Sony Vegas rendering

[Roger Bansemer]

I render 3 half hour programs which just about fills a DVD using these settings.
I use batch render –
MaincConcept MPEG-2 and from the dropdown I use DVD Architect NTSC video stream
Then I use Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro and the Stereo DVD on the dropdown.
This renders my two files to use in Sony Architect.

[Dimitar Prodanov]

Wow so i have to go through a lot of work to have it perfect for DVD format?

Also I guess rendering isn’t a problem?

[Roger Bansemer]

Personally speaking, rendering can be a HUGE problem. I’m not the expert that so many are on the forum but I can tell you even the best of them have rendering problems often with little solutions other than render it again.
Sometimes what happens is that after rendering for hours on end, when it gets to the very end of the render, Vegas pops up with a message saying “error in rendering” or something like that.
Hopefully you won’t have that issue but it does happen.

[Brandon Denton]

Are you trying to hand this video out to others on a DVD so they can play it on their DVD players or for your own DVD player usage?

A single layer DVD holds about 4.7GB, do you care about the extra space on the DVD? If not, it would be best to choose a setting that would use all the space so you maintain as much quality as possible.

And as far as memory needs, it depends on the settings of the project. What resolution are you running at, what frame-rate, what kind of effects, etc. 3GB should be enough for standard definition video settings and using any of the effects that come with Sony Vegas 10 (I assume non-pro).

[Stephen Mann]

A while ago i’ve read somewhere that rendering is pretty difficult and cannot be done easy on every machine. Can I not render the whole 59 minute film at once if i leave it to render for a few hours? Heard something about memory that matters.
Btw, it’s FILLED with transitions, music and alot of clips and all that.

Your PC is sufficient for rendering, but a bit underpowered for editing AVCHD.

When you read about someone carping that they can’t render, computer crashed, vegas crashed, running low on memory, etc., – they are the exception. 99% of the time they have a PC problem that they can’t or won’t fix, or bad device drivers that they can’t or won’t update, or bad media that they can’t or won’t isolate. We don’t know because when they do fix their PC, they rarely come back to say what they did to fix it.

I have many projects that are about two-hours long, two to four cameras, four or more audio tracks, 15 or more video tracks (I don’t like “takes”), titles, some effects and hundreds of dissolves. No problem for my Quad-core HP computer.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dimitar Prodanov]

@ Roger Bansemer – Thanks for letting me know about that one, hope it doesn’t occur.

@ Brandon Denton – Yes, I’m planning on sharing it with a few people, I was actually thinking of leaving over 1GB space for “Extras/Deleted scenes” and other stuff like that. About the settings, i’m planning resolution to possibly be 720×480, my camera records in 640×480 but i think i’ll stretch it a bit. 😛

@ Stephen Mann – That’s good to hear, too bad it will probably take a whole day on my PC. :s

[Dave Haynie]

Native DVD is 720×480, so yeah, you need to “stretch” your 640×480 a bit. I did SD resolution editing for years on several PCs much less powerful than yours. One render (high quality conversion of a 2 hour video from NTSC to PAL) too 8.5 days on my 1GHz AMD machine.

Higher quality MPEG-2 will take longer than basic quality… sometimes. However, if you’re making a relatively short video, you can render at constant bit rate (CBR), 8Mb/s or so, and get top quality without some of the computational overhead. If you’re filling the DVD, you’ll want to spend the time on VBR rendering to optimize quality based on content. The “custom” button on the “Render As…” dialog is where you change these, if you haven’t found it yet.

-Dave

[Dimitar Prodanov]

Thanks, i will check those out. I hope everything will turn out well.