Rendering mpeg2 in Vegas vs. letting DVDA render it

[Edward Troxel]

The both use the same rendering engine (it’s a shared component) so we can take that out of the equation. Now the question becomes why Vegas and not DVD A?

1) Vegas allows you access to the various rendering parameters – DVD A does not. For example, you can manually specify the bitrate, choose CBR vs VBR and even 2-pass VBR. This cannot be changed in DVD A.

2) In Vegas you would render to MPEG2 direct from the timeline without going through the DV-AVI intermediate. This will, theoretically, give you a better final result – especially with pictures, titles, and other generated media, because you will not be changing the color space multiple times.

However, there’s advantages in letting DVD A handle everything as well:

1) You don’t have to worry about setting the proper bitrate.

2) You don’t have to render the audio separately.

Edward Troxel

[Timothy Duncan]

I think it is cleaner in DVDA. It takes longer, but is doing a better job at the variable encode according to my testing. You can definitely see the difference when you encode at lower data rates when trying to fill up a DVD.

td

[Ken Wilson]

Ed says:
“However, there’s advantages in letting DVD A handle everything as well:
1) You don’t have to worry about setting the proper bitrate.”

This was pretty much the only advantage that I could see. Because I’ve been cutting DVDs longer than I’ve had Vegas and DVDA, I’m used to setting my own bitrates (especially for projects approaching the 2 hour mark), but I can see how the ‘fit to disc’ option in DVDA would be pretty appealing to those folk who don;t want to deal with it.

Thanks for the responses!