SOS! How do I make a DVD, not BlueRay, with Sony Vegas PRO 11 THAT STILL IS 1440X1080?

[Dave Haynie]

Not sure what you’re expecting to do here. A DVD is the physical media, and of course you can put any format on that you like. However, the DVD-Video format will, of course, not support any form of HD video.

You have to decide what you’re trying to achieve with this… where is it going to play? If you’re trying to play HD on DVD players, forget about it — can’t be done. If you want HD on DVD to play on a Blu-ray player, that works pretty well. Of course, if it’s for a computer, you may simply put a file on your DVD, maybe with a startup script to get the PC to auto-launch a player.

For HD on DVD, you have two possible formats. One is simply the Blu-ray format, the other is AVCHD, which was derived from the Blu-ray format. DVD Architect will create a Blu-ray format that’ll fit on a DVD if you specify DVD media in your project. But many Blu-ray players will not play this.

The alternative, AVCHD, is the Blu-ray derived standard used for memory card and DVD recording. Virtually all Blu-ray players support this format, but DVD Architect does not. I recommended creating AVC video with Vegas (must be at 18Mb/s or less, since Blu-ray players are only guaranteed to support 2x DVD speeds), then use a tool like MultiAVCHD to create the AVCHD format for your DVD.

Also, keep in mind that 2 hours is way too much video for an HD format on DVD. Sure, you can crunch your video down to Apple levels (Apple’s HD format is AVC video at 1920×1080 and 4Mb/s… that’s about what you want for 2 hours of AVC encoded video on a 4.7GB DVD)… but it may not be pretty, depending on the subject matter.

-Dave

[Tonya Love-joy]

Thanks Dave, I was playing around with it all night and just said “forget it” and set it up as mpeg SD and still i’m not under 5 GB for the DVD. I was trying to keep it at full frame but it’s not worth the headache.

I just learned a vaulable lesson indeed! I was going to try one more render tonight and go from stereo to mono on the audio to see if that gets me down to 4.75 for the DVD.

My problem occurs before I get to DVD arichtect (Im not trying to make a blueray at all-just wanted to keep all my pixels :)).

Do you have a suggestion for me how I should set up the render? Or is there a tutorial you can refer me to?

All the info you given so far was helpful, i need to know more about these technical things not just the art of editing. Thanks so much for taking the time!

[Dave Haynie]

The trick is to start with a bitrate calculator. There are many of these around. I did the back-of-the-napkin calculation up above, that Apple’s 4Mb/s super-compressed AVC video would give you two hours of HD on a DVD (regardless of logical format), if you can deal with the quality issues. But you can figure this out in more detail with the calculator. There are zillions of these; the best I’ve seen is Mark’s DVD Bitrate Calculator, which is a free download here: https://www.johncline.com/bitcalc110.zip (for Windows, of course).

So, this one can be complex, but don’t worry too much. First, select your Disk Type, which is probably DVD-5. Next, select your audio encoding… the lower bitrate on DVD is usually AC-3 (“Dolby 1.0”) at 192kb/s. Then, go to “Total Video Time” and enter your film’s length… the Audio Time gadget will copy that. The others are useful if you have a complex menu setup on the disc, but not needed for simple discs. If you have something slightly complex, tweak the “Safety Margin” setting.

This applies to any kind of production on optical media, but it’s specific to DVD. So when you get that number.. that’s the value to use for video rendering. Whether its MPEG-2 in SD for a standard DVD-Video project, or something like an AVCHD DVD for high-def playback, you need to render the video to that bitrate.

So what you do is choose an output template in Vegas that’s close to what you want, then customize it. So for a DVD-Video, I’d pick the “DVD Architect Widescreen” template (given that my last 4:3 project was about four years ago, and back then, the right choice), go to the custom panel. I’d select 2-pass VBR rendering (this would be the Main Concept MPEG-2 CODEC) the value given by the bitrate calculator as the average bitrate, then choose something higher (6000-8000kb/s for a DVD is a good range) and something lower as the minimum.. or just leave that defaulted. And select 2-pass… that allows the peak vs. average to be tweaked with foreknowledge of what’s coming.

This should deliver a result that’s optimal… small enough to fit, but no extra space.

-Dave

[Tonya Love-joy]

thanks,that does it!