to SD-DVD render looks too soft

[Mike Kujbida]

Janet, thanks for your comments. It’s my way of paying back for all the help I got when I first started using Vegas.

“The change that I have put into place for my current mix of footage is to change Video Quality to high in DVDA.”

I don’t see that option anywhere in DVDA.
Do you mean “Best” mode during the render?

“I normally shoot videos that will be about 10 minutes or so long but then I put several different projects on one DVD that will amount to about 1.5 hours of total video. Do you think I should change any other settings to give me the best quality.”

You need to use a bitrate calculator to determine optimum settings.
I always recommend the one I referred to earlier in this thread and that is the one at https://www.johncline.com/bitcalc110.zip.
I make a few changes to the default settings and they are as follows.
Click the Settings button (lower left corner), set 1 kilobit=1000 bits, set Audio encoding type and Bitrate to 192 Kb/s – Dolby 1.0 (the AC-3 default in Vegas) and the Safety Margin to 5% (default is 1% and I like to have more margin than that).

You mention putting several projects on one DVD but didn’t say if they are all on a single Vegas timeline or multiple projects.
Either way, you need to know the total length and go from there.
Using your 1.5 hr., I get the following VBR values.
3,792,000 / 6,320,000 / 7,904,000
The calculator only gives you the first 4 digits as it assumes that you know that you have to add the remaining 3 digits (which you will need in the Vegas screen).
If all your projects are on a single timeline, go into the Custom settings as described earlier and change them to this value.
Make sure to click the Two-pass option and give it a custom name so that you can re-use it later without having to enter the numbers in all over again.
If these are all separate projects, use this same set of numbers as they’re going to end up on one DVD anyway.

I think I’ve covered everything.
Please let me know if any of this doesn’t make sense to you.

[Mike Kujbida]

Nigel, I was told a long time ago that, if you have a lot of stills in your project, you should use Best mode as it helps to maintain the image quality during the DVD creation process.

[Chas Smith]

Hi again, Mike:

Just a follow-up on the render: Yep…looks mucho better!!
For grins, I experimented with different bitrates (VBR & CBR) 2-pass, etc. Settled for a higher bitrate and found the results to be much better than the default.

I was wondering if there’s a “handshake” between Vegas Pro NLE & the Architect? I see in TOOLS that there’s some way to render to DVD & BlueRay. When I clicked on the DVD, I got the message that my (HDV) edit files were “too large”. (Duh!) I was thinking there might’ve been a “Smart-Render” pop-up after that but none as far as my experience was concerned. Just thinking it would be handy if that were the case.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Chas

[Mike Kujbida]

[Chas Smith] “Just a follow-up on the render: Yep…looks mucho better!!”

I’m very glad to hear that Chas!

“I was wondering if there’s a “handshake” between Vegas Pro NLE & the Architect? I see in TOOLS that there’s some way to render to DVD & BlueRay”

I don’t do Blu-Ray (yet) but, with DVD, my experience has been that, with that particular option, you’re limited to a maximum of one hour and you get no options to control anything, not even a menu.
I use it for quick and dirty student projects where they’ve shot a video and need to make a DVD of it for their instructor.